Sunday

Dear Friends; dear Readers,

I haven’t known how to start apologising for the long silence…

Thing is, nothing – least of all, mental illness – happens out of the blue, does it? Out of context. I suggested a hint to you, just past the zenith of high summer, that this year hadn’t all been serenades and roses.

For the rest of us. Nothing to do with Bee, as it happens.

Except that all is connected… There is no such thing as coincidence. There’s a reason troubles come not single spies but in battalions.

Dominos…

So there it is. We ourselves, Shaun and I, have had a couple of challenges to cope with over the last twelve months.

Deepest friendships betrayed. Deepest griefs turned over in the soil.

(Only connect.)

Deepest disillusionment where once there was closest friendship.

Deepest dreams, going back to childhood, dissolved in the mist. Or dissipated, rather, in the flume of sea waves…

(Only connect the prose and the passion, and human love will be seen at its height.)

It was kind reader Diana who asked, many months ago, why Shaun left his post.

(Live in fragments no longer.)

Now is not the time for all these revelations all at once.

But

there will be time.

there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,

There will be time to murder and create.

As I’ve said in a previous post, madness doesn’t spring out of nothing. Bink’s genes and mine were spawned in the same puddle. I have often noticed pale flickerings in my own mind which are surely ghostly shadows of the demons dancing so raucously on her nerves.

Time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate.

So… to the present day.

And a confession.

The depression I thought I’d cracked for life, in 2008 – after we’d been homeless, split up and sofa-surfing for the best part of a year – has been back: tripping me up when I try to walk; jeering when I lose my footing; sitting on my face in bed and laughing at me when I can’t get out of it.

Write? I might as well fly.

And yet… and yet.

The news is (on the whole) very, excitingly, good!

Life is, genuinely, looking up. Hugely.

Take this, for example:

Last week, Bee brushed her teeth.

Encouragement Number One.

Oh, come on! That is exciting. Really it is. When you’ve been mad for two thirds of your life, more, cleaning your teeth is really cool. It was only for only the second or third time this year, since about last Christmas, I believe.

(Took her two and a half hours – or half a year, depending on how you look at it – but, she said, the next time will be easier… always assuming it doesn’t take another six months.)

If Bee can clean her teeth, I can surely write. Can’t I?

Encouragement Number Two:

What is broken can be mended.

(Sometimes. If the parties want it to be.)

Friendships. Fortunes. Faculties.

All, restorable.

How often have you heard lovers say that an argument brought them closer together?

How often have you looked into the background of some fabulously wealthy entrepreneur, and found bankruptcy and loss in the back-story?

(Putting it back together being most of the fun. Presumably.)

And when someone is as ill as Bee, the prospect of wellness – of overcoming that illness and fighting a way back to functioning health – is surely the greatest achievement imaginable.

So… there genuinely have been huge encouragements. Extraordinary happenstances of good providence.

Breakthroughs. Progress. Things to be greatly grateful for. Riches falling in our laps. Like apples in a November garden.

So prepare yourself for lots of good news.

(And don’t be discouraged when it’s not… Or not all the time.)

(And one lesson learnt, for me. When I’m low, if I’m going to write, I need discipline. So I might re-introduce a bit of discipline into this blog. But I won’t tell you what it is so I have the freedom to depart from it…)

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred in decisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.