A Town Unlike Alice

Yes, I've ripped off the Neville Shute novel titled A Town Like Alice, my point being that my character