Another Url, Another Planet

Yesterday was my third official paid day back at work since my 22 week absence due to depression. I work with people who are recovering from mental illness, most of whom would like to return to work, too.

Thanks to the combined efforts of our friendly local neighbours and council, we were recently able to downsize from the premises we worked on and in for six years. Although the house that we occupied was perfect for our needs, we felt it was for the greater good to move into two small rooms in separate areas and store all of the equipment we used in three different locations.

There are several upsides to this move: 

On Wednesdays, in order to access the internet, we have to pay a visit to our friendly local pub where they have decent pub food and a wide selection of real ales all at reasonable prices, as well as free wifi. We could go to the library, of course, but it doesn't have a bar.

The ten minute walk along the canal-side and all the rich people's houses to and from the Wednesday room and the bus is beautiful. How the other half lives!

We are now within walking distance of our friendly local Jobcentre Plus, which, if things carry on as they are, we will all be required to make use of in the not too distant future.

What is the purpose of your visit to JCP today?

She smiled.

The purpose of my visit is to exercise my right as a taxpayer to come and have a look around.

She looked around for Security.

I'm with the Ment Ill Mob. Here's my card. We'd like to conduct business with you. We promise not to misbehave much. Do you know [Name Drop], who is basically your boss?

Ah, yes. How wonderful! Please come in.

We'd like to see your Disability Employment Advisors as we are all disabled according to the Disability Discrimination Act and on Employment and Support Allowance.

The DEAs only work with people on JSA. But there's a DEA based at [Rich CEO's private employment agency] somewhere else who works with people on ESA.

Oh. Can we have a look around anyway?

Sure, go right ahead. The DEAs are on the second floor. The longer it is people have been out of work, the higher up the floor is. Have a nice day.

It's hot in here, isn't it?

We ascended the stairs to the second floor where we were greeted at the Welcome Desk by a young woman wearing a Jobcentre Plus uniform with holes in the sides for her arms who I was sure I'd seen earlier the same afternoon. I wiped the sweat from my brow.

We'd like to see your DEAs as we are all disabled and on ESA.

The DEAs only work with people on JSA. But there's a DEA based at [Rich CEO's private employment agency] somewhere else who works with people on ESA.

We ascended more stairs to the third floor where we were greeted at the Welcome Desk by a young woman wearing a 1950s bathing suit and a placard advertising automobile services who I was sure I'd seen on a Google images search result for "swimsuit placard" just now. The heat was starting to get to me.

So this is where people come when they're desperate for help after years of unemployment?

Yes.

Presumably, if you aren't able to push people into an unsuitable low-paid job here on the third floor you ask them to ascend to the roof where they can then jump off benefits voluntarily?

Titters

We wanted to see your DEAs as we are all disabled and on ESA, but the young woman downstairs told us that the DEAs only work with people on JSA. But there's a DEA based at [Rich CEO's private employment agency] somewhere else who works with people on ESA.

Who told you the DEA's only work with people on JSA? That's rubbish, of course they work with people on ESA. And the DEA based at [Rich CEO's private employment agency] somewhere else who works with people on ESA, but only lone parents. BTW, isn't it nice and quiet in here? And so plush, too.

Why is it so hot in here?

We descended to the second floor where we were greeted at the Welcome Desk by a young woman who I was sure I'd seen earlier the same morning wearing a placard made from an oversized Domino's Pizza box with holes in the sides for her arms. The sticky wetness that had been my clothes on entering the building was making me think about the cool, fresh air I suspected was likely to be found on the roof of the building.

We'd like to see the DEA, please.

I'm sorry, she's not here today.

Isn't that her over there?

Oh, yes.

Hi, long time no see!

I'm sorry, do you have an appointment. I finish at four. Who told you we only work with people on JSA? That's rubbish, of course we work with people on ESA. But you have to go to see the DEA based at [Rich CEO's private employment agency] somewhere else who works with people on ESA, not only lone parents. Take some information leaflets explaining how we can help you.

We descended to the ground floor, the few of our group who had survived the journey holding up our pants due to weight loss caused by the tropical conditions. Slimmer, fitter and suffering from the mind-bending effects of dehydration and altitude. No nearer to finding work, but starvingly hungry and too tired to cook anything.

Following reports of Manchester City's players, coaching staff, their financial backers and executives being united in their quest to end thirty-five years of hurt by pulling off a remarkable Quadruple this season, I thought it's about time I manned up, came clean and continued my New Year's resolution to be a little more honest and open on the internets regarding my personal eccentricities and interests.

