Windows of Madness (part 10)

Llewelyn
1958

Anger.
Llewelyn started primary school in September 1958, but without any brothers or sisters to condition him he found the playground totally anarchic, hiding behind one of the large wooden gates for six playtimes before he was eventually discovered by a braying mob. He quickly learned the ropes, however, and turned the tables on a would-be bully by punching his nose and watching a watery turd slip down his trembling leg.
It was also around this time that he had his first in a long line of childhood illnesses, including measles, scarlet fever and double pneumonia; events which robbed him of some critical education and set the seal on his ‘late developer’ status. Luckily, injected forms of penicillin were around by then, not to mention an apprehensive walk to a temporary clinic in a dance school where polio vaccinations were being administered. He didn’t particularly want the long shiny needle in his arm, but he was aware of the terrifying ‘iron lung’ in which polio victims were said to spend their entire lives, and this duly motivated him.
Like most kids in the 1950's, his knowledge of horrible illnesses and injuries was restricted to fanciful images and second hand stories of gruesome cancers, amputated limbs and gunshot wounds. He flinched whenever he saw the ‘mad lady’ walking about town as she turned her head around every few steps and flashed her wild eyes at those behind, and he watched with awe as the man with no legs slowly made his way down the main street in a huge black tricycle that he ‘pedalled’ with his hands. The world was a thinly shrouded horror story, full of mysteries and deceptions; just like the ‘Tampax’ adverts that were never explained to him, and the vast bloodied sanitary towel he once discovered in an alley.
His father’s disappearance, the absence of any siblings, and the isolation of their early years in the neighbourhood had made Llewelyn awkward in company, distrustful of people and sensitive to criticism. He didn’t really have a ‘role’, ‘self-image’ or any firm attitudes which normally would have been taken from surrounding children at an early age, and in those days play groups and pre-school education were virtually unknown. So when he received a clip around the ear from his mum every time he expressed a divergent opinion, this didn’t really help the confidence-building process, and when he was repeatedly embarrassed in front of strangers with slapped legs and screamed reprimands, this began to sediment in his mind as anger.
Anger.
“Make sure you eat all that fried bread” she demanded in the morning.
“You’re getting fat” she scolded in the evening.
The situation got worse as the years went on, and his mother graduated from bare hands to a peculiar gnarled bamboo stick, which she kept conveniently close to her fireside chair ready for instant use. The worst thing of all was the unpredictability of her moods, because most of the time she would be kind and caring, inducing him into a false confidence which was then crushed with impulsive acts of low level violence. He became nervously alert for every inflection in her manner, like a wary animal not sure whether to take the proffered food, or run for cover.
“Don’t you dare be cheeky to me” she said one lunchtime.
“Stand up straight and get some guts” she said at teatime.
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The Mad Professor

Llewelyn’s next-door neighbour was a very interesting man, and also a member of a dying breed. He had a domed head which towered above a horseshoe of wispy white hair, a time-worn wrinkled face, ill-fitting clothes and big army boots. Handicapped by a hideous curvature of the spine and a pronounced limp, he had a grotesque appearance, yet he was a kindly, tolerant man who would help anybody out, and he always wore a smile. He was nearing retirement age, but still worked at the university, 50 miles away, where even his colleagues knew him as ‘the mad professor’.
The professor had a keen sense of duty, and never missed a day at college, always climbing the hill to the railway station at 6.30 a.m., in good time for his train which departed twenty minutes later. His limp was the product of an old war wound coupled with latter day arthritis, and as the pain gradually worsened, his daily climb became a grim struggle.
One winter morning he found the hill covered in snow and ice. He was weak and very unsteady on his feet, so he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled to the top of the hill, where an astonished stranger showed pity and helped him to the station. The professor was lathered in sweat, and deeply distressed. For the first time in thirty years, he was going to be late.
It was 6.55a.m. when he finally limped onto platform 3.
Yet, the train was still there.
The guards had delayed its departure, for the man who was more reliable than a clock. The man who was a proper standard.

He’s dead now, of course.
