Contrasts

What a week of contrast’s.

Friday evening and Saturday morning were spent frantically getting my peat’s in. With the help of Kyle & DS & his tractor we brought 6 loads of peat’s in of the moor. I had done it successfully stacked and dried my peat’s and got them in before the bad weather starts. We have enough peat’s now to keep our stove burning throughout the winter as well as being physically stronger I feel emotionally very good, there is a lot of anxiety getting your peat’s in and I didn’t want to look like the stupid incomer who hadn’t a clue what she was doing. Saturday night we had our first gale in months it was such a shock and it’s rained on and off all week so I got the peat’s in just in time.

Sunday we added a goat to our menagerie. She is called Heidi and is already pregnant, by yesterday my son Finn reported that she has already turned a big patch of weeds into a football pitch, I think the goat is going to be one of his favourites. Finn has also decided to stay with us, this was an amazing feeling for me having Finn back and our family feels whole again. I do feel sadness for Chris and Helen who he has lived with for the last year, they have done a fantastic job with him, and Finn has really got a strong bond now with his dad which wont be broken now.
Tuesday at 5.30am I set off for the mainland caught the ferry and headed for Dundee.

We have exchanged our family car for a big red van-with 6 seats so we can pick up more things off the mainland which we need at home, later on we hope to use it to take our produce to markets. After picking the van up I headed to Glasgow, Wednesday was spent in an orgy of shopping in IKEA etc, but it seemed more a chore than an enjoyable experience.

Arrived in the evening to Motherwell, ready to start training Thursday morning for LAMH a local mental health organisation that is embracing recovery and doing some really good work.
Went out to the van to bring some gear for training to find it had been broken into , & my precious I-pod and satellite navigator had been stolen from a locked glove compartment. Everywhere was strewn with glass, this was 5 minutes before I was due to start training. Take me back to Lewis!!

Any way the group were great as I had to make several phone calls to get things sorted. I love working with support workers because they don’t have any difficulty with the concept or ideas of recovery , are not phased by it’s simplicity and are eager to go back and put the ideas in practice. There is no need to deal with “professional sensitivities” and they understand implicity the need to be human beings first.

Tonight I drive up to Ullapool to catch the 10 o’clock ferry the last late ferry of the year.

Tomorrow will be full of football matchs and chores, hopefully Sunday will be a rest day before I set out for southhampton on monday.

Photo Gallery 2008

Pets and Animals August 2008

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Ron in Italy, July 2008

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Recovery Champions 2008

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Australia and New Zealand 2008

March 2008, Perth

January 2008: Making Recovery Happen, Ron speaking in Perth, West Australia

Rest and resilience in a challenging world

School holidays finish today, frantically trying to get the children into bed and I’m losing.

Francesca has given in and gone to sleep, it’s her first day at school tomorrow but Rory and Finn are finding 100 reasons why they cant get to sleep.

Finn has been living with his dad for the last year and is trying out school here with a view to coming back to live with us. The choice is not about which parent he wants to live with but which place has the better football team for him to join, he dreams about being the next Beckham!

Talking of dreams Ron and my dream of the bunkhouse/recovery training venue looks likely to be on hold for a while as we have yet to sell our house in Fife. Any one out there wants a lovely 4 bedded eco-house in Wormit, Fife to buy or rent, please get in touch.

Ron & I seem to be taking it in turns to get despondent about our situation whilst the other try’s to spin out a more positive viewpoint. We have so many plans to implement here but most of them require cash.

Ultimately we are luckier than a lot of people in the present economic climate, we have a good amount of work, a roof over our head, a beautiful environment to live in, good friends, each other -perhaps these elements give us the building blocks for our mental well being and the resilience and toughness to stay self employed. Ron has been training in one form or another now for 16 years and was hoping to slow down next year, instead it will be full on for both of us, at least we are both passionate about our work, passionate about recovery and driven in our fight to change the mental health system.

Next week I'm back to work it will seem strange to leave this safe cocoon and be back in the big real world.

Karen stacks the peats and finds herself reflecting on the meaning of recovery

Angelo was meant to be with us tomorrow but his mother is very seriously ill so has decided to cancel his trip. This is such a pity as i was looking forward to showing him and his girl friend our island.

Angelo

I stacked the last of my peats today, this is very late but I cross my fingers for 2 more weeks of sunshine so they will be thoroughly dry and I can bring them off the moor.

Each time I have gone up to them I have brought a couple of bags back full of the dry peats and we have started burning them on our Rayburn, apart from the lovely peaty smelling smoke, there is something very satisfying about burning something that you have worked physically hard to produce.

