i have been here for what seams like 3 life times not the near fifty years that i have.
there comes a time that life bites hard and it hurts big time sometimes it physical and i have had quite a few of them i will get on to them in due time but the silent killer sometimes is the mental one .now people may not read any of what i put down and to be honest this is for me for once in my life i took what was said that may help me put the demons and nightmares to rest and stop my spiral down the proverbial rabbit hole i will talk about other things life the universe and motorbike but 1st i need to deal with the mental I.E.D that went off .
i come from the generation that was get over it ,suck it up butter cup get back to work and i did in the process burying good mates and doing what the jobs required me to do locking away the pain and uncertainty to the point that it was when it was going to blow not if and boy did it .
The simple things casual comments with friends that loosen the firing pin then trying to fix what had happened not listening when told to give people space going back saying sorry making it worse then BANG the IED go's off and you continue down the tunnel not listening trying to fix it not wanting to lose another friend but doing it anyway and still you try, the ghost and battles long gone come back in your dreams and thoughts, with you then thinking what If i had done this or that and still down the rabbit hole you go getting to the stage were family and good friends are scared of you , my partner said she had been waiting for the bang since she met me .
The hardest part is admitting you need help before you pull the yellow and black and take your own life not caring what you leave in your wake and i admit i was very close to doing it on a number of occasions . i took counselling made progress and bluffed my way out of the rest. one thing i had been good at most of my life was diverting peoples attention away from me i would help anybody that need it forgetting the old adage that you must put the oxygen mask on yourself first before trying to help someone else
The fallout from the cluster feck that happened by my own hand or should i say more mouth i have to deal with and accept loss of good friends and all its is my burden caused by my own actions i will leave it there .
Till the next instalment of down the rabbit hole
Good day you ready for another trip down the rabbit hole
so more counselling and the hard part is letting go of the memory's and feelings that you have for most of your life kept locked in and buried and believe me it is not feckin easy I've been told i grunt and sigh a lot when i and trying to let my feelings and emotions out sometimes its easier when your counsellor as access to your records most people don't, or not high enough clearance to read . thank gad for S.sA.F,,A (https://www.ssafa.org.uk/
Today we been talking about what kicked the chock away from the lock on my memory's and my slide down the rabbit hole
believe it or not it happen in a discord room
The slaggin and banter was rife as usual now i had just got a good friend to join and i was glad they had fun and you could hear the happiness coming back in their voice i had helped them though bad times over the years and been their when they need me though personal and relationship problems helping them believe in themselves again , and by a quirk of fate something great happened another friend in the group was going though nearly the same thing that they were and hit it off ,i was over the moon result and it was brilliant for once i saw something that would work they'd be happy and kids someone to look to and learn from ...................... PIN Pulled BANG
From my place of shoulder to cry on ear to listen, rock to rely on and grumpy snafu knight on a steel steed for them i became a obsessive ,as their daughter would say a duckhead tried to fix and like i said didn't listen and lost the friend.
so we talked about what had caused this , and boy was and is hard, it is amazing that little things can cause so much destruction .now we must go way way back to the days of yore at least back to my childhood for the start of the assembly of my mental IED
I grew up in northern ireland through the troubles or should i say the forgotten war the one brushed under the carpet ,my friends and i never realised or knew about what it was about. we were kids we played had fun one day i was away at a hospital appointment so was not at my friends house they were playing in .They managed to find the spilt pieces of his fathers firearm (he was a police officer )he had hidden them round the house so the kids would not play with it .
The funny thing is its like they say child proof locks, that's a laugh adults cant open them kids can . so how they managed to do it we will never know but they did and were they got the ammo for it was another mystery and my mate shot himself took his head off i really didn't think of it just buried it though more about his sister and family than what happened
fast forward 18yrs your doing your 1st stag on guard in Northern Ireland you mate your staging on with finishes a call to his fiancée, you then learn that she has dumped him on the phone she's in Carlisle he's here. stag finish's you going back to the guard room he tells you he's going to the head you think nothing of it till the bang .you near enough knock the door off as you race into the head you find he had put the rifle under his chin and pulled the trigger ,lock it way move on later that year called to a incident you know your the only one qualified to deal with what's happing but you obey the order you were given and proceed to full fill it the person is found by divers later were you knew the current would take him you lock the doubt and what if away and carry on .fast forward two years you unit is called to and incident as your team was closest its carnage massive hole in road wreaked pieces of metal that had once been a van and bits of flesh and body parts scatted over a near half a klick distance you do your job .training kicks in you recognise a boot stuck in the hedge its a mates and his foot is still in it was the only piece that we could find to put in his coffin along with the sand and bricks to give the illusion to his family you lock it way move on forward another year the worlds going crazy hell came to earth and you had volunteered for it ,escorting aid and medical supplies your convoy was attacked you pull your friend out of the rover but only his body from his chest up comes with you .bury it move on there has been more but less said of that
My counsellor explained or suggested i should say that when the pin was pulled on my mental IED though a few words that because i had not dealt with each traumatic event merely locking them away ignoring them i was transferring my loss of friends and colleges on to my friend and trying to hold on not to lose them but did anyway which is probably true and that i was still on stag protecting my friend and their family .its time to end my stag and its going to be hard
tomorrow i start to deal with each one which i am not looking forward to and that i will not burden you with
but you will get the next thrilling instalment of my life till now
gad help you all
Dum de DUmmmmm
Today i have been dealing with each traumatic loss with my counsellor but will leave it there you don't want to know it
Instead we will start the journey of how i got to here(remember i grew up during the troubles in Northern Ireland ( writing about myself basically to myself hey what better judge :)
To say i had a normal birth would be a tad ingenious to my mother ,if all her pregnancy's had survived i would still be the youngest of 7 , and i was not planned as after her last miscarriage my mother had been told the next one could kill her .my father would blame it on a cold day Portrush and would apparently call me his little mistake i can not corroborate that but i am sure mum put her foot own on that .