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The Unit
2007

I was once more knocked off my feet by the appalling reek of laxative-induced faeces, rolling down the corridor like mustard gas, searching out every corner of the longsuffering unit. A rotund little man came into sight and announced with a chuckle:
“He! He! I’ve had a good clear out. See you later.”
I viewed his retreating form, and noticed some brown liquid trickling down the back of his long socks. My worst fears were confirmed when I had a quick look in the nearby toilet and discovered that his explosive diarrhoea had left the place looking like a slaughterhouse. Luckily it was a ‘male problem’, because if the patient had been female and they had requested female attention, a short-term exchange of staff would have been necessary before the clear up operation could begin, with a reluctant female staff member being dragged in chains from another unit. We were okay this time however (sic), and soon employing our full contingent of specialist wet suction cleaners, red mops, rubber gloves, aprons, specimen containers, and yellow plastic bags to neutralise the damage.
Richard applauded from the wings, and after a while we settled down to a rewarding cup of coffee, with the residual odours of latex and crap drifting up from our scrubbed hands and stinking clothes. Of course, most nurses knew that the smell of the unit could never really be removed, so they kept two entirely separate sets of clothing at home, like mechanics routinely isolating their oily overalls from other items. In our case, we weren’t allowed to wear uniforms, because we had a ‘rehabilitation’ philosophy of care and had to pretend that everything was normal.
What a joke.
“Well done everybody” said Richard.
“Thanks for all your support” we chorused.
Oh…mm….mm….yes…..don’t ever underestimate the role of top class leadership.”
“No of course not” I agreed. “In fact, on behalf of the staff I’d like to thank you from the heart of our bottoms.”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself” Sidney (would have) said.
The atmosphere of the unit always seemed pregnant with something other than air, almost as though we were breathing in the atmosphere of an alien world; something similar to Earth, but not the same. The combination of cigarette smoke, residual urine and faeces, sweat and yeasty chronic infections hung around the unit like a London smog, eating into the carpets and wallpaper, settling into filing cabinets as a fine dust, and bonding with the fibres of your clothes with the tenacity of a biological washing powder. Even our new wall-mounted, electronically operated deodorant sprays were beginning to give up the ghost, and at the end of the day my lungs felt like two bags of sand. Still, at least an extractor fan had been fitted in the smokers’ room, which was an improvement over the previous ‘policy’ of opening the windows and fire doors for ventilation. It was quipped at the time that the only way the fire doors would ever be closed, would be when we ran out of spoons to chock them open. But it was less of a joke, perhaps, that we went home at the end of each shift having smoked ten to twelve involuntary cigarettes. As I passed the lounge, a lady on T.V. said:
"A boy’s fingers were cut badly as he tried to fight off a classmate who held a razor blade to his neck.”
“More cheerful news” I remarked.
“What is?” said the mystified looking nursing assistant.
For some reason my stomach was beginning to rumble and knot again, and as I looked at the clock I suddenly realised that the Inspectors’ final debriefing was scheduled for today, and due anytime now. My mind began to clutch at straws, and I wondered whether they would perhaps postpone the meeting, or hold it in more salubrious surroundings, or cancel it because one of their members had an unexpected golfing appointment, or…..
“There’s some swanky looking people outside, ringing the bell” interjected one of the patients. “They’ve been there ages”.
“Why on earth didn’t you let them in!” I spluttered.
“Well, they looked a bit weird to me…. and anyway, its not my job.”
On the left, a toilet door creaked open and out wandered Richard, carrying a large print copy of ‘Angela’s Ashes’.
“Lord love us and save us. ‘Tis himself, so it is” said he.
“Are you drunk, Richard?”
“Sure, can’t a man enjoy the fruits of his labours without a devil like yese giving him a shellaking?”
“The inspectors are here again.”
“Jazus! Open the door yer great daft eejit. You’re a blockheaded idlesides, so you are.”