The image of Emmanuel Adebayour in the replica Inter Milan Blackburn Rovers 1992-94 away jersey he got from Santa (Cruz), exchanging snoods and hair products with Carlos Tevez under the Yaya Toure Christmas tree and especially the sight of Roberto Mancini's wardrobe bursting open with silky azure and cream neck scarves (one for every day of every season, even summer) sent a shiver of excitement up and down my spine and then back up again and then made me start sweating profusely.

The hard-earned tipping point for me, was seeing City play with such exhilarating attacking flair, wildly entertaining abandon and having the courage and confidence to carve up and bone The Arsenal like a stale, leftover turkey in order to make it into coq au vin last night, while teaching Arsene Wenger the purest of culinary footballing lessons at the French Master's own Academy was a sight to behold (or would have been if I could have kept my eyes open). It turned on a light in my darkened satanic red soul, a sky blue moonbeam, and awakened in me a joyous epiphany of adoration I now wish to share with my friends and the rest of the world. With a breath of relief:

I am a Manchester City fan, through and through and always have been. I was born in Manchester Stockport, I lived and worked in Manchester Stockport for a few years and I even drove through Moss Side, once, quickly, but still managed to glimpse the famous old Maine Road ground, the one true home of football. I admit that I was just riding the Manchester United glory train, even if I got on board after the last English top division title stop and had to wait an entire lifetime for it to start moving again. But when it did finally get going, it was glorious. But now, as City have finally proved that they can run a train service every bit as evocative as United's, it's time for me to get off and rejoin my bitter brethren in anticipation and expectation of reaching the end of the line first.

To those who cynically say it's about the money - maybe it is, for the players and the rest of the Project staff. But for the real, true football fans of Manchester Stockport, it's all about the glory.

The late and newly stiff Garry Cock was unavailable for comment.

I began 2010 by wishing everyone (except fascists) a Happy New Year and a promise to blog my reflections on the naughty decade in due course.

Well, that will have to wait for another time, but here - thanks to my identi.ca memory aid - are my reflections on 2010.

After recovering from hiccups, speaking in tongues, a hangover the size of every Xmas and New Year and forced communication with O2's customer service drones, I went back to work and set about the urgent task of building a snowwoman in the front garden.

This was my equal opportunities response the the much celebrated #SnowCock (replete with massive snowballs) of Glossop erected by Tim Dobson and friends.

Heaven snows he's miserable now

Snowwoman somehow ended up transgendering into #SnowMorrissey until he inevitably lost his head, prompting a lyrical tribute from the similarly all-white and undead Andy C.

Just as life imitates art, 'real' life inevitably imitates life online. Perceptively and spookily - leaving aside the evidence of my maniacal online rantings - Andy C was concerned for my mental health.

If I'm honest, my most recent mental breakdown occurred somewhat earlier. Without wishing to go into too much detail and bore anyone with my personal troubles, I had been speaking with a psychotherapist since September 2009. After a few sessions, she expressed her concern that I might be 'bipolar II' and asked me to see my GP in order to get a referral to a psychiatrist for an assessment. I felt pretty shocked to hear this as I'd never considered that I might have had any hypomanic episodes (let alone needed to see a shrink) even though that might have explained some of my problems.

In tears, I told my GP what my psychotherapist had said, and thus I began my own pharmaceutical research into the effectiveness of anti-depressant medications to give me some respite (my GP's word) from my heightened and unstable emotional state. My GP also referred me for a psychiatric assessment.

Mightily relieved finally to have spoken to someone about my difficulties and for allowing myself to ask for help, I felt as high as Jesus on the mountain for forty days and nights. Looking back now, it's perhaps significant that my identi.ca output during this time was the highest it's ever been (according to Michele's Denticator - unfortunately it only shows the last 12 months, so you will have to take my word on that). Interestingly, my output last month, since I've been feeling better and like my 'normal' self was just as high if not higher:

I also increased my long-form blogging output, with a serious intent to try to write more regularly and have some fun in doing so. Perhaps significantly, my first post during this high period was about mental health.  I wrote eight proper blog posts in those forty days and nights including:

A rant on authority and the War of Terror

A tribute to Manchester United and my Mum and Dad

A reminiscence piece I originally wrote in 1989 about my time stuck in a blizzard on Longs Peak, Colorado

An Ubuntu fanboi article

Another reminiscence piece, this time about a childhood incident

And a frankly bizarre post about a blue tit

It had taken me nine months to write my previous eight proper blog posts and almost five months to write the next eight. I wrote only one in the two months reviewed in this post while I was feeling so physically and mentally ill. Between May and December 2010 I wrote another fourteen.

