The Homerton plug

Thirty years ago on my fortieth birthday I went with my best friend of some fourteen years for her to be admitted to the Royal Free Hospital. She was psychotic, high, mad, she had broken down the terminology changes according to the kind of distance we choose to keep. She was ill. She needed a safe environment and medical help.

I recall my horror and fear of Nicol Ward. Men and women shuffling with doped eyes, a sense of a hinterland of life. In the evening I drove to a bar and got drunk on whisky.

Slowly my friend got better but it took more than a year. In the decades that followed she magnificently rebuilt her life. Recovery meant the revision downward of ambition, avoidance of stress, dependency on stable routine, careful monitoring of her lithium, good relationship with her doctors, but she got there. Hospital became a distant thing. Being well, or almost well, became the norm. She loved her part-time job, her flat, her friends. She kept a chart of her mood. Seven was ok. Any variation up or down was a bit of an alarm bell. It turned into a shorthand. ‘How many are you?’ I’d ask. ‘Seven,’ she’d say. So that was ok. There were swathes of sevens.

Thirty years on, almost to the day, I was not allowed to accompany my friend for her to be admitted to the Homerton Hospital. Two care workers took her in their car and were not insured for me. Community care had turned out to be a bit of a joke. The architects of it should take a close look at what community means, what care means. Perhaps the concept’s based on some arcane notion of family. Like many of us my friend lives alone and support comes from the margin of time loving friends can give.

Over the course of a week, in an effort to keep my friend out of hospital, two different people had turned up at her flat each evening for about twenty minutes. They were for the most part kind and came from many different countries. They’d ask her if she was taking her olanzapine and valium. But my friend had become unsure of days and times. One of them told her to eat sandwiches because sandwiches are easy. Never mind that if she went out to buy the sandwiches she’d come back with a stuffed Waitrose trolley, schmutters from charity shops and bits of wood from skips.

I went up to the Homerton on the evening of my friend’s admission. Nicol ward now seemed like the Palace Hotel. My friend was relieved to be in this place called hospital. She showed me her sleeping quarters: a pallet bed, a wooden cupboard, a curtain, no window. There was a reek of nicotine in this so-called ward. We went to find a nurse though they were hard to identify. Jasmine (that was not her name) shouted at someone behind a curtain ‘Tracy you smokin again.’ ‘I’m not’ a slurred voice said. ‘You tellin lies’ Jasmine said, then left. There was a wailing from behind the curtain. A large deranged woman reeking of urine - I made no more helpful observation of her than that - emerged. ‘You come near me and I’ll smash your face in,’ she said to my friend.

My friend cowered and hunched like a creature in the face of her prey. I told Jasmine that I could not leave my friend in this terrible place. I said I feared for her safety. I said unless a single room was found for her, I was taking her home. Jasmine said there were no rooms free. We packed to leave. A room was found.

I took myself to a nice restaurant and drank a few glasses of a pleasant Pinot Noir. I texted my friend and asked her if there was anything she wanted me to bring in. ‘Aj tk gϕd wij snj xmy ar haven’ she replied. When I got home it did not seem like a comfort zone. I did not sleep.

Next day I went again to visit my friend and take her a few propitiatory things: cherries, wet-ones, boiled sweets because the drugs made her mouth dry. She looked so ill and done in. She was carrying her possessions in a bag. She’d been told they’d be stolen otherwise. She said she would like a bath because she ached all over but there were no plugs in the baths. Ezekiel (that was not his name), said someone had taken them. I asked what were the rules were about baths. He said there were no rules. I enquired how my friend could have a bath if there was no plug in it. He produced a urine specimen jar and a latex glove. He put glove over the jar and twiddled about with its fingers. He said she should put that in the plug hole. ‘It looks like a condom’ my friend remarked. Ezekiel laughed.

Jasmine found a real plug and ran a tepid bath. My friend went into the bathroom with her sponge bag and her possessions bag. I said I’d check on her in a bit. When I did she said she wasn’t ready and was washing her hair. When I checked again she called in a frightened voice for me to go in. She had run the water out of the bath. She said she’d been calling for ten minutes. She could not get out of the bath. Her face was white and her eyes looked huge. I put my arms under her shoulders and tried to haul her up. I told her to put her arms around my neck, but I am rather small.

It transpired that my friend had been given a large dose of Diazepam half an hour before she had her bath….