I opened the front door, apologised for any inconvenience, and watched as the cold, sodden forms tramped in and suddenly met the poisonous fumes of diarrhoea which still hung murderously in the air. For an instant, they froze in mid-step and I had visions of them sinking to their knees, holding their throats and falling face down on the foetid carpet dead as dodos, but they reassumed their robotic appearance and marched steadfastly on. Richard had already moved patients out of the large T.V. lounge for the “important meeting”, and was now dancing about sycophantically and burbling oily salutations in the direction of the approaching V.I.P.’s. A nervous sweat had broken out on his top lip, but he looked cool in comparison to the senior manager who had been locked in with the inspectors since lunchtime, and now looked as though he was being frog-marched into a court martial. His usual air of omnipotent cockiness had somehow deserted him, and he sagged like a burst beach ball in front of his tormentors, willing the end to come.
“Can we have three cheers?” enquired one of the inspectors, casting his squint in my direction.
“Er….er…..well” I stuttered.
“Come on, chop chop, hurry up, we haven’t got all day.”
“Er….sorry…..er……..hip, hip……” I mumbled tentatively (thinking it must be somebody’s birthday).
“No! no! Three cheers. Three more CHAIRS please. There aren’t enough to go round here.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Beg your pardon.”
“P-p-perhaps we ought to introduce ourselves” the unit manager spluttered.
And the meeting began.
Meetings usually began with the participants arriving in dribs and drabs, forming into little chuckling cliques, and sizing up the odd unfamiliar face. Most of the meetings in this hospital Trust involved a hard core of meeting ‘addicts’ who loved the whole scene of professional role play, ego exhibition, and paper progress, alongside a smaller group of staff who had generally been volunteered by their managers and always looked painfully bored or mystified. At great expense, a special meeting room complex had been built on the hospital site as a sort of gold-painted temple for wafflers, but this didn’t stop the meetings invading clinical areas as well. Indeed, local mansions were also hired for special ‘away days’ and ‘team building’, so that staff could play games, join ‘workshops’ and indulge in all sorts of weird mystical cult types of bonding (i.e. loathing each other on sight and then pretending they didn’t). The cost to the taxpayer was again astronomical, with an average £12 - £15 an hour being paid to each member of the 10-20 strong group for anything up to seven hours of complete bull, God knows how many times a year, plus the cost of hiring venues or building purpose-made facilities.

The ‘let’s introduce ourselves’ ritual now inevitably followed, even though the identities of 90% of those present were always well known, and personal information of this sort was invariably irrelevant to the content of the meeting anyway. This ritual was, of course, always suggested by one of the managers, and I suspected strongly that the real reason for ‘introductions’ was that it gave managers the repeated opportunity to announce their messianic job titles to everyone else present. Certainly, their decorous false modesty, well-rehearsed phrases and patronising smiles towards less grand individuals, was enough to fill a sick bucket. I looked across at the senior manager, who was quickly reasserting his smug, unctuous charm, and I wished I was the scarred boss of SPECTRE who would stroke his white cat, press a secret button under his desk, and say:
“Goodbye, Meeester Manager”, releasing the protesting panjandrum through a trapdoor, down a stainless steel tube, and into the jaws of five waiting sharks.
“Shall we introduce ourselves?” the sharks would ask.
To be fair, introductions were probably advisable on this occasion because the Inspectors used a large panel of visitors, and this particular group had not been before. Indeed, I found myself speculating that they may have been swaggering impostors; a religious cult trying to get recruits, some devious door-to-door salesmen, or a party of drunken traffic wardens wrongly directed from the ‘Rose and Clown’. Unfortunately, all of these interpretations proved wishful, and we had no choice but to prepare ourselves for the verdict.
According to the preliminary report, there was low staff morale, widespread sickness, poor leadership, and a substandard environment. Indeed, the unit was considered to be potentially dangerous, ineffective, and very near to being closed on the spot. There had been a further decline since the previous negative report, and within a week the Inspectors’ views would be made public. Were there any comments?
“Hmm…hmm…Surely, we have improved a little since our last inspection” Richard said in a faint voice. “We worked out an excellent action plan after you came last time”
“But have you implemented any of it?”
“Hmm….hmm…Well there have been delays of course, due to staff sickness and under-funding. We have a meeting scheduled for next month to discuss it.”
“But doesn’t an action plan imply ‘action’ as well as discussion?”
