On days like this, I do not like the Zombie Apocalypse. The nickname began as a joke but, as events have progressed, it seems the only realistic interpretation of the times in which we live. No-one could have foreseen the Covid-19 Pandemic, except perhaps those academics, tucked away in laboratories or in fusty corners, who have read enough historical and medical texts to know that we are about due to have another worldwide plague at present. Or those who, like me, see this as a kind of karma for the damage that the human race has done to our planet.
We now live in a ‘burning house’ with climate change, long predicted but hopefully ignored by anyone who believes in scientific progress. Now the temperature of the planet is wreaking disasters only ever before imagined in the Bible, or by prophets such as Nostradamus. Nostradamus was able to be specific in several ways, but it always occurred to me that he might simply have got the measure of the human race – we are going to continue to invent new technologies and industrial marvels, which are going to be at odds with religious beliefs all over the place, and displace vast numbers of people through warfare, famine, drought, poverty and inequality in certain areas of society, as rich and poor, import and export and methods of manufacture separate nations and classes and creeds of people worldwide.
Diminished global resources, concentrated in certain areas, are running out, and the human race has continued to multiply at stupid levels really, when you think about it. How exactly are all these people going to be fed, educated, employed, cared for, nursed, rehabilitated, and prevented from using up all that there is? Books written 25 years ago mentioned the heating up of the planet as a major factor in our possible extinction. Since the Industrial Revolution, that process has accelerated, and we are now in dire trouble if we do not take immediate action.
All of which leaves aside the question of our toxicity. Just under fourteen years ago, the lyrics of The Smiths’ That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore, on which I had been so keen as a teenager, echoed repeatedly in my mind on a loop, “I’ve seen this happen/In other people’s lives/Now it’s happening in mine” The swooning minor-chord cadences lock into a mesmeric vibration.
I had already spotted a slapdash approach to so many things even before my Accident. If the ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’ had annoyed me before 2007, then it enraged me when my brain damage was new, along with an inability to calibrate my own wellbeing and progress after the injury. I felt, quite soon after the event, that reality was hostile, and this sense did not leave me for years. With the arrival of curtailments to freedom of movement when the Pandemic was announced, together with the revoking of many support resources, I felt a sense of deja-vu; I regarded myself almost as primed for the circumstances. At least I could feel assured, as the Neuropsychiatrist had put it, that my “pharmacological management is now optimised”. This had not been the case at any point previously and, through breakdowns, assessment for Bipolar Affective Disorder, mental health assessment during the year that my son was denied an education leading nowhere, and difficulty with hormones leading to an almost suicidal Day 21 of my menstrual cycle, I had managed to find an excellent coping mechanism in weightlifting.
The lack of appropriate medical assistance prevailed until 2016, when my second mental breakdown occurred and a friend recommended a private practitioner – whom I could afford, thanks to some of the compensation that I had fought so hard for, to consult. The National Health Service has never forgiven me for this transgression, and has ignored most practitioners’ correspondence ever since.
Early on, after the Injury, I can remember sitting in an AA meeting and hearing someone proclaim that their stress was so bad that they had been referred to the Scutari Wing of St. Thomas’ Hospital. and I wondered whether there might not actually be something in the “severe traumatic” classification that my original hospital discharge form had stated. After my son was born I continued to be seen in the Memory Disorders Department of the Scutari Wing for some weeks, but cannot remember clearly the content of those appointments, except for trying to address whatever piece of gaslighting my son’s father was employing at the time. I was often suicidal, as his punishing disposition never let me off a single mistake, even months after the fact, and a woman’s place was in the wrong, with no mitigating circumstances. If the novelty of a partner with a brain injury had worn off for him, it was crucifying in me a hundredfold. Whilst pregnant and breastfeeding, I had reduced my Fluoxetine dosage to 20mg per day, and increases in progesterone, as I was to find out some years later, were instrumental in my not-infrequent tendency to fall apart.
Thankfully at that point we were living with my mother and stepfather, after the move to a flat in London had fallen through. Thank goodness it had; I dread to think what the consequences might have been had things gone differently. It was hard enough to look after myself and my son as it was, and hard to stay alive, even with the support of my family at the time. After my son’s father left, I was on a waiting list for Home Start, an organisation which provides a companion for single parents with depression for a few hours per week. I think I cried off accepting their help, though – so unable was I to judge the severity of, or to articulate, my situation. Only now, years later, can I see quite what dire straits prevailed.
I regret that I participated in the Vaccination Experiment and had two Covid-19 vaccinations. I fear that this ‘revolutionary methodology’ of wellbeing delivered by a syringe has hoodwinked so many of us into agreeing to unknown alterations to our DNA and our immune systems, because Big Pharma and the World Economic Forum need to lead the Great Reset.
The gloves are off; I insist upon telling my story because I have survived quite enough to have been able to trust my instinct to begin with. The National Hell Service has form, of which I am only too well aware.
I became acquainted with the ways in which bullying is meted out quite early on after my brain injury. Over time, the game plan seemed clearer: you must stick within the parameters imposed by people who have no idea about your neurological circumstances, or you are penalised and must forego support. The wording, which had always seemed to me to be abundantly clear before my injury, now danced an equivocating pattern across my optic nerves.
This situation has worsened – rising impatience and diminishing attention span conspire to enable the small-print to contain agreement to several transgressions – do you know what they are? Neither do I. But on a more blatant level the transgressions are clear: the blurring between public and private life now that social media has ‘opened up’ the channels of communication (what a tower of babel) means that people are judged on matters relating to the job they do, and private predilections have now become, as far as the public is concerned, Any Other Business as opposed to None of Yours.
Now the High Court judge, who had used to go home and beat his spouse in a home-made dungeon, has to paraphrase his or her ‘hobbies and interests’ in order to evade opprobrium. Is this freedom of speech, or are the parameters forcing us to paraphrase, to ‘speak in tongues’ rather than to state clear facts? The linguistic militia are at it on several levels: you cannot simply die nowadays, you have to “sadly” die; no matter how you felt about the extinction. People must be told that this is a ‘sad’ event; deportment is in this way taught through language, through semantics which conjure up an only partial truth.
Diminishing vocabulary, and use of stock phrases, erode our ability to explain or to understand fully what is being done; I received a terse email from the Headmistress of the school which off-rolled my son last Autumn, stating that I had been “both offensive and abusive” without specifying how, and banning me from entry on to school property thereafter. I replied, asking various pertinent questions, and the resulting ‘radio silence’ became the space in which I reflected upon how outrageously impolite and disrespectful this person, and her organisation, truly are.
Bureaucratic Obfuscation as Bullying
Being blindsided by an organisation is something I can tell you about: the Senior Leadership Team – who will not communicate unless it is on their terms – blindsided my son and I in Autumn 2023. My son is one of the thousands of Invisible Children: children with Special Educational Needs and their families are left in a kind of vacuum, desperate to know to whom to address our many complaints and concerns, and devastated when, it turns out, no-one seems to care.
Capital Punishment 