That’s enough for now. I have read of course, and I well know it, that mental health treatment is at the bin end of government concerns. The Homerton mental health hospital is a foundation hospital. It is apparently under review because of its shortcomings. It will perhaps relocate to St Leonard’s in Kingsland Road where Edith Cavell once nursed. I have written a book about Edith Cavell. I might as well give a plug for that. It is to be published on 30 September. Edith Cavell was a Victorian matron. Last night I dreamed she was in charge of my friend’s ward. She was wearing her starched uniform and ruling staff and patients with vigilance and high demands. In my dream the Homerton ward was clean and calm and transformed. In my dream.

One to One Thousand

A new book to write, a new commission, so a new computer - but the same old jumble of mystifying files transferred from the scarcely old, scarcely defunct last one. (What do you do with old computers.)

I’m a woman of resolution if not delivery. This time, I vow with familiar self-deception, I’ll organise, file and sort my work, my life, to a standard worthy of my wonderful machine.

For a modest fee Apple offers a One-to-One service for purchasers like me. For an hour an evolved young man (it’s usually a man, women are too busy cleaning the bath and buffing their nails) born with a gene for widgets, wifi, syncs and stuffits, sits with the unmutated, throwbacks like me, and tries to explain and show how to do it.

I arrived late for my session. And hot. I’d got off at the wrong station, lost my water bottle, left my glasses at home. What did I want to do with what was left of my time? Steve asked. I held back my tears. I said I’d really like to set up one of those out-of-office replies for when I went on holiday. I’d like an automatic message to go to people in my address book letting them know I was away and telling them when I’d be back.

I’d tried doing this myself. I’m not a fool. I’d gone into Mail, Preferences, Rules …. but how would that work if the computer was switched off.

Steve took over. I couldn’t see quite what he was doing and he didn’t have a spare pair of specs for the aging eye. He went into MobileMe, clicked on a discreet little icon, a cog, clicked on Preferences, up came more icons, one of them said Vacation with a picture of an aeroplane, Hooray. There was a box for my message. This is only a trial, I told Steve. I don’t want to send this. I just want to know how to do it. I typed in ‘I am away from my Inbox until 15 July’. Something whirred. I think he clicked Done. Great, I said, That’s really easy. I deleted the message. I’d learned something useful. We moved on to IPhoto and My Gallery.

Follow the above rules if you want to annoy everyone in the universe. I got home to a bewildered volley in my Inbox. M wondered why I had re-sent him 34 of his previous email each prefaced with erroneous information about my being away. N. had got 15 of hers and thought I was feeling pestered and making some devious complaint. Suppliers of garden implements thanked me for letting them know. An abandoned lover thought it was all on again. A Cornish builder asked me if I was all right.

Who needs Facebook Twitter or Blogland when there’s a Vacation box in MobileMe. But I felt and feel stupid and curiously guilty. Never have I done anything more attention seeking than this. And why did my nasty glistening arrogant machine resend all those past email. MacBook Pro Rules OK. When I go away I’ll slip out the back door and tell no one. My Inbox can get stuffed.

The Courts

I am between projects. - Edith Cavell is finished - captions written, maps drawn, cover designed, references cobbled. The wait for publication feels strange: I’ve prepared this elaborate dinner and where are the guests. I’ve sent in a proposal for a new book but haven’t yet heard. Perhaps no one will want my ideas any more… But time is mine and I’m deadline free. I plan to sort papers, cull cupboards, do my tax, descale the coffee machine, get my teeth whitened, buy new clothes, travel to Greenland, go to the garden centre and buy a retractable hose (the current one has kinks in it) … But, what the hell, these last few days have been so sunny so I’ve been walking the streets in thin white linen, and a hat from Leather Lane.

One of my usual walks is through St Paul’s courtyard, over the bridges, down by the river to the Southbank, back on the north side through the Temple gardens… Yesterday, unemployed as I am, I stopped for a lemon drink in the courtyard of Somerset House: the Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court.

The Safras were Sephardic Jews like the Souhamis. Edmond’s father founded a family bank in Beirut in 1920. Edmond J. then spawned loads more banks in Geneva and New York. He acquired billions of dollars and lavish homes including the Villa Leopolda on the French Riviera, the most expensive villa in the world. His wife Lily - he was her fourth husband - recently bought a Giacometti sculpture for $104 million. Safra died in December 1999 in a lurid suspect arson attack. He had Parkinson’s Disease. His Philanthropic Foundation finances synagogues, hospitals, scholarships, schools.