“Hmm…..hmmm…….Well, things are well in hand. We have now agreed the action plan”
“Yes, you had an action plan last year, and apparently the year before that. We also have on record your predecessor saying something similar. There appears to be quite a collection of ‘action plans’”
“If only we’d known how bad it was” interjected the senior manager “We would have prioritised this unit for investment. Naturally, we have long term plans to develop a new community based service”
“But, we’ve been told that these plans have been on record for the last five years”
“Well, policy of that sort takes quite a while to roll out. If only the unit had flagged this up earlier, we might have acted sooner. There’s been a problem with the interface, I’m afraid.”
“But, aren’t communications a management responsibility?”
“Yes, of course. I wasn’t trying to fudge or wriggle out of owning the problem or anything, although I should point out that I’ve only been in this job three years, I inherited a long list of problems from the previous regimen, and funding has been a major issue. Also, we’re having to restructure the whole service again (for various vital reasons I can’t quite bring to mind) and we’ve had other practical priorities such as introducing ‘Investors in People’ policy. Not to mention the fact that my wife’s having a baby and I seem to be getting a constant series of colds at the moment. “
“It’s nice to find someone who will accept responsibility without equivocation” applauded one of the Inspectors. “How do you see the unit now?”
“I believe we’ve made some important steps forward with the unit, including a number of ‘blue sky planning’ discussions, regular focus group meetings, the appointment of steering groups which now meet quarterly, and continuous reassessment of patients so we know exactly where we are.
“ Significant progress, then?”
“Yes, I should say so” replied the senior manager, cleverly immune to any form of sarcasm.
“And I’ve just put together a new training video” added Richard, beaming incestuously at his boss. “Perhaps I can show the inspectors…….”
“That reminds me” interrupted the senior manager “I’m due to give a presentation in five minutes. You’ll have to excuse me I’m afraid.”
“A presentation!” we all gasped.
“Manager giving presentation! Manager giving presentation!” howled Richard, pressing himself against the wall as the senior manager rushed out.
“Are there any other comments?” said one of the inspectors, looking directly at me.
I turned instinctively away, but found myself surrounded by gimlet eyes, and an atmosphere of curious expectation. For a moment, I was mesmerised by this concert of stares and glares, and then like a cornered rat making a last desperate spitting bid for freedom, I blurted out:
“Frankly, I’m surprised we’ve got off so lightly…. In my opinion, the patients are steadily deteriorating because they’re needlessly hospitalised, and they don’t have any meaningful way of spending their time. They've lost all self-respect because they can’t contribute to anything, and they’re left with nothing to do but spend their benefits, or sleep on sofas. The unit is bed-blocked because the patients are incapable of moving on within the present system, and insufficient money is available to ‘warehouse’ them outside the hospital. Management is paralysed by fear of confrontation with individuals, unions and the public, and we’re being buried alive in mindless bureaucracy, just so that we can demonstrate paper progress to auditors and ourselves. Many of our nurses have joined the circus by spending a large proportion of their time at home on fully paid sick leave, correctly anticipating that management will send them boxes of chocolates for doing so.
“Hmmm…Hmmmm….Thank you very much for your views…..” interceded Richard.
“And” I continued “In my opinion, this is nothing short of a scandalous and disgraceful waste of public funds.”
A stunned silence followed my reckless outburst, and in the interim I cast a careless glance around the table, waiting for my nemesis. Like a group of assassins at a Mafia wedding, they eyed their target, toyed with their guns, and twitched their lips; the apoplectic manager on the verge of a stroke, the chairman’s chilling cold weasel look, the black coated ranks of inspectors with their ice hockey masks, turning me over like a beetle on a pin.
“I need tea now!” said a voice on the other side of the door.
“Oh, I think I can hear somebody about to misbehave down the corridor, and the ‘phone’s ringing too” I said eagerly “If you’ll excuse me please.”
I hared off without further ado, while the rusty necks cranked around and followed me out of the room.
“P-p-perhaps this is an ideal time to show my new training video?” I heard Richard stutter.
Creeping back to the door crack, I could just make out the shape of a large hairy naked man bouncing energetically on a bored-looking but vociferous brunette lady – and suddenly I remembered where I’d put the manager’s personal video.