I crashed down to earth only three days and six thousand unpublished words after my spur-of-the-moment decision to write a fifty-thousand word NaNoWriMo 'novel' in thirty days. Like all the other novels I've started, this one remains unfinished, although I did get past page four on this occasion. All of this was while I was working full-time. Mild insomnia helped.

Man flu

Just like in 1994, 1999 and 2004, I felt myself slowly burn out as Xmas approached and by the time #SnowMorrissey had melted I was feeling too depressed to work or do anything else other than go to the doctor's surgery. My GP doubled my anti-depressant dose and I later self-diagnosed the new but familiar sharp stabbing pain in my lower right side under my ribs as pleurisy for which I prescribed myself Lemsip Max. The previous year I'd had a similar but worse pain with frightening shortness of breath, which only cleared up after a month or so using an inhaler.

Less perceptively and spookily - and admittedly without the benefit of a stethoscope, cheeseometer or any medical training - Andy C was less concerned about my physical health. Less is more.

Six days later, after a brief investigation with her stethoscope, my GP confirmed my pleuritic self-diagnosis, signed me off work and prescribed my some antibiotics for a chest infection, too. Unfortunately, she didn't have a cheeseometer either. I started to feel a bit better, but a cold winter's night a week or so on and the pain returned. Perhaps understandably, I was generally feeling more and more miserable, too.

At least everything was running smoothly at work during my two weeks absence.

'It's just a slice of cheese'

I went back to work on 1 February feeling much better after United had made City wait another year at least for their first trophy since 1976 and after setting in motion Arsenal's annual implosion.

Seventeen days and an x-ray later, however, I was in Accident and Emergency with a suspected collapsed right lung. After a blood test to make sure I wasn't suffering from a heart problems I went home the same evening. The following day I developed a strong desire to punch Nicholas Winterton in the face. Repeatedly. And regularly. Say every ten minutes. Coincidence?

Pull yourself together

By now, I'd lost touch with Reality, defending homeopathy. I'd lost hope, despairing at James Robertson's inevitably futile struggles to print and use his own postage using only Free and open source software. I'd lost my humanity, calling Basil Brush impersonator Richard Cutts a demented glove puppet for agreeing with me about Nicholas Winterton.

Three weeks before my x-ray, I'd phoned the local mental health trust to find out what had happened to the referral letter my GP had sent them back in September 2009, four months earlier. They helpfully told me that I wasn't a priority for treatment because I was working and, therefore, apparently OK. I asked them what did I have to do in order to become a priority? Try to kill myself? They offered me an appointment the same afternoon.

Naively, I assumed that this would be an appointment with a psychiatrist. After waiting for an hour behind the locked doors and shatter-proof glass partitions of the Community Mental Health Team building that kept the professional healers and helpers apart from me and rest of the presumably perceived as dangerous local community it serves, it turned out to be an appointment with a nurse who scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper. He then produced a copy of a letter dated the same day that he claimed had been posted to me the day before inviting me to a meeting with a psychiatrist in two weeks.

Three days before my x-ray, I met the psychiatrist. I made an extra effort to wash my hair, shave and put on clean clothes to make myself look less like Jim Ignatowski.

He sat in front of me reading my notes as if for the first time. After a couple of uncomfortably silent minutes he said 'You're not Stephen Fry bipolar.'

I suppose I should have been relieved about that, but my immediate reaction was confusion - how could he possibly know? All he had asked me was 'Would you like a coffee?' He didn't even ask if I wanted decaf, sugar or milk and yet he was magically able to undiagnose me without conducting any blood tests, x-rays, scans or other measurements of the balance of chemicals sloshing around in my brain, which is the current unproven theory of choice among the medically inclined.

We had a bit of a chat. I asked for psychotherapy on the NHS as I could no longer afford to pay privately. He recommended that I keep taking the medication even though I complained to him that I felt worse than ever after four months on them. I was finding sleep difficult, yet felt tired all the time, couldn't concentrate properly, had a dry mouth and sometimes felt my mood change from OK, to tearful, to agitated, to angry and even to suicidal in the space of a few hours.

I told him I'd washed and dressed specially for him. He laughed and said that was good, because otherwise he'd have had to section me under the Mental Health Act (have me forcibly detained in the mental health unit of the hospital). He rounded off our meeting by suggesting that I should pull myself together and get a life (not his exact words, but my honest interpretation and not far off). As I bid him goodbye and was closing the door to leave he asked me if I had any plans to kill myself.

I decided to stop taking my medication. Within ten days I successfully predicted England's abysmal failure in the South African World Cup.

Look out for more cheesy Twenty Ten goodness next week as I march on into March and explain the cheesy references....

