Saturday, January 10, 2009

Snuggling with a howling gale around us ...


We are having a long lie in snuggled under the duvet as a howling gale surrounds us with expected winds of 70 miles an hour. Ron & I did some work on the house to reduce some of the drafts yesterday, brought in loads of coal and peat so we don’t need to go out much. Unfortunately Francesca has a birthday party this afternoon so I will have to venture out in the van I hope there is a lull in the wind.

Yesterday was the funeral of our dear friend Ian Murray. A community psychiatric nurse who worked in North Wales he was a lovely man, a fantastic practitioner, who worked towards recovery, he had a intuitative understanding of why people self harm and has helped take thinking forward on this subject, he was also a great dad to his talented son’s and husband of Anne a fellow mental nurse. Our thoughts are with them as we were unable to travel to the funeral.

As I thought our trip to Palestine has been postponed to later in the year, as it was deemed unsafe, also staff were in no mood for training in the west bank as they hear more and more about the destruction of Gaza. The mental health centre in Gaza, a ground-breaking, very forward thinking community mental health project has been bombed and completely destroyed. The mental health workers have to work from their homes. They have lost all their records and are practicing in extreme difficulties. These were some of the staff we were meant to be doing recovery training with next week. I feel so powerless as the West continues to allow this degrading bombing to go on. No human being deserves to live in these conditions. Our thoughts are with our friends in Gaza who showed us such wonderful hospitality last time we were there.

Ron & I will now use this free time to catch up on writing and planning for the coming year. We hope to complete a manual on person centred planning and develop some further training packs.
I have some workshops coming up at the end of this month in Glasgow and am looking forward to training again. As I have not done any since our return from Australia in November. Its also the Celtic Connections festival so I am hoping to catch up on some good music too.


Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor have an international reputation as speakers and authors. They are the directors of ‘Working to Recovery Limited’ an innovative international consultancy, training and publishing company with a cutting edge approach to supporting and improving mental health provision.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very sorry to hear of the criminal attack on your friends in Gaza..

The Israelis were pushed into this action by London.

The crisis is meant to spew out beyond the borders of the Zionist state. London is hell-bent on inflaming the whole Middle East. The crisis will provide the justification - the moral fig leaf - for re-drawing the region to London's own liking.

Even the initial rocket attack on Israel which kicked off the latest assault, looked staged..

No doubt the rocket attack was yet another "Reichstag Fire Incident". It provided the pretext for a grossly offensive action that would otherwise have been inconceivable without it...

See: Anglo-Saudi Manipulations Could Lead to World War - Expansion of Gaza Conflict?