“Faster, harder, faster Mr. Big” the lady said in a flat voice, apparently reading an autocue beyond the bull’s heaving shoulders.
“Grunt, grunt” he replied in a Teutonic accent, sitting back to pump a wide arc of seminal fluid across the studio.
Richard’s heart had presumably stopped beating, but he still looked openly envious of the man with an issue really well in hand.
In fact, nobody seemed in a rush to turn the rogue video off, so I made myself scarce in an obscure part of the unit until the meeting finally broke up an hour later, and the shell-shocked pilgrims made their way out through the front door. It was 5.00p.m.and the managers had decided to join the inspectors on their way home, leaving me to consider the error of my ways and to fret about what tomorrow might bring. Strangely, I could only feel an intoxicating blend of relief and amusement pulsing through my veins. The radio seemed to empathise, and somebody said:
“A man from Cheshire is going off on a Caribbean holiday after his twenty-five year old collection of junk mail fetched £500 on the internet.”
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” I chortled too loudly.
“Are you all right?” said a passing patient.
“Just fine” I giggled.
It was teatime, and the holy ritual of the temperature probe had already begun. I joined the craning necks to see what the aluminium tins had to offer, and tried to work out how the patients with their backs turned to the monstrous machine could still stare at it with both eyes. My Pavlovian salivation started in earnest as I viewed the fish and chips, but I plodded on gamely and ignored the hunger pangs, skating expertly on the soup when necessary, and rather looking forward to my hard-skinned peanut butter and jam sandwich (saved from lunch time). Mysteriously, there always seemed to be more food deposited on the floor than we ever received in the tins to start with, and today we could have done with a bulldozer to clear a path through it. The usual late arrivals gave a thespian performance about neglect and abandonment, and we were treated to one interesting episode of horizontal vomiting, as a rather determined gentleman filled his mouth beyond its capacity, sneezed, choked and disgorged the blockage like a rocket across the table. Trying to distract one lady, I asked her:
“Was it all right?”
“What, all that puke you mean?”
“No, no, the meal. Was it okay?”
“No. It was far too peppery.”
“But you put the pepper on yourself, didn’t you?”
“So what?”

The drugs round followed, and indigestion remedies maintained their usual popularity, while from the corridor came the sound of a mass exodus.
“See you tomorrow boss…….’bye now……all the best……keep smiling…….cheerio…….we’ll be off then…”
“Oh, yes…… See you tomorrow” I said, watching the endless conga of harlequin workmen dance through the well-punished front door and into the harsh evening air.
“See you all tomorrow.”
Where was the location of the unit card school, I wondered?
I ate my hard-skinned peanut butter and jam sandwich, and was advised by my colleague that several unidentified patients had again raided the fridge, carrying off the vegetarian contents of his personal plastic container. Retreating to the ‘quiet’ lounge, I then switched on the T.V. and discovered from the news that some of the latest bilingual road signs in Wales directed people to turn left in Welsh, and to turn right in English. An advert for the internet then showed lots of men running around in T-shirts with a ‘www.’ logo on their backs, claiming that ‘the world was now full of w’s’.
It was indeed.
I counted seven consecutive adverts, lost patience and swapped channels, only to find that the same adverts were being rerun on the alternative channel. Still, at least they weren’t in black and white like most of the bits in between the adverts, and there was always the local evening paper. I picked it up and five colourful leaflets fell on the floor, blending nicely with the gaudy washable carpet tiles and the blackened chewing gum blobs which extended across the room like rows of flattened Pontefract Cakes. As usual, one leaflet tried to interest me in conservatories that had no prices, the next purveyed some bizarre gadgets that wouldn’t have been out of place in a police museum, and another told me how I could make lots of money without risk if only I would sent £15 for a starter pack. The forth invited me to improve my memory using a special secret technique known only to the thousands of people who had already benefited from it, and asked me to visit the web site www.can’tremember?co.uk. Luckily, the address didn’t include one of those signs which people now refer to as a ‘forward slash’, because this always sent me scuttling to the nearest urinal with subliminal zeal.