In his Fountain Court fifty five wide-spaced jets of water gush with changing force from the ground in computerised choreographed display. Pigeons get the hang of it, and lift a cautious wing so that spray but not the hefty jet gets to the nits in their pits. Little children strip down and prance about. One of their favoured things is to stand astride the jets. It makes them squeal with innocent if immoderate delight. I doubt the fountains designers thought of this use. A few disconcerted parents tried distraction from quite such evident pleasure. It reminded me of Natalie Barney’s autobiographical admission of how, as a child at bath-time `the water that I made shoot between my legs from the beak of a swan gave me the most intense sensation.’ She’d have had more fun at Fountain Court than with a bevy of celluloid swans.

I walked on home through the inner yards of the Royal Courts of Justice. A fleet of Reliance prison vans with those little dark squares of opaque glass waited for their clients. Reliance Security has this year been voted one of Britain’s Top Employers. I passed the Old Bailey. Outside were men with cameras, an ambulance, a barrister in a gown smoking a cigarette and looking fed up. Though I live close by I have never been in the public gallery. I tried to go in. The security guard told me I’d have to leave my mobile phone in a shop across the road where they’d charge a pound to retrieve it. It seemed a bother. I wandered home.

On the evening news I learned that had I stayed I’d have observed the trial of two ten-year-old boys found guilty of attempted rape of an eight-year-old girl. After their conviction the boys were taken to sign the sex offenders register. In my mind I imagined that I’d stayed and shouted `Iniquity’ from the public gallery. This criminalising of children is worse than their wrong doing. The Old Bailey is no place to teach little children any lessons except those of anxiety, fear and humiliation. It is a startling indictment that we structure into our society the demonising of infants and use the language and procedures of adult criminal law to judge and mar their unformed lives.

Swampy

God Almighty. I really think it’s time we took to the streets. Not only have we had a coup from this bunch of toads - or is it a knot or a nest - but now they’re scheming to squat in the swamp for five years. Until 2015. Mounting each other for their chemistry, they croak, kwaak, kwaak, is good. There’s to be no referendum on their right to squat. Voters might not understand they’re a protected species.

David Cameron doesn’t think Nick Clegg’s a joke, kwa kwa. He only said it as a presentational joke. Which is what this soi disant government is: a presentational joke.

Vote LibDem if you want Hague for Foreign Secretary, Osborne for Chancellor, Theresa May for Home Secretary, if you want to keep Trident, continued war in Afghanistan and Iraq (Hague doesn’t rule out war with Iran.)

Pluck out one of these Eton/Oxbridge, privileged, monied, bulbous croakers and scrutinise: take Osborne - born Gideon Oliver Osborne but call me George - his children’s names are Luke and Liberty. (They’re at a private Belgravia prep school, fees c. £12 thousand a year.) Eldest son and heir of Sir Peter Osborne, 17^th Baronet of Ballyhoo. Married to the daughter of the Rt.Hon Lord Howell of Ballyha. Ideologically committed to cutting the state. Hawkish on foreign policy. A eurosceptic. Flipped his second home making around £55 thousand. Personal wealth estimated at around 4 million. In line to inherit his father’s billion pound luxury wallpaper company. The Prime Minister’s best friend - until he bunked off into a civil partnership with some sailor he met in a port in a storm.

About to suffer under the austerity measures he intends to impose on the nation. Spare some change for George.

When I was researching The Trials of Radclyffe Hall and Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter I learned quite a bit about the hypocrisy, ambition, greed and general ghastliness of Britain’s ruling class.

Cartoonists will now enjoy and succeed in a way that analysts can’t. Current levels of hypocrisy, capitulation, lies and lust for power are better served with images: the harlot, flag and fag and toad, the wallpapered cracks and rickety stepladder, the abused bottom, shotgun marriage and the greasy greasy pole.

Coup d’état

You’re told you live in a democracy so what you do is vote for a party of choice. You’re only allowed one vote. Some of you don’t get a vote at all because the doors of the polling stations are closed. For others there’s no point in voting because the party whose ideas you hate most has already got all the votes before these are cast. When the votes are counted no one party’s got enough of them, so the party you hate most goes into a closed room and wheedles a deal with the smallest party to keep the party you voted for out of the frame. The party you most hate never said they would do this before they solicited for votes. In fact they and the party with whom they now wheedle called each other scumbags and stinkers.

The party you hate most and the party who got the least votes do this, not in their own interests of course, but to achieve a stable and secure government for which no one voted or knew existed but which will be good for the democratic process because it’s what is being imposed by those proven to put the interests of voters far above their own.

