A Prayer for the removal of bitterness

God Save me

From duplicitous christian men

With their self-centred, self serving

Self justification

Their needy validation.

God save me

From my mistaken belief

That their faith would be enough

To save me from my darkness

And their strength would nourish me

In my hour of need

That promises would be reflected in deed.

God save me 

From my foolishness

What a bloody imperfect fool I am

How could I not see that when he spoke

Of wanting to save this broken marriage

He didn’t mean the vows we took at altar

He meant the bricks and mortar.

And when he takes my money, and my home,

To preserve his social status

…And the woman with that shiny ring on her finger

Fresh from a luxury holiday in the Caribbean sun

–God, how that sting still lingers!

God Save me.

And God save him

From those as yet unseen imperfections

Which are bound to emerge, post-dopamine charge.

When he takes on her children -

Please let him not forget mine.

I’m sure her body is perfect

And she bears no scars

And will make a far better life-partner than I,

Whose faith is shattered by lie upon lie

Whose body is ruined

Who has no tears left to cry.

Dear God save him

From waking up lonely, 

Because you can lie to make yourself feel better

And tell everyone what an ogre they are

But she loved and cherished you when in need.

And you behaved like a son, not a lover

Treated her less a wife, and more a mother.

God Save me

From self-deluding christian men

You can keep your charity and good grace

Provide me with sweet, sweet revenge

Give me strength to endure

Soften my bitterness

Just take me away from all this

God Save me.

I've been thinking a lot about things that enrich our lives, alongside what gives us purpose or motivation, and whilst freeing up memory on my cloud storage I came across something I write last summer when my youngest daughter was taking part in her first ever Tall Ships Race. She is just back from Italy and together with a friend from the same school mentioned below, she drove around in a hired Fiat Panda exploring the culture and seeing Pisa, and soaking up the vibes of Florence before returning to crew in her second Tall Ships experience. Both my daughters have lived far more adventurous lives than I have, although my enrichment came from different experiences to theirs. 

There has been a steep rise in youth crime where I live in the South of England, it can be intimidating to witness anti-social behaviour but as our economic state and our out-of-touch government grapples with papering over the cracks and ignores the deepening rifts caused by leaving the European Union, as bills get harder to pay, food costs soar and pressures grow on ordinary people, the disruption caused by all this sees young people left without support or direction and can lead to acts of small aggression, destruction or frustration. This leads me back to enrichment, the extra icing on the cake, the opportunity taken that leads to new horizons, the moment that changes a person's perspective, how they feel or their next decision...

July 2022

I was thinking how great it was to see that we have a local girls' football team and giving some thought to some of the amazing things our young people do that rarely receive attention. Whilst it only takes one young person to drop some litter or, (through boredom mostly) commit small acts of anti-socialism to attract instant condemnation. From charity fund-raising to caring for a parent or sibling, to volunteering in the community, being part of a successful sports team, and even shopping for an elderly neighbour there are so many examples that demonstrate how wonderful young people are. 

During the cursed  'lock-down' we heard of many such acts by young people. I am missing these positive stories. I am sure young people are still doing these things.

My youngest was incredibly lucky to experience an enrichment programme during her time at her secondary school,  Wyvern St Edmunds' the culmination of which was a challenge to climb Mt Toubkal (4167 metres above sea level in the High Atlas Mountains). Encouraged and joined by her then, form teacher Miss Kirkham, a coachful departed from St. Edmunds. What! No toilets !!? the girls exclaimed in horror at the induction tal, "Yep' came the reply, "what goes up the mountain comes down the mountain". It was a life-changing challenge for many of the group who undertook it and I still remember how exhausted they all were when they arrived back at school - exhausted and exhilarated. 

That challenge gave my youngest the courage to successfully apply to become Head Girl, a role she thrived in, and this summer she is undertaking the Tall Ships Challenge 2022 aboard the Jolie Brise, currently somewhere out in the North Sea between Antwerp in Belgium and Aalberg in Denmark (amongst some of the largest cargo and container ships that I wish I'd never looked at on the Marine Traffic Tracker!). 

So thank you St. Edmunds (Wyvern St Edmund's) that inspiring enrichment programme has enabled my youngest to get over the sudden cessation of her known school life (no exams, no prom, suddenly no friends to be with every day) and to start at a sixth form where she knew no-one, where lock-downs yo-yo'd in and out and it has enabled her to see those challenges as possibilities, to look beyond the immediate horizon.

She is not alone, her friends have similar stories of growth and achievement. All different, all positive. My maternal pride has led me to digress a little, and I know that in life we don't all get the same opportunities and we don't all make good choices when opportunities present themselves. I also know, that in the parish that I work in; schools, parish councillors, the scouting and guiding association, churches, housing associations, Wiltshire Council - a whole host of agencies and people, are all working hard to find ways to provide more opportunities for young people to have things to do and places to go, to encourage and inspire their brilliant young minds and channel the phenomenal energy that young people possess. 

Covid took away so much, I hope we can continue to offer challenges and opportunities for our young people so they all have a chance to widen their horizons and discover that to climb a mountain you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other and eventually you'll get to the top.

If you're going to write then choosing to write about a broken heart is a dangerous gambit. It's passé, it's over-done, done to death, dull, disinteresting - ditch it!

But it happens, right? We've all had our hearts broken haven't we? 

People, in this post-pandemic era talk about social isolation and loneliness emerging as a result of fear of the outside world, fear of getting a terrible illness, mistrust of other humans who like rats become carriers of disease, panic of being in an arena where you have no control. It's not a million miles from the feelings attached to having your heart broken - the tendency to withdraw, isolate, leads to the same sense of loneliness. There's a powerful Ad campaign that was run in the UK in 2016 specifically targeting the elderly, the Loneliness Kills ad campaign was conceived and executed by Superdream, an ad agency based in Birmingham, United Kingdom, for Alone, an organization helping older people in need. It read, "Research shows that loneliness and isolation can be as harmful to someone's health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day." That's a shocking statement aimed at opening people's eyes back in 2016, the baton was picked up by Age UK and in Australia in 2019 they pronounced "Loneliness is a social cancer, every bit as alarming as cancer itself". When Covid19 arrived it became a tangible concern for everybody regardless of age or gender. Others became hyper-independent, hyper vigilant - refusing to rely on anyone but themselves, refusing to open their heart or be generous and giving in order to control the impact of their fellow humans on their own environment, well-being, and sense of self. Surely a negative action leading back to self-isolation and loneliness?

During the pandemic, people were stopped from leaving their homes, once the crisis eased off those habits formed from government-imposed 'isolation' continued for many. As we emerge from the crisis, people are ordering "Just Eat' rather than walking to a nearby restaurant, they're accessing youtube or Netflix or Amazon Prime rather than going to the theatre. We're becoming more like the people on the galactic cruise liner in the Disney/Pixar animated film WALL-E released in 2008, so used to pressing a button to get our needs met that our bodies become irrelevant, gradually unable to walk or dance. Okay. I'm not saying that when your heart is broken you become an obese slug (although that is a stage some broken-hearted people go through if Bridget Jones is to be believed) but there is no doubt that when you experience a huge let-down from someone you loved, or heavily invested in, either through loss and grief, or because someone actively left your life, or ghosted you, or simply could not return the love you felt for them, you have a physical response and often a mental response to accompany it. Something in you breaks... not literally or physically (although pain can definitely be a factor) but something so real in terms of your soul, your spirit - that you were crippled by it, unable to function. Your heart is an animate part of your body, philosophers and artists consider it to be the inherent centre of your being. The chemicals released through love or passion, the endorphins, the adrenalin sparking through your nervous system and cerebral cortex, cause your heart to beat faster, and this fact explains the link to symbolising love through the imagery of the heart; not just an intertwining of two souls in shared experience but also two hearts...beating as one. 

Experiencing a broken heart is a process, from which, some people heal and some people don't, choosing instead to isolate. Not perhaps in quite such a dramatic fashion as Miss Havisham, the reclusive jilted bride in Charles Dicken's story "Great Expectations". But the real and manifest ways in which the mind asks the body to respond to a broken heart are as diverse and unpredictable as the mind itself. In 1966 Jimmy Ruffin asked, "What becomes of the broken-hearted? Who had love that's now departed? I know I've got to find, some kind of peace of mind - Maybe.."

In this new age of self-introspection, self-preservation and insular leisure activities such as 'gaming' and 'online shopping' and the arrival of AI - will the act of 'broken-heartedness" be softened by the removal of face-to-face contact by augmented reality and the invidious growth of computer-generated software? Will love and connection become a thing of the past, an outdated, unrecognised symptom of society from a bygone era? Will Jimmy Ruffin's sought after peace of mind become a dull sense of inertia, a numb fantasy expressed through a third-party tool such as an online game or artificial avatar?

I've just been to the funeral of a neighbour. In the nineteen years that I spent living on the same road, I knew he was a 'rare bird' but I had no idea just how rare. His wife Ann was an expert at 'socialising' we shared an interest in theatre, and I was honoured when she sent her son over so that I could read a script he'd written, which was genius in its delivery but someone else had beaten him to it, in terms of genre and theme. I knew there was a military background and some interesting stories, but it was late in the day when I surmised that this kind, intelligent, articulate man was a Major General with an MBE and a CBE to his name. He was a humble man. I wonder if anyone reading this will realise the profundity of calling someone 'humble' in this day and age. It is a rare quality, it means that a person can separate themselves from their 'ego'. It doesn't mean that they are weak, or sycophantic or fawning. It means they are strong and confident in who they are and what they stand for, and that they lead by example. My neighbour was such a man. 

I live in a cathedral city, so the word 'Divinity' is often used in a religious sense. However, just before the coronavirus outbreak, we experienced an event that changed the city and heightened our sense of inner divinity, our fallible selves set against our sense of protectedness and immunity. Novichok (1). The death of a Russian resident and his daughter who died from exposure to a chemical agent, the discovery in the city centre of these two people dying from exposure to the nerve agent and the ensuing panic, security lock-down, rocked the sense of security across this small city. It exposed its inhabitants to the intensity of the worlds media, to see the place where you live held to scrutiny in the mirror lens of the wider world can be equally threatening. Subsequently, three other people also fell ill from exposure to the nerve agent and one of them, a mother of three, also died. The night of the first incident, March 04, 2018 I was nearby in a medieval church, built to serve the spiritual needs of the builders of the Cathedral, preparing for an International Women's Day event with local musicians and girls from local schools. We became aware of the incident when my two daughters and a friend went off to buy some snacks after the rehearsal and came back having passed the pizza restaurant where the two Russians, Sergei and his daughter Yulia had been eating that day before falling unwell. The girls reported a heavy police presence and a barrier blockading the restaurant. Later, as we got ready to welcome our audience and to light candles, rumours of the event started to spread on social media. We wondered who would come - should we carry on? The heightened awareness that accompanies 'out of the ordinary' occurrences, created both fear and fascination. Many people decided not to come, some came and then left, shaken by a sense of anxiety. Would a chemical agent be in the very air we were breathing, was it safe to touch surfaces? Was it too late? We were stoic, trusting the guidance of the police and distracted by the demands of music-making, worship and celebration.

Salisbury, is a place with a long-standing relationship to nearby Porton Down (known as the Chemical Defence Establishment in my father's time) populated by scientists and military, and local people connect to the site in a variety of ways. So perhaps in terms of a critical emergency many residents were pragmatic but as the coronavirus was later to demonstrate, dealing with the element of unknown and unpredictable is deeply unsettling.

This unexpected drama, threw a community into a temporary spiral of deep uncertainty. It is the stuff of fiction, the potential plot of a James Bond movie. We will never know the full truth behind this incident, it is too dangerous, too unsettling to be in the public psyche. Chemical weaponry is a callous and cruel concept that is as close to a sense of absolute evil as anything man has ever created. There is no divinity in the creation of devices or agents aimed at mass murder, only those without compassion, driven by greed, overshadowing in its excessive need to provide for 'self' at the cost of all else - only those people could conceive such an idea. There is no godliness in mass destruction and yet those that create such things are motivated by a sense of higher purpose, a sense of power as if endowed with a twisted divinity. 

Hard on the heels of Novichok in 2018 there followed the coronavirus, another man-made agent that had the power to kill. The parallels of which cannot be lost on those who have considered both events. We have lived, in a state of heightened awareness ever since. Not just here in Salisbury but around the world, as this biological infectious agent spread with devastating impact. We are now alert, but also weary from mentally and physically living in ways that we hope protect us from further attack but are new and awkward. Caught off-guard, yanked from our hitherto comfortable existence and forced by a need for self-preservation to live in ways that have swept aside the very elements of society that hold us together. Community, coming together, holding each other, celebrating, commiserating. We have become meerkats in the desert, watchful, and guarded, as we grope in the darkness of the unknown future, in our states of heightened awareness, reaching out for the familiar, attempting to re-discover and rekindle what has been lost. 

We all have the divine within; a spirit that makes us kind, dynamic, creative, passionate, gentle, compassionate, empathic, and god-like. Perhaps shaken by the realisation that other humans can ignore all that beauty and purity in order to create evil, we need to dive back into ourselves and re-discover our divinity to shine our light, collectively in the darkness. To honour joy, happiness, love, through sports, through art, through music. Life is too short to allow the grubby, the unkind, the selfish, and the cruel a permanent place in our lives. 

1 Wikipedia : Novichok (Russian: Новичо́к, lit. 'newcomer, novice, newbie'^[1]) is a group of nerve agents, some of which are binary chemical weapons. The agents were developed at the GosNIIOKhT state chemical research institute by the Soviet Union and Russia between 1971 and 1993.^{[2][3][a][5][6]} Some Novichok agents are solids at standard temperature and pressure, while others are liquids. Dispersal of solid form agents is thought possible if in ultrafine powder state.^[7]

Russian scientists who developed the nerve agents claim they are the deadliest ever made, with some variants possibly five to eight times more potent than VX,^[8][9] and others up to ten times more potent than soman.^[10] As well as Russia, Novichok agents have been known to be produced in Iran.^[11]

Hello. Welcome. 

I wanted to find a corner of the world to post my moments of inspiration (or madness). I hope you'll not just enjoy my literary leanings but comment and engage... life is too short, too fleeting, to pass by. Please don't be a bystander...