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!
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
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