Election Special

Polling Day - and the prospect of waking up tomorrow to find that lot triumphal and braying with their pockets stuffed with votes - Cameron, Osborne, Hague…

Last night a friend and I were musing about whether this country could ever have a Barack Obama. We thought not - because of the controlling class. Their history is deep. They make the rules. The oligarchs, the old boys, defenders of the realm. And they have Simon Cowell on their side. Sir Simon.

My polling station is St Giles Church. I think St Giles was the patron saint of cripples. My Labour candidate I read is the lead drummer with a group called Blur who after years of struggle has combated successfully his addiction to drugs and alcohol. Central Office chose between him, a mop head on a stick, Jesus Christ and Barack the Second. It didn’t matter. What the hell. This is the City, the Square Mile, where bankers, investors, financial advisors, asset managers and corporate wankers do things with money. Like stuff their pockets. It’s the safest of Tory seats. Always has been. Always will be. Off I hobble to mark my cross, or write something really really rude. Think I’ll write BUM in very big letters. Or KNICKERS. Except I quite like Gordon. So I suppose it will be Blur’s drummer that gets my forlorn and wasted kiss.

Gordon’s Gaffe

They rivet into the brain, these gaffes. As a child I liked Two Way Family Favourites on the Home Service . ‘The time in Britain is twelve noon, in Germany it's one pm , and at home and away it's time once again for "Two-Way Family Favourites" The signature tune was ‘With a Song in My Heart’. The programme was introduced by Jean Metcalfe here, and Cliff Michelmore in Germany. There was the whole Sunday thing of the anticipation of roast dinner - roast lamb and mint sauce was my favourite - loving messages sent to brothers, fiancés, mothers, then chosen songs to which, to this day I know all the words: ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake’, ‘Goodnight Irene, Goodnight Irene, I’ll See You In My Dreams’, ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window’, ‘Mr Sandman Bring Me A Dream’ ‘Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing’, ‘The Wayward Wind Is A Restless Wind’. The world, for an hour or so, was safe, transparent and as it ought be.

Then one day there was a muddle about the loving message, scratchy noises, the wrong tune, and a muffled voice said ‘Shit. I’ve made a bog up of this bloody thing.’ My brothers hooted, but I felt the same searing embarrassment as yesterday, with the Prime Minister’s voice from the back of that big black car ‘should never have put me with that woman… whose idea was that… just a bigoted woman… disaster… just ridiculous…’ Then his head in his rather podgy big hand with those ludicrous headphones. Poor man. And the press swarming like gleeful bees over Gillian Duffy.

It’s terrible to intrude where you’re not wanted. But Gordon had made a bog up of the bloody thing. What seemed revealed to me, was not so much his insult to Mrs Duffy - who’d worked for the council all her life and always voted labour and had just nipped out to buy a loaf - but how grumpy and depressive he is, how much he dislikes campaigning and the sales side of the job. How accident prone he seems, pitiful, with his blind eyes and awkward body and bitten nails, and destructive manner of digging deeper into the mire.

Like Mrs Duffy I’ve always voted Labour. But I actually rather like immigrants. They’re so other than her and Gordon and Samantha and David Cameron. Don’t know what to vote this time. Cameron’s the one I take against most: him and Osborne - they’re so gleeful at the prospect of power, so tetchy in opposition, so to the manner or manor born they can’t wait to get where they want to be going. For their sakes not mine or Mrs Duffy’s or the East Europeans that so vex her sense of Rochdale.

The world is not safe, transparent or as it ought be. Politicians are whisked into big cars, their minders hover, watchful for a terrorist grenade, a loony bullet, an errant egg. But it was the bloody microphone, pinned to the bloody lapel wot did it - scotched the pretence that what you hear is what you get, or that anything or anyone in the world might matter more than winning.

Kontakthof

Six hours of Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof at the Barbican last Sunday were a total treat. All that’s best in theatre: absorption into other lives, changed perception, enchantment. I didn’t know what to expect. I’d not seen Pina Bausch dance, or seen the work of her theatre company. I knew she died last year, that she was praised as an innovator and a great artist and that Kontakthof was choreographed, devised, directed - whatever the right word - by her and preserved and on tour in her memory.

