What A Difference A Year Makes in Scottish Meanderings

Good grief - talk about Sod's Law! Remember how my computer didn't seem to be any different after I put it in for repair? Well it obviously reads Prosebox and saw my entry about buying a new one, pulled itself together and started working properly again. Connecting every time, opening webpages with ease, stopping random shutdowns ...... until I'm *right* at the last point of wearily putting the final touches to my second Uni assignment last night - paring down words here and there, sorting out references, re-formatting, etc. - then suddenly - the Blue Screen Of Death.

Brilliant.

And when I rebooted (with size 12s) - no Internet. Did I mention my assignment has to be sent electronically through our student portal? So I did what any sane person would do in those circumstances. Had words with it, switched it off then switched it on again. Back in business :)


And in searching the other week for an old notebook containing training notes I needed which I was convinced was in my front bedroom/study, I came across another notebook containing diary entries which stopped in late October last year.

I always use A4 Oxford Office Notebooks to write in -


and start diary entries at the front and training notes at the back. That way I can have one book which fits in my bag and always have what I need to update my diary should the occasion arise but also have somewhere to jot down notes. It also means if I lose the book I'm basically f****d but so far so good!

The notebook I was looking for was used when on the ACIS counselling training course at the beginning of this year so I knew would have diary entries of around that period at the front but I kept drawing a blank and finding notebooks which seemed to have the correct diary period but no notes at the back!

"Funn-ee" I thought in best 'Pete and Dud' fashion. (If you're not familiar with the late, great Dudley Moore in the Pete and Dud sketches just ignore that bit.)

Having searched everywhere I could think of I stood perplexed in the middle of the front bedroom - and then remembered a small child's chair which I'd heaped 'stuff to be sorted' on and then 'hidden' out if sight in the corner of the room behind a sofa!

Bingo!

But in that search one of the notebooks revealed diary entries which stopped at the 28th of October last year, when Mam was going through her nightmare in the nursing home. I was struck first of all by the quality of the writing which, compared to my normal writing, was all over the place. It's probably only obvious to me but I can really see the struggle I was having just to write legibly and the effort it was taking. And then the entry ended with me saying I was dreading the next day because there was a Substance Misuse Conference on locally which I had been asked to go to starting at 9.30 and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it.

At that time I was still spending a lot of the day in bed, unable to stay up once I'd got up in the morning to feed the cats and clean out their litter tray. So to know I'd have to stay upright for the whole day was a challenge in itself but I was determined to give it a go. It cost £60 for a place at the Conference and I'd been given the chance to go for free and the whole thing was about the support of service users and how good/bad it was - were they getting it right effectively? And I had a lot to say about that because the support I received (or rather didn't) was absolutely abysmal and caused more problems than it solved plus I was just so desperate for some help in getting off this awful drug I'd been put on and knew it was likely I'd find someone there I could talk to.

I remember that morning so well.

I felt absolutely dreadful when I got up and it took me an hour and a half just to get dressed. Several times I stopped, thinking I just couldn't go on but I kept going and finally made it down there by 10. Someone was speaking as I arrived so I slid into the first empty seat I could see then realised all the tables were arranged in a circular fashion and I'd sat at the only empty table there was in the room! About 10 minutes in, someone from the nearby table came over and whispered to me to take my chair and join them and they made room for me at their table. Such a nice thing to do.

Folk were deliberately arranged around the tables in a mixture of service providers and service users, the idea being that everyone could have a voice in discussions. The format was a talk followed by a discussion with a specific question or questions based on that talk and then you were supposed to change tables so that you got the chance to have discussions with lots of different people from all parts of the service industry. It worked well but by the second talk I was just about on my knees and freezing cold. When I'm unwell my temperature always gets really affected and drops dramatically. It's that bone chilling kind of coldness where you never seem to get properly warm no matter how many layers you put on and I remember looking round all the tables and seeing folk in t-shirts, thin tops and dresses and I was sitting there in a jumper and cardigan freezing!

I couldn't concentrate on what was being said, I felt sick, I was shivering with cold and I desperately wanted to go home to bed. I decided to stick it out until lunchtime then slip away but the only problem was, one of the ladies at my original table, Jean, who ran a substance misuse service in Aberdeenshire had, in the first discussion, directly asked me a question about the support I'd received so I'd had to tell my story and she said she'd like to talk to me personally afterwards because there were several things she could think of to help.

So I got hold of her at lunchtime and explained I was really struggling and was going home and could we have our chat now? She was happy enough with that so we did but then said "Look go and have some lunch just now and don't change tables for the next talk - come and sit beside me - I'll keep an eye on you and if you still feel the same by the afternoon break you can go home then. Deal?" I felt like death warmed up but was so impressed by this that I agreed although I couldn't face the plate of food she got for me. However her kindness and the fact that I was due to take the drug I took daily at one o'clock and which generally worked an hour and a half later saw me through the afternoon and I was able to make many connections and also catch up with folk I hadn't seen for a while.

But I never got to thank her. Although I stayed at the same table in the afternoon I didn't sit beside her and then someone collapsed in the last 20 minutes so we were all herded out of the room into an atrium sort of place and people just drifted away from there. I did look for her but I imagine, because she lived a good hour away, she and her colleagues probably took the chance to get on the road at that point.

There were over 200 delegates at the Conference and although we were all given a list of names, unfortunately Jean is a pretty typical Scottish name and there were 3 of them on the list! I got in touch with the person who'd arranged the Conference and explained that I'd like to speak to her but had no contact details - the only thing I knew was the town in which she worked - and she said she'd try and locate her but never got back to me.

And now here we are a year later and I'm kind of gobsmacked at how much has changed.

Interestingly, that same notebook with that October 2015 entry was only half used - I suspect because I was going back and fore to see Mam at the time so think I ended up using a different notebook when I was up there. When I found it, I started using the rest of it and, coincidentally, the date I started with was the 14th October 2016 - a year further on - so the difference in the writing, in what I'm talking about, in what I was doing on a daily basis, in how I was feeling, is striking.

When I struggled to get up and stay up on that October morning last year, when every nerve ending I possessed felt as though they were all exposed, when I couldn't eat because I felt so sick and when all I wanted to do was get home to my bed and lie exhausted in it, little did I imagine that I'd be not only managing to stay up all day but studying a Diploma course at University one year later!

And I have to say, although the support I received on a professional level was completely diabolical for the most part, it was the little kindnesses like Jean's, the expressions of concern from friends and the huge effort my oldest brother, Ian, and his wife, Margaret, went to to try and understand the illness and all the different drugs and what they were doing to me - that's what really pulled me through.

There's an organisation called the Scottish Recovery Consortium in Glasgow and right now they're trying to get folk on board for a 'Kinder Scotland in 2017' challenge. They want to create a kinder Scotland by everyone who is willing undertaking a 21-day challenge in January to commit a different act of kindness each day and telling someone about it. This is a joint collaboration between 2 organisations who are interested in the impact of not so random acts of kindness on communities. A special website has been set up for it.

While I love the idea in principle, it bothers me that we have to have an actual challenge to do this! Have we become such a cold, selfish society that we have to have something like this to get us just to do things for each other? What happened to random acts of kindness which people did just as part of life? Part of their daily business? Part of just being a human being?

I dunno. Maybe I'm making too much of it. Just seems something wrong with that.

I do love their banner though :)