Finally getting to the paper itself, I waded through the latest grand council designs for improving local facilities and boosting business, the first of which appeared to involve bulldozing the entire town centre, replacing it with a 20,000 place car park and charging everybody £10 a day to use it. The alternative plan was much more appealing, but seemed to suggest (through computer generated imagery) that the shopping centre would be like classical Rome within three years, and that the major approach roads would be transformed into wide boulevards with mature oak trees, within five. Still, at £100,000 for the consultants’ report, the council taxpayers should expect miracles at the very least.
On the radio, it was reported that a palaeontologist had discovered a well-preserved carbon footprint in the Himalayas. The creature responsible was said to be a small ape-like mammal with low intelligence and a big head. Professor R-------- was incidentally the first man to ascend Everest on a mobility scooter, and he took the opportunity to thank all his family, the search and rescue services of five countries, the Dutch navy and NASA for their invaluable help in his record-breaking feat. He paid special tribute to his good friend Sherbet Fountain.
“Was he the man who carried you and the mobility scooter on his back for the last mile?” enquired the reporter.
“No, no. That was just a local chap. Sherbet is my personal trainer, body masseur and engine tuner”
“Oh, right.”
Professor R------- went on to outline his next ‘challenge’, which was to include ascending Mont Blanc on a pogo stick, diving off the Victoria Falls in a Belfast sink, and completing a decathlon whilst hog-tied.
“And what is the point of all these challenges?” commented the reporter.
“Point? Point? Good heavens man, we live in Postmodernist times - there’s no point to anything”.
“No point?”
“All acts of consciousness are completely relative. They have equal ontological validity. There is definitely no one truth” he barked assertively.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
With five minutes left, I searched the paper for a quick fillip from the astrology column and discovered that my week was going to end on a ‘high note’. Hoping this wasn’t going to be preceded by a kick to the groin, I then glanced through the ‘Memories’ page and saw pictures of jobless men turning muddy fields into town parks, circa 1860. If only they hadn’t perpetrated those vast tiered gardens, ionic temples and artificial waterfalls on the public, it would have been so much simpler for modern workmen to tarmac the lot and line it with ticket machines. A blight on them for being so near-sighted and hindering the march of progress.
“Do you want a crap?” I said to my colleague,
“Say what?” he responded.
“Do you want a bap? I’ve got one left over from lunchtime.”
“Er….I’m not particularly hungry, thanks.”
We now returned to the coal face, and one of the patients asked me for access to his huge stock of sweeties. Although on a diet care plan, he had recently returned from a shopping trip with two large bags of jelly babies, two bags of sugared bon bons, four tubes of mints, two cream cakes, and a lot of receipts for the cash book. He had preceded these purchases with a fish and chip lunch, one can of non-diet coke, and a ‘ninety-nine’ ice cream with extra “sprinkles”. His laboured breathing now followed me down the corridor and after five minutes of key juggling I was able to release the requested items into his sticky grasp. I had a pang of conscience as I observed the folds of his painfully obese form rock and roll back to the lounge, but I knew that to refuse him access to ‘his own property’ would have brought opprobrium down on me from all sides. I was even more regretful that we continued to treat many of the patients like children, and wondered if it was strictly necessary to unload sack loads of sugar and fat on them every week, and then foolishly remark on their disappearing teeth and scale-breaking weight.
As part of this approach, all the patients received a large ‘Walt Disney’ type of birthday cake every year, which was usually so sickly and garish it would have turned the stomach of Billy Bunter. Unfortunately, staff seemed to forget that the recipients of these cakes were often forty to fifty years old, and that the patients were already keen enough to see themselves as life long dependants without the staff reinforcing it with organised puerility. Some of the patients were actually suffering from a psychotic ‘regression’ which had taken them back to their adolescence, and in their cases it was even harder to see how Walt Disney icing was going to reverse the process. Often the patients in question were in need of a new electric razor, a hairbrush or even a basic clock, suggesting perhaps that a more constructive approach to gift selection was well overdue. Anyway, at least I always knew what the key workers wanted for their birthdays; but would it be a cheeky Donald Duck or a cuddly Minnie Mouse this year?
“My radio has broken” said Maddie.
“Oh, yes?”
“Can I have a new one please?”
The cleaner had switched off the plug socket.

