vox sana in mundo insano

This poem below has some special significance for me. In 1997, I moved to France for a year and ended up in Montbrison, a charming little provincial town in the Loire department not too far from Saint Etienne. During my time there, I spent a few months with a lovely family called the Oliviers. I remember them taking me to the Richard de Bas Paper Mill over in the small hamlet of Ambert one day (it must have been around February 1998). This historic little museum still produces paper by hand using artisanal methods which have scarcely changed since the 14th century. At the end of the tour, I ended up in the museum shop where I could purchase gifts and souvenirs, among which were examples of printed texts, be it prose or poetry, on speciality paper that had been hand crafted with flowers pressed into the actual pulp. Blaise Olivier kindly offered to buy me something as a momento of my visit, so I picked an item of poetry which I thought was rather prepossessing at the time. WHen I return...

Emma is the eldest of my sisters, and was born in December 1960. I have known of her existence for a while, but it was only in the spring of 2020 that I finally got to know a bit more about her through my sister Susan, and decided to send her a letter to see if she would respond. Here is the letter I wrote to her back in May: Dear Emma, I hope you don’t mind me addressing you by your first name even though I don’t really know you at all. I give myself that liberty only because we are related through our birth mother,    Christine Marie Medenhall I am your half brother, Peter. I was born in 1977 if you remember? I was too young to remember you, and I know you were a great deal older than me. But I’ve known about your existence for a long time because you were mentioned in my adoption statement as my elder sister, Caroline I address you as Emma though, because that is the name you have chosen to be known by, and I respect that. I just wanted to write to you and say how happy...

                  LIES BLACK LIVES MATTER! First of all, let me state that this blog post is not a racial diatribe against black people. Of course black lives matter, as do indeed all lives. Whatever our skin colour happens to be and whatever our ethnic origins, we are all part of the same race: homo sapiens or the human race. However, I do make a distinct separation behind the statement that black lives matter (an utterance so obvious that only a terrible person would disagree with it) and the actual movement itself which has less to do with racial justice and everything to do with Marxism and a radical extreme left agenda. America has been through all of this before, and this is the tragedy of it all. It seems like we have not learnt from history. But for those who are too young, naive, ignorant, and dare I say stupid to understand the fundamental truth: that America doesn’t have any significant problem with racism, only with cultural Marx...

I've been aware of something not quite right with society; something I was not able to put my finger on until fairly recently. This feeling of malaise has gradually been building up slowly but now it seems to have suddenly reached its zenith with the outbreak of Covid. I'm not an irrational person by any means and I have always used logic and rational thinking to guide me through life. But a lot of puzzling events have been happening lately, and things are starting to really not make sense at all. If you feel that everything is normal, other than the fact we are just riding through a global pandemic then stop reading now and carry on with your daily life.  For a brief moment, I was contemplating whether I was developing some psychosis, over thinking things and obsessing over the jumble of thoughts running through my head. But every day, another little piece of the jigsaw fitted into place, and I felt like I was slowly waking up from some false reality which had been created aro...

I'm sharing this story from the Lancashire Telegraph because this is not just a tragic article about some poor guy getting accidentally hit by a passing lorry in a random part of the world. Not to me it isn't.  I'm sharing this because this guy has a connection with me. To you, he is a statistic. But to me he is a whole lot more. He has a history; he has a past. Sadly his present has been cut short and he will have no future. I don't know this man. I have never met him. And yet I feel a great sense of kinship and connection with him because we have a common past. He was never named in any of the news articles I found pertaining to this road traffic accident. He will forever be an unknown, anonymous fatality to those who have read this article. But I am now going to put an identity to this person and honour him with my own eulogy.  His name is Thomas Henry Friday, born Thomas Medenhall. He is my long lost half brother. Thomas had already been put into care by the time I ...

Looking out to the horizon T wo years ago, I had never even heard of Emotional Detachment Disorder (sometimes called Emotional Deprivation Disorder). I came across this little known mental health condition while looking on Google one day in April 2019 to try and find answers to the confused questions going on in my head at the time. What I learnt was nothing short of an epiphany. As I began to browse the first article I came across, I noticed that my most common personality traits as well as the symptoms for which I was seeking redress, were being described to some degree of accuracy.  I went on to research as many articles about EDD as I could,  and I realised, perhaps for the first time in my life, just how different my feelings and emotions were in relation to a normal person's. It finally dawned on me just how significantly my life had been impacted by this condition. That is what eventually led me to the conclusion that I was going to need some therapy to try and sort my ...