now like i say i have no knowledge of it or my birth and to be honest if i did it would be astonishing .However i feel aggrieved that i have not been given credit or royalties for inventing bungee jumping even though the midwife and my mother conspired to spoil the first test of it
you see my time in her womb i had bounced around playing tag with my feet or whatever (hey i can imagine cant i) to the effect i had the umbilical cord wrapped round my neck 3 times ready for the first life test of going bungeeeeeeeee jumping .They spoiled the fun :(.
I apparently was a quite baby to the fact my mother forgot about me when she had gone down to the butchers and grocer with me in pram on the bus when she appeared back at my grans she was busy put the stuff away nattering to her mother went gran asked her where's the youngun needless to say rushed back down and there i was out side the butchers sitting quietly in the pram my grandfather took savage delight in teasing his daughter about it ,alas i never really got to know my grandfather as he died when i was very young my fathers, father gone when he was barely into his teens ,
My father was a charted sectary the elite of the accountancy world he had learned his job through night classes and on the job .The fact he never really retired was to quote him 'he had to fix the mess made by book learned accountants' ,he used to laugh and say that he learned to check and double check everything before signing it off when he was learning accountancy in Irwins bakery ,once ya had got kneaded like bread by the bakers, because you forgot the extra d or pence in their pay you did not make the same mistake again by the time i was about two or three he had started working for a survey/mapping firm .now he went to their different sites round the world to do the accounts Lebanon ,Nigeria and the united states now when he came back form one stint in the US i was about three or four at the time and he brought back a push along Yellow 747 and i became a interdiction pilot on my little yellow 747 zipping out from my bedroom to clip my sister on the ankles then zip back into my room ,my sister got told off telling tales ops me bad now look at me i was sweet i would not do such a thing
to be honest i was a wee shit and she got her own back later convincing me that odor cologne was tea can sit taste it 44 years later
Now when people say they have been in hospital so many times and had this many operations i have to smile , say nothing just smile ,to be honest. I would beat most people hands down.
just after that picture was taken i had my first operation to fix my water works piping i had been supplied with a wrong sized waste pipe for fluids to small a diameter and was causing a blockage then my hearing started to go a few years later with my sight now the vents that got put in my ears did not bother me now my eyes however one eye was starting to fail and with the squint, I had made many trips to a&e interesting to say the least as. My mother would bring me in and the nurse would ask "what has he done this time" reaching for the folder with my name on it
I saw Two of everything and usually picked the wrong side so walked in to a lot of things
The operations i had on my eyes where done in the Royal Victoria Hospital children's hospital Belfast still one of the leading children's hospitals in the world in my opinion .
The Doctor who was going to perform the Last operation (wasn't Patrick Troughton not that Dr who at the time) ,no it was a Doctor Brown and he described what and how he was going to to the operation on my eyes to my parents and it was revolutionary way of doing it i was the first test of it, but it was still only a 20% chance it would work .Parents being Parents and not matter were you go they will always do the same they would call in the god squad and got a sky pilot Brother Jardin now canon to give me a blessing and laying on of hands now whether it worked or had any effect is still up for debate.
Dr brown met my parents as they were on their way to see me after the operation with my sister and brother to tell them he did not know why he had done it but after the first incision he reversed what he had told them he was going to do and did it in reverse my father basically had to carry her in to the ward and my room only to be met by me saying "what had you brought me !) I think my mum almost fainted (told you i was a precocious little brat )so after a total of five operations i could see ,abet still with glasses thick bifocals which were not allowed to be proscribed to people under 12 back then so the optician would file them to the NHSS as disability aids over the years they were gradually reduced in strength to build my eye muscles up to the effect that i did not have to wear them again by the time i was 15 .Though back to wearing them to read and close distance work but to have 36 years with out having to use them great needless to say my schooling took a bad hit
Now i could divert attention at a early age . at that stage i did have photograph memory, teacher would ask spell this i would ask were on the page it was at when told rattle it off. Putting it down on paper was another thing .what i would be saying bore no relationship to what i wrote b's and d' got mixed up the word or sentence would be written backwards now my parents knew something was wrong and approached the headmaster of the primary i was in at the time to see what could be done to help me ,this was at the time i had been sent to remedial reading classes even though i was reading Tolken and Len Drayton books at the time .
The headmaster was to be honest a duckhead (i do like that saying ) and told my parents that i was a typical middle class parents excuse for a lazy son when my mother stated the books i was reading and could discuss the adventures of Bilbo and Frodo bagging's from lord of the rings to be told i had probably seen it on tv (now were did i put that blue police box ) i am surprised he had a head left because i am sure my mother let rip verbally
i think it was a couple of weeks later that i return to class from 'Another remedial reading class ' and as was usual counted along with the teacher unknown to me that he had told the class not to do it the next ting i remember was laying on the floor at the comer of the teachers desk head spinning and hurting like hell .I had been picked up and been thrown across the room by the teacher hitting my head on the desk and the wound needed stitches and my ability to remember things was gone .God knows why my father didn't beat seven shades of hell out of him i will never know but that was it got removed and placed in another school it was great but my parents fought with the education board to get me help they refused to acknowledge dyslexia existed even though my parents had taken me across to se Mr Gray who was the government's chief adviser on this and other educational department's so you can see were my distaste for teachers came from and education boards the north eastern education and library boards in particular refused to admit that it existed because if they did that they would have to put money aside for its treatment i am glad that that in Northern ireland now their is only one the education authority it took me 8 attempts to get my English language o level but i did it maths ands physics were easy and technical drawing think of it what would the latest generation of kids do if they had to use a slide rule and protractor.
Now my mother got accused several times as i was growing up that she was not feeding her boys properly we were like sticks on legs and i was that until later life we will get to that so she had to keep a list of what she feed us which was a laugh . the health worker with a social worker appeared at the house one day accusing my mother of lying on the list she had gave them just as my brother and i returned home from school now my brother is seven years older that me ,and we never were siting for long at any time he looked at them as they were saying he's was emancipated as he buttered and jammed half a loaf and stared eating it as he when out to the garage i finished the other half and despaired on my pushbike for some fun. my mother still laughs about it saying you could hear their jaws hit the floor, i think we went through two loafs of bread a day ,we were ether running, cycling, canoeing or playing a team sport my sister would practicing her ballet . when the summers of my 16th, 17th and 18th years i worked for the local council as they described it was environmental sanitation worker in other words a binman streetsweeper or as we called ourselves womble s we picked the litter off the streets and beaches of the bough . i have to laugh when i see social media posts about the rubbish left on the beeches after party's its nothing new 35 yrs ago i was picking cans rubbish and disposable nappy's off the beach with just gloves and black bag
i was really into my cycling back then and triathlons ,now i was coming out of Portstewart to wards Coleraine having cycled out to Portrush then Portstewart thinking as i went what i would say to the girlfriend i had back then alright she was 10yrs my senior but hey when she's French and a doctor what can i say . we had had a fight in one of the local nightclubs which i did not handle well to be honest i was a duckhead it was a bad verbal fight or should i say a berating of me in French in the middle of dance floor to ad insult to injury the dj cut the music and everybody looked at us i think i said' i right' and turned and went to the bar for drinks when i returned she had left so i drank both drinks and carried on regardless. I was planning to met her that night to patch things up never got there as i powered down the road to Coleraine a car pull across me to go down an adjacent road i hit the back quarter of the car and was down the forks were parallel to the down tube and the driver fecked off . i picked my self up swore lifted my bike on to my shoulder and walked home 7 miles then passed out my parents took me to a&e and was admitted with head injury's and put on oxygen and 24 hr supervision was nearly a month before i go out on that one
my path from what i wanted to do and what i did become was an incident concerning one of my friends Louise she was going down to meet friends in one of the ports and had started her car suddenly realising she had forgot her purse , out the car and ran into the house Bang the car exploded there had been a ied car bomb fitted to her car because her dad was a copper .the scumbags classed everybody as fair game so that set me on my path working for the government seeing different people and places by this stage my love affair with two wheels and morphed into motorbikes
i had left my parents house when home on r&r to get something when a rta changed my life and career a car had pulled out in front of me not more than 10m ahead needless to say no escaping it Kawasaki Vs Lada double knockout Lada wins on physical points
Seven pints of blood lost ,severe head injury's and right leg a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle not to mention flatlining on the operating table twice (hey heaven don't want me had hells scared i will take over so back to this existence )