It’s hard to describe what was going on, on stage. It was other than words, the way complex paintings are. It was all to do with connection I suppose. There were two shows, one by the seniors - the over-65s, the other by teenagers - the over fourteens. There were twenty six people in each, not professionals, but auditioned, an equal number of men and women, girls and boys. In each show, the dancers, if that describes them, do the same routines. They walk toward the audience, show the palms of their hands, the backs of their hands, they slouch, stand up straight, grimace show their teeth. Through all they are directed to do, they reveal themselves. They pair into couples, dance together, flirt, separate, take off their clothes, are rejected, bereaved, consoled.They are disappointed and shy, obedient, hopeful and silly. They divulge snippets of ridiculous experience. They gossip and say mildly malicious things about each other. Some show off in bewildering ways to weak applause from others. One of the men/boys, has a party piece of chasing a woman/girl with a dead mouse. She screams of course. Another laughs too loud and long at jokes. Every so often one or other of them keels over dead. The others go on, doing what they do. There are few props: chairs, a piano, a coin operated rocking horse. One of the women/girls importunes the audience for coins. People in the front two rows fumble for money. She puts the coins in the horse and sits on it. Nothing happens. More fumbling, more coins. It gets kind of tense. A man sorts it. The horse was not plugged in at the socket. She rocks, impassive. A queue forms waiting their turn. It’s all ridiculous. I wanted it to last all day. It was people-watching in the best of ways. Curious. Revealing. Loving.

None of the players is allowed to be vain, to pretend they are something they are not. We, the onlookers, are invited to see into them and ourselves with affection. It seemed like the opposite of the celebrity stuff we’re bombarded with so much of the time. It was enhancing to see the contribution of older people, young people, women. We enjoyed ourselves. A standing ovation and lots of whistles.

Crusoe Island

Minutes after the Chilean earthquake a tsunami wave forty feet high hit Robinson Crusoe island 360 miles away and washed away the island’s settlement of San Juan Bautista (St John the Baptist). No prior warning had been given to the 600 islanders. The Chilean defence minister Francisco Vidal said the navy made a mistake. When the National Emergency Office The ONEMI asked about variation in wave height in the area the navy predicted this would be no more than seven inches. They had no readings for the Juan Fernandez archipelago. A twelve-year-old San Juan Bautista girl saw the sea rise and moored boats crashing into each other. She ran to the square and sounded a gong. People turned on sirens and clambered to high ground.. Reports suggest that reassurance from the navy put people in harm’s way and made them resist their instinct to go into the mountains. Email to my friends on the island are not answered. The ONEMI says eight people are dead and eight missing. The Chilean army is there now.

Here is an excerpt from my book Selkirk’s Island. I was on The Island at the millenium. I rented a wooden hut by the shore in San Juan Bautista. Behind the settlement were waterfalls and high forested mountains of dense luma, tree ferns and grasses. At times the wind rushed through the valley with a sound like an approaching train. Once or twice I saw waves hurl from a calm sea catching rainbows of sunlight in their spray. I thought it the most beautiful place and I cried when I had to leave.

... in the huts that pass as shops, Crusoe t-shirts and Selkirk wall hangings are sold. A wooden sign directs travellers up a mountain trail to the Mirador Del Selkirk, the lonely peak where he searched for a sail. The cave by the projecting rock in the north-west bay at Puerto Inglés, where he never stayed, is known as Selkirk’s cave.

The Island’s savage terrain and the wide encircling sea deter Homo sapiens. It is possible to link to the World Wide Web, though phone lines are often down. An electricity generator works, on and off. There are one or two cars, no road, newspapers, postman or bank. Credit cards and cheques are not used or taxes collected. There is a doctor, a dentist, a midwife, but no pharmacy, hospital or vet. Six uniformed carabinieros play soccer and collect little children from school on rainy days. Older children go to boarding school in Valparaiso, ferried over in a naval ship in March, then back to The Island in summer for Christmas.

Islanders refer to mainland Chile as ‘the continent’. It seems a world away. In turbulent weather marooned visitors watch the sky. If clear, a small plane flies (courtesy of ‘Robinson Crusoe Airlines’) to a domestic airport in Chile’s capital city, Santiago. It carries a few people, post, and in season, boxes of lobsters. Its runway is a dirt strip at El Puente (the bridge), the only flat bit on The Island, at the low western end where Selkirk went by boat with Dampier to snare goats. Travellers take the same bucketing boat trip from the Great Bay to Bahia del Padre, past awesome cliffs and rocks where fur seals bask and bottle in the sea’s spray. There is transit in a decrepit jeep to the airstrip, then a three-hour flight across the ocean.

The islanders live from the sea. Lobsters are their trade….

Juan Torres of the Union of Juan Fernandez Artisan Fisherman was not on the island when the tsunami struck. He has not heard news about his relatives and other fishermen but he says that all the coastal buildings in San Juan Bautista have been destroyed. The pictures above show where once a month the supply ship would arrive with drums of petrol for the fishing boats, cylinders of gas, fresh vegetables, provisions and building materials.