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.