Stir crazy Ron and the joys of living on Lewis

Started this weekend with another good meal at Sulair, with Ron & Seppi.

Sunday Ron was going off island for 3 weeks, he has been absolutely stir crazy, he has been on island for 7 weeks, apart from his heart bypass, I think this is the longest he has stayed in one place since we have been together. He almost didn’t get away as 10 minutes before we needed to drive to the airport he couldn’t find his wallet. Panic set in until he realised he had left it in his trouser pocket last night.

He has started his week in Welshpool, in Wales, catching up with the staff at Phoenix House, part of Acorn Care. Things are moving fast since we did the recovery training in July. The staff are really making a difference and feeling great about their jobs, this is so satisfying to hear.

Meanwhile I have been catching up with work on the croft. Baba & Dolaigh have taught me how to make a peat stack, my peats are now safe & secure from the winter wet.

The Pigs are now down at the bottom of the croft and are busy ploughing the field up.
Heidi the goat has settled in well and is demolishing the tall grass and weeds around the house.

Tomorrow Ron is at the Asylum conference for 2 days catching up with many old friends.
I wish in some ways to be there, but actually am very glad to be at home, I think my travel problems over the last couple of weeks have consolidated my belief that living on Lewis was the right thing to do for us and our family

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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.

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.

Amazing light, late night gardening and Ron leaves for Palestine

The light here is amazing at this time of year, We turned the lights off to go to sleep last night at midnight and semi daylight streamed through the edges of the blinds, it truly doesn’t get dark.
What is strange is how it affects you physically. The kids aren’t able to go to sleep until after 11pm, I often don’t feel tired until gone midnight, the other night I found myself gardening at 11.00pm. Would this be described as slightly manic behaviour on the mainland? What is interesting is the kids aren’t acting as if they are over tired & I feel full of energy.

I presume that on the dark winter nights all of us will want to sleep from early evening and catch up on all the lost sleep.

The light is certainly good for Ron’s tomatos. Never thought I would be jealous of a plant but he nurtures and talks to them more than me.

Ron is off to Palestine tomorrow. He will be working in Bethlehem hospital and other health centres on the west bank; unfortunately Gaza is still out of bounds.

Ron is going to be doing more in depth voices training with the staff; next week Dirk Corstens a fantastic social psychiatrist from Holland will join him. They will be doing some training together with the psychiatrists on voice dialoguing.

People are much more open to our ideas there. I wonder if it is because they have very little money to spend on anti psychotic medication so are more open to other forms of treatment.
Last time we were there together and ran a 5-day recovery course making recovery champions with some of the staff from Bethlehem hospital and the surrounding CMHT’s. The staff invests a lot of their personal money and time in gaining good degrees and postgraduate training.

What was truly amazing though was because of the crisis with receiving no eec funding the staff had not been paid for 6 months but still carried on going in to care for their patients, some how I cannot imagine that happening in the UK.

Recovery champions in Swansea .. haute cuisine on Lewis and a Birthday Boy ...

Sorry this blog is late it has been a very busy few days.

Ron and I were in Swansea until Thursday night. We were running a 4 day version of Making recovery happen course with 15 participants who wanted to become recovery champions for Swansea. What a group, Swansea is not going to know what has hit it. They were so motivated and passionate , If they are given the space to bloom then Swansea will be a centre of excellence for recovery in a few years time. The group was truely multi-disciplinary with Psychiatrists, nurses, OT’s, a psychologist, social workers, voluntary sector staff and a fabulous support worker and true to form, as we were in Wales, fabulous singers.

I returned to Lewis Friday morning car-less ,with no chance of a hire car wondering how I was going to manage , as Rons family were going to be foot passengers on the evening ferry arriving for Rons 50th birthday bash.

Luckily my very dear friend Seppi came to the rescue and I borrowed her car for the morning, even more luckily Grants garage managed to fix my car by lunchtime so I was able to pick everyone up.

With the help of Seppi’s van we have managed to put up all the family at the house which is pretty incredible seeing the size of our croft house.

Last night 10 of us went for a fantastic meal at Sulair a restaurant in Port of Ness. If you love beautifully presented & cooked modern Scottish food , you must visit Lewis and the restaurant. I think it would be hard put for me and Ron to think of any where in the world we have been and tasted food that was any better.

Today it’s Rons proper birthday so we are all having a big BQ, I think I may stay off the wine though as my head is still throbbing from last night.