As of today, Sir Alex Ferguson has been the manager of Manchester United longer than the late, great Sir Matt Busby. Fergie has had the top job in English club football since November 1986.

Except it probably wasn't the top job when he took it.

To put things into perspective, United hadn't won the First Division title for 19 years at the time. Our only truly bitter rivals Liverpool had 16 Championship successes to their name (next to our 7) and had totally dominated the previous 11 seasons, winning the trophy 8 times. Only the brilliance of Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest (who I had the privilege of seeing rip United to shreds 4-0 at Old Trafford on their way to their first and certainly last League title in 1977-78), Aston Villa's great team of 1980-81 (who won probably their last ever top division title after a then 71-year wait) and Everton in 1984-85 (not their last ever title, but almost certainly their second-to-last ever title).

The first season that I can remember watching United, 1974-75, we were in Division Two and playing the likes of York City, Orient (minus the Leyton, as they were then known), Oldham Athletic and Oxford United after the final and complete break up of the Busby Babes. Unless you count Sammy McIlroy, which I always did. I was heartbroken when Ron Atkinson publicly signed Bryan Robson on the Old Trafford pitch before the game against Wolves on 3 October 1981. Everyone knew that it would be Sammy, United through and through and still only 27, who would have to leave to make room in the first team. He scored his only United hattrick that same afternoon against Wolves and was sold on to Stoke City 4 months later.

In the years before Ferguson that I was a United fan, we won Division Two and had a new, young and exciting to watch (and listen to on the radio) team under the flawed management of Tommy Docherty. In our first season back in the top flight we managed a creditable third place in the League just 4 points behind Liverpool and 3 behind a great QPR side (Stan Bowles, Gerry Francis) managed by Dave Sexton. Some great old footage of match and players' hair highlights:

Although United inexplicably lost to Southampton in the FA Cup Final that same season, we beat Liverpool in the Final of 1977 to prevent them winning the real Treble, a truly remarkable achievement by a team that will live forever in my memory and which was immortalised (for a few years at least) on my Subbuteo table. The disgraced and disgraceful Doc was sacked, which at the time was impossible for me aged ten to understand. Replaced by his antithesis, the dour and disappointingly defensively-minded Sexton, the highlight of the next four years was our return to Wembley in 1979. We lost in the most devastating fashion to a last minute Alan Sunderland goal for Arsenal after having just clawed two goals back to level ourselves (including a brilliant equaliser from McIlroy).

Ron Atkinson brought back the flair and entertainment of Docherty's years and won two more FA Cup Finals, the best moment being Norman Whiteside's winner to prevent Everton from winning their own trophy Treble. Big Ron's United were always far too reliant on Captain Marvel Robson and his injury after we won the first ten games in the League the following season signalled the beginning of the end of his five years in charge.

Enter Ferguson.

Although I didn't fully comprehend it at the time, looking back now, it's easy to see how amazing his achievements were with Aberdeen, not only in breaking the Old Firm monotony, but even winning in Europe, too. A real foretaste of what was to come.

But it took several more seasons of hurt and under-achievement. I'm thankful that, apart from Xmas and New Year, I spent the entire 1989-90 season in the US. I did make it back to see us win another FA Cup and it was this cup run and victory that is supposed to have saved Fergie's job. If I'm honest, I probably wanted him to go some time before then, so rubbish we were.

Whatever the reasons, thank God he stayed! The rest is relatively recent history and well documented.

All I want to say is thanks to the Boss for filling the last twenty years with new found and real hope, unbounded and tearful joy, some of the most thrilling and unbelievable moments and matches. And trophy after trophy after trophy.

He knocked Liverpool off their perch as he promised he would. He took the spirit of Busby and re-modelled it for the modern game. He imbued himself in the traditions and the culture of the club and made damned sure every single player at every level did the same or they were out. Christ, he even shut my Dad up harking on about how we'd never be as good as Best, Law and Charlton. He made us United again.

Just thinking about Barcelona in 1999, where my then new housemate and landlord was experiencing first hand the atmosphere for himself (I'd moved to London for a new job just ten days earlier) and phoning me on his mobile to let me hear the singing, is choking me up.

1-0 down in injury time, having been totally outplayed without our suspended talismen Keane and Scholes, I was literally on my knees praying to a God I didn't believe in. It wasn't be the first - and I hope it won't be the last - time I was running around, jumping up and down, screaming 'Yes! Yes! Yes!!!!'

It would have been fitting if we could have beaten Chelsea today, but I hope the postponement has meant a day at home for Sir Alex with his family to relax before Xmas and the always most important next match against Sunderland.

Thanks, Boss!