Many of the patients were in the habit of going to bed directly after tea, so we decided to invite them downstairs again for one of our rare community meetings. In times gone by, when the unit had followed a ‘therapeutic community’ model, we used to hold these meetings every evening to sort out the domestic jobs allocation, receive feedback on the day’s events, discuss any complaints and ideas that people might have, and give credit where it was due. These, of course, had slowly fizzled out as the patients became older, the staff got tired of doing it, and the unit reverted to form as a continuing care hospital ward again.
Occasionally, though, the community meeting idea was reintroduced by either industrious students or ‘new broom’ managers, who would both employ short-lived democratic outlooks, and then move on. Indeed, just as the staff were becoming more ‘unwell’ than the residents (e.g. judging by psychotherapy appointments), so was the turnover of nurses becoming much greater than the throughput of patients. This sometimes led to an illusion of progress on the unit, because new staff would launch ‘fresh initiatives’ which were actually recycled old and failed ideas, while the overall decline from community care unit to hospital ward was too slow for the rapidly changing staff to notice. Therefore we had the paradox of patients becoming less and less able, at the same time as temporary managers deluded themselves that things were getting better and better. A radio in one of the patient’s rooms, announced:
“Buses ground to a halt yesterday as drivers walked out over a colleague who was dismissed for winning a martial arts competition while off work sick.”
“Oh well, there’s always a job for him here” I thought. “I hope he’s got plenty of storage space for the manager’s ‘get well soon’ chocolates and flowers.”
Withstanding the usual spectrum of complaints, selective deafness, and convenient delusions, I helped a couple of patients change back out of their pyjamas and assured them that they would be back in bed by 7.00p.m., if that’s what they wanted. I then went to see how my colleague was getting on and found him kneeling behind a bed.
“Oh, I’m awfully sorry” I said facetiously “It must be terribly frustrating living alone. I quite understand.”
“Bog off” he replied graciously. “I’ve just found a bunch of house keys and a dried up orange under this bed.”
“No sign of your plastic box then?”
We had quite a few ‘magpies’ on the unit, and it wasn’t unusual to find hoards of newspapers, pens, food, and other peoples clothes tucked away in bizarre places. Car keys and house keys did occasionally ‘relocate’ themselves around the premises, and once or twice staff had needed to use the services of locksmiths and breakdown recovery organisations, only to discover the missing keys somewhere on the unit the following day. I stopped laughing, though, when I discovered that the keys under the bed were mine.
And then I started laughing again; hilariously and violently. I just couldn’t stop, and the nursing assistant looked at me with growing consternation, while the tears rolled down my face, and my body shook with child-like emotion.
“What’s wrong with you today?” he asked.
“Nothing at all” I giggled “It’s the world that’s the problem.”
“You need a holiday, Steve.”
“I certainly need to get out of here. One way or another.”
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Pseudo-Science Monthly
Number 7, Volume 2, May 2005
Editorial

The Final Madness

Are there any facts left in society?
This is the key question we should perhaps be asking ourselves as we stride purposelessly into the 21st. century. For generations, the mighty paradigms of religion and science have constrained the western world like a reversible straitjacket - but now the knots seem to be unravelling. Religious belief struggles in the face of secular indifference and sectarian strife, while science wobbles under a constant bombardment of embarrassing reverses and internecine squabbles. Global warming, the rape of the planet, M.S.R., B.S.E., foot and mouth, hospital super bugs, genetically altered crops, cloning, and endless moral polemic; all test our blind faith in scientific advancement and its techno-industrial outgrowths. Scientists could soon be viewed with the same sort of reverence as weather forecasters and astrologers. Where once we worshiped, now we doubt.
Beneath these once omnipotent gods, society itself struggles for a factual identity. Educational qualifications are distributed like confetti at a wedding, noble honours are touted for cash and celebrity, excellence suffocates under mass mediocrity, nationhood disappears amidst political correctness, and individualism extinguishes the ancient principles of community life.
We stand uneasily on the edge of a precipice.
The death of objectivity.
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(to be continued)
Full story on www.windowsofmadness.co.uk
Paperback available at www.booklocker.com/books/4150.html