I have found my time out on the moor with the 2 dogs stacking and turning the peats very enjoyable, as I go off in my own world, as I carry out the monotonous and back breaking work I have been thinking of all the ways we could diversify the recovery training to include other excluded groups from society. I find my mind is at its most creative when I am doing something repetitive; swimming was my usual time for creative thought. When I was working in the NHS I had the most fantastic manager called Mark Varrah. We connected straight away, I think he loved my off the wall thinking, I remember designing services on the back of scraps of paper , presenting him them and him replying go and do it then and I did. Way before I knew Ron I created this wonderful thriving day care provision in Gloucester; with much help from some fantastic staff and people who used the service, we had organic gardens, African drumming all kinds of creative artistic groups run by real artists, bright yellow walls that hid the nicotine. The doors were always open we started at 8am and didn’t close until 8pm then had a couple of support staff who took people out to the cinema and clubs.

I loved my job, there was a can do attitude it was a positive place. I thought I had good succession planning in place for when I left, but with in 6 months after I left they had turned the place into an NHS building again. Gone was the garden replaced with a car park my yellow walls were magnolia push button locks were put on all the doors and the staff had retreated back to the office. Then there was a succession of suicides of gifted young people that used to come to the centre. I don’t know whether the regime change had anything to do with that but Ii remember feeling so angry at their wasted lives. They were seen as just mad people by some, bad by others, manipulative, lazy, lost , spoilt some of the words I over heard. What i saw was young people with lives blighted by what had happened to them, being gay, but Christian unable to come to terms with that, another losing a brother in a car crash and wishing it was themselves. What did we do about it we gave them pills to block it out and labels and illnesses why can the NHS find it so hard to deal with human emotional pain, why cant we hug, hold a hand, sit still why some one cries, why do we feel the need to stifle pain, to ignore it, feel embarrassed by it or even worse feel threatened because of our own insecurities and baggage.

Rons sponsored hair cut, 24th September 2008

A REMINDER that Ron is doing a sponsored hair cut on 24^th September in Dundee to raise money to send some Scottish and Palestinian people to the Intervoice conference in Australia.

We need as many sponsors as possible , you can download a sponsorship form from here.

Soon you will be able to sponsor directly by secure on-line payment …… more details soon ...

Welshpool, churches, the Italians .... and our homegrown vegetables.....

Our lovely chickens, our son, Rory's job is too feed them caterpillars picked off the brassicas ...

2nd August

The Italians have gone home, life has slowed down slightly.

Marcelo Macario who was visiting us with his family is a fabulous Italian psychiatrist working near Savonna. He has been fundamental in helping us spread the recovery message across italy, helped by ther fact that he is seeing it happen with his own patients. Angelo has turned from paranoid schizophrenic to an English translator , he translates all our materials into Italian and now translates at most events we train at in italy. Angelo is visiting us in a weeks time with his girlfriend. Ron always speaks on world mental health day in Trento at a mental health conference. This year Ron proposes to learn the speech in Italian so he can do the entire speech at the conference in perfectly spoken itlaian, if it comes off it will be entirely due to Angelos tuition.

Life on the croft continues to be busy. Last week was spent with me turning all the peats to dry them out. I am running out of time and just hope for another couple of sunny weeks. My vegetables are ready to eat and we have now had carrots, courgettes, runner beans , curly kale & a few of Rons tomatoes, Rory is earning a fortune picking off all the caterpillars from the brasicas and feeding them to the chickens!

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21st July

Our work with mental health staff in Welshpool proved to be very positive and it turned out to be a successful recovery champions course. Nearly all Phoenix House staff and 6 staff from Woodlands are now really keen to put into practice all they have absorbed this week. They have a fantastic management team in Jackie, Peter, Neil & Sunni and I hope to see some really good recovery stories eminating from phoenix in the next 12 months, Acorn Care have a wonderful group of staff to do them proud.

I also got to go to a beautiful spiritual place for the second time at St. Melangels church. It is right in the heart of Powys countryside. There is a beautiful little church that is on the grounds of a far older sacred place. It is magical , calming and within 20 minutes of being there I was completely chilled.

I was also getting cross at Ron who didn’t seem to be enjoying the silence , until i asked him what was wrong and he said the place was far from silent for him as he could also hear the pain and suffering of the place. For him churches will be ever associated with abuse.

It makes me feel so angry to see the pain in his face, as he cant enjoy the spiritual nature of this place when the yearning to be a priest still lies at the bottom of his heart and being, maybe the popes apology will help , but I don’t think so .

I also had too many wines two nights in a row, laughed like I haven’t done for a long time thanks to Joe's incredible humour and sang some Jazz which was very cathartic.

After the course was finished it was a mad dash to collect the children from Gloucestershire drive up to Glasgow, reached the hotel just after midnight, then up again at 7.30 breakfast then meet the Italians at Stirling who wetre coming up to the island with us.

I took the scenic tour to Inverness, missed the turning ended up miles out of our way got back to the A9 to find the road was closed, crawled along the detour and only just made the boat as it was half an hour late.

Crazy, knackering but we made it, the crossing was a little rough, there were a few green faces , we arrived in Stornoway, hit the supermarket and were home by 10pm having driven nearly 800 miles in 24 hours.

karen