In this brave new start I had found, of living on Hangman's Rd, my biggest personal decision was to stop keeping a diary. I found the last six years of diaries among the things I kept in my room. From reading some of the entries in them as I filed the diaries away I realised how much over the last six or seven years of writing them that at best they were inconsistent in the details they recorded. At worst what I wrote seemed like trivia, and I had been highly evasive about putting my personal feelings in the diary entries. That my most personal feelings had only found expression in activities that seemed to not have a name seemed to be beside the point. By deciding to not keep a diary from then on I abandoned the diary I had started. I resolved to by whatever means open to me develop the intent to be more honest about myself in my person, more than I had in writing where I believed that I had fallen short of the standard I wanted to keep.
I was not the only one of my friends to move. One close friend, Graham R, had finally organised himself to get out of the English midlands and lead the life he always wanted to live in Cornwall. His parting gift to me came with mixed blessing attached to it. It was a black and white portable television that he did not want to take with him and I was the best choice of recipient for it. In one way I was lucky with the gift, I did not have to buy a license, the landlord's license for the house covered my viewing habits. He had left a colour television in the kitchen for communal use. where whoever of the five of us was there together the most agreeable consensus for it's use was at most some sort background distraction where nobody particularly liked the channel it was set to But whoever was there disliked the other channels more. That there were only four channels to choose from simplified any disagreement on which channel it should be set to when the set was on.
I watched what I really wanted to watch in my room, albeit with reduced quality. The black and white television sat on my bedside table and I would watch it from the warmth of my single bed. It felt quietly luxurious to me when 'The World's Strongest Man 1988' was broadcast and I watched it alone in my room. In no way did I recognise that I effectively had a soft porn habit fed by my choice of television programme, where I rendered the screen images of these big men lifting big weights and moving buses etc as my definition of porn. The television presentation of their efforts assisted me in this. It was complimented by slow motion replays of certain lifts etc, and interviews with the performers who claimed to be, and were presented as, athletes who were strictly in competition with each other. But when the camera lingered on the lightly dressed rather large bodies of these 'athletes' and the body moved and flexed a little, creating a reaction in certain viewers the physicality of the athletes seemed to be more important than any competition they were supposedly part of. Who could place where the narcissism loop actually started, when the chain ran from the athletes in training in private and went via their open competition with each other through the television screen through to the millions of viewers? Who could care enough to want to resist the loop after it had become self perpetuating enough as to become a fixture in the commercial television schedules?
The external formalities of settling into this new room proved a lot easier than I expected them to be. The form filling for the housing benefit went a lot more smoothly than before and because Nottingham City Council had taken over the remaining contracts set up by The Manpower Services Commission everything was 'in house' and between the city council and West Bridgford council it was all dealt with far more promptly than before.
I liked the room too. In the parental house my sister had got the best room in house for it being the most hospitable room that was the width of the house, I was getting the same at this new address. The other renters were working class men of mixed ages, jobs and backgrounds who accepted that they were nicest in small doses, such as when they met each other in the kitchen whilst cooking a meal for themselves. A meal which they ate on their own in their bedsits. Nobody ate their meal in the kitchen even though it was meant to be a communal space. It was too indifferently furnished for anyone to want to stay there too long, We carried our meals to our rooms even though it meant carrying our plate climbing one or two flights of stairs that were dimly lit from above.
I attempted the occasional attempted communal meal. One tenant worked for a time in an abattoir. By agreement he brought home for free a whole pigs head from which he removed all the edible meat. His show his expertise with sharp knives on the kitchen table of what was clearly head shaped was quite a sight, the nearest we would get to theatre in that shared house where really we shrank into our rooms as much as we shrank to fit around the world we were supposedly part of. The idea worked, once, We all had our fill and the meal was cheap. But experiment was not repeated.
I found a much better prepared communal life in people's homes through work. With my first job working directly for the council as a care assistant I was sent to different addresses across West Bridgford and nearby The Meadows to help the disabled and the elderly, mostly men, start their days. Helping them to get them up and wash themselves, and making their breakfast for them on a tight schedule was rewarding work when they were keen. I spent a fair amount of unpaid time on buses getting to and from appointments, but the bus journeys between clients became my break times. I was not issued with any sort of pass to reduce the prices of bus fares, but there was an expenses scheme to collect my work related bus tickets for, I liked working on my own. I was comfortable with knowing management was there to support me, and the client would report back to them if anything was amiss. But other than the expected client feedback to the management I was left to get on with the job. The work did not feel to me as if it was 'woman's work', nor did I see myself as an exception in my gender for doing the work that I did. Much less did I hanker after my former placement in the Leonard Cheshire Home, close as it was to where I now lived.
One client was particularly notable. He was a young man who had been wheelchair bound since birth, but he was obviously intelligent for all he was slow of speech. He saw himself as Christian. I went to my first classical music concert as his attendant, It was a performance of the large scale choral piece by Edward Elgar, 'The Dream of Gerontius'. That it was live music-something I saw rarely-should have impressed me. But the overall impression that I felt was one where the performance was the musical equivalent of a large piece of solid looking dark stained Victorian furniture.
He was not only a Christian but he had passed theological exams, and was part of a circuit of preachers. In the time I knew him he got himself booked to speak from the stage at Christian camping events. Being a Christian, myself, I temporarily became his ideal choice of carer-for-his-travels. I attended several camping events with him, events where away from their home churches, Christians looked for renewal via spiritual insight and fresh thinking.
I got my share of that through showing the levels of practical charity involved in waking a disabled person up whilst in their sleeping bag in their tent, then sitting them up comfortably at the edge of their tent so that I could fit their catheter and start to fully dress them. Only then could I lift him into his wheelchair, which I had to steer slowly over rough ground for us to go off in search of breakfast. Whatever anyone might call the mix of a gentle attitude, physical strength, and a lack of squeamishness about the human body, I had enough of all of them for him, until he found somebody else with a similar aptitude.
To be directed to Chapter Eleven please left click here.
