A rebel without a clue.

It's raining, but I don't care. I've a couple of sacks of early crop potatoes to sow on Wednesday - February for harvest July - and a sack of potting compost to make a real start with vegetables for planting come the spring, £8.50 from Wilkos at the bottom of Albion Street in Leeds. Begun to get the ball rolling with volunteering on weekends, and cutting back on nonsensical alcohol bingeing, I can help the Meanwood Valley Volunteer Rangers. Will see Andy at the Allotment on Wednesday too - I keep calling Jonathan Morton at Leeds City Council, but I've not got through to him yet, it's been months! *** Suddenly Wetherby is so boring. It's always felt like a one horse town, but I watched myself drinking a Belgian dark hot chocolate in BAE (£3) and thought 'banal'. There is only so much banality I can cope with and today, in the drizzle, was making suicide seem like a positive response! *** At 2pm I walked up Deighton Road to Mark Lane, passed Kirk Deighton ...

Lola had a poorly ear, £70. Mother has a poorly tooth, priceless, And I have an alcohol support session this afternoon, meaningless. Monday afternoon bus yo-yo The second bus since arriving back at my flat, very late, on Saturday night. Back to the same routine. The few days away in Andalucia were worthy, I suppose, but there is nothing permanent about it. Glenn turned on his laptop and groaned and I woke up at six and returned to podcast-land. 

A tearful morning. An image of a Vizsla crawling onto a bed and All I Need Is A Miracle playing alongside and I get the emotion engendered there ... When nothing fits, when nothing makes me smile, and am in the pits of despair, I can only return to Lola to help keep me going along the dark weary road I trudge. A proxy, but that image encapsulates why, without her, I would not be here. One careless whisper and months of positivity melt into the cracks of existence once more. People are cruel and I don't need any of them in my life; give me another moment with Lola and things will, just about, soldier on. ... Bored of war! Another conflict being created to keep us bickering and fighting amongst ourselves. Why can't they say enough is enough. There are more important things than conflict. Harmony and unity, brotherness and togetherness. *** For several months I have managed my mental health without SNRIs because I had been keeping certain things at arms length: COVID-19 does that ...

Sitting back in my morning place: by the bay window looking out into the darkness. Watching the gradual awakening of the street. The birds on the roof opposite, the children dropped off with Diane across the road, the cars which head east up the way to another destination. Monday morning. The weekend was a tough one. I didn't enjoy it one bit, but it's taught me a lesson: don't trust anyone because they are venomous snakes and will bite and devour at the first opportunity. Although it was an opinion of someone who doesn't matter to me it still cut me deep and, because someone I do value added salt to the wound, the soreness festered. No one likes me because I don't work. That word. Work. My mind doesn't work either, but they cannot see that for the reality it is. A man who has severe mental health issues - and has cut his own wrists as a cry for help - thinks he knows what the remedy to my problems are! But his problems are fathomless. They go so deep it's h...

Falling off the waggon coincided with falling foul of Adrian and Jason. It was followed by a crappy Saturday where, although I didn't hit the bottle, I felt hopeless against those who have negative attitudes towards me. People who really don't wish me well. But that was a couple of days. Minor days. Today is Sunday and, like Sisyphus, I must keep trying to get that boulder back to the top of the hill? First the first time in ages I walked via Wothersome, Thorner, Birkby Hill, Red Hall and Elmete Drive towards Leeds, but at no time did I feel peaceful, preoccupied by the voices in my head. It's a stiff lesson to learn that no one I loosely call 'friend' is compassionate about my mental health and wellbeing. There is one or two I feel are true friends who seem to understand more about what it is like to have these voices braying at me keeping me in this bad place? So start again. Pick up the heavy weight and carry it on my back. Carry on with my final year being this ...

Glenn and I are off to Andalusia. The price of a LFT has crashed to around £6! Why were the likes of Randox allowed to charge whatever price they felt like back in 2020 and 2021? Now they've probably got a vast quantity of test kits which will soon be quite literally worthless to everyone, and will get dumped on somewhere third world or unrecyclable: probably Romania, Bulgaria or Ukraine. Oh and the UK government has sent military hardware to the Ukraine. Just as COVID vanishes up pops the other nonsense: war, conflict, aggression; sphere's of influence! Oh I don't know! Isn't the Ukraine really Russia anyway. It's definitely not western Europe as they are mainly Russian Orthodox... Go figure. I would advise those who are being slapped on the back by the US, UK, et al, that they're using you to sell weapons and ideologies!  The US doesn't care about the Ukraine, but they do like to keep the tangle of conflicts carrying on. Life doesn't matter at all in t...

To change my life in someway. At the moment, although I have the enthusiasm for change, things outside my control: my mother's situation, are preventing me from being bolder than I have been during my experience of the Camino. It's in my power to walk away from all this responsibility, and let mother stagnate further, but I do feel a little compelled to stay around her very small circle. My decision to make this year count has a long way to go. What I'd like to do now, as a knee jerk reaction to the last 2 years of various Lockdowns and the machinations of COVID-19, isn't as important as what needs to happen in the next 12 months. If by the next Candlemas, in 2023, I am still buzzing around the honey pot of Wetherby then I have clearly failed. This is a focus I am not going to allow to drift into nothingness. *** The end of another working week. Friday. Lola and I will catch the bus away from Wetherby today. It's been around a month, I guess, since last we climbed o...