Day One of 42.

The first morning of the long summer. Emma is in Ibiza and I am in her house until Saturday when I switch from this house to Archie's on North Street, for the remainder of the summer, as Iskara and David head to Bulgaria for the rest of the school holidays...

It's a scary prospective being unable to leave Wetherby for around 42 days(6 entire weeks)! It's such a weak town with little really happening in it's small minded existence? For a small market town it just feels bland and up it's arse about nothing. Maybe I've just spent too long of my life enclosed in its crushing embrace.

True, I've never felt entirely at home anywhere else, but I rarely go anywhere for more than to pass through it. And passing through villages, towns and cities does get a little repetitive as we humans have relatively few absolutes... Church, castle, tower, hairdressers, café, bakery, supermarket.

On Saturday, as I travelled back from Amiens, through Beauvais, I felt the same absolute exists in the French obsession with open air markets - they add to the distinctive charms of a French village, town or city, but they are also repetitive (the same vendors circulate in the vicinity every day and culminate, together, in the larger habitations on a Saturday)

Thankfully I have the allotment for a positive input, but somehow I have to find another part of Wetherby which I have never seen? The one outside the pubs, the Whaler, San Angelo's. Beyond the weir, the salmon steps and the chip shop eating masses (who fill their already huge guts) to a nice calm alternative...

Another factor at play in my sudden return and jolt back into reality was and is the usual procedure of being reassessed for PIP: every three years, but was put back by the circumstances of COVID. I knew that in July my time would be up - the brief feeling of absolute financial calm in the otherwise swirling maelstrom of monetary doubts.

Being in receipt of ESA, PIP and the various off shoots doesn't make me wealthy, it puts me just beyond the dire situation of living below the poverty line, in a time of increasing stress to the system - or crisis - we are currently living through. It's not just me in crisis, a situation I've been in so long it's become a norm, but whole rafts of society too...

England seems heading badly off track at the moment and much needs to be done to prevent it falling in to a position on the fringes of Europe's and the world's developed nations?

While only the rich get richer, and money isn't all that it is cracked up to be, the poor are struggling. But it's so difficult for politicians and the aristocracy to understand what it means to be a 'common' person (in the parlance of Jarvis Cocker).

September is my 'date with destiny' - the end of the road I've been on too long (almost perpetually since 2013). This is no way to live? It's not. It's burying me up to my neck and I'm struggling to keep my self above absolutely vanishing without a trace ...

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A podcast I listen to weekly (Crowd Science) featured an episode on ear worms or, technically, Involuntary Musical Imagery which I've suffered with alongside tinnitus for several years. The inability to stop terrible music going around and around in my mind while my ears ring with constant pulsing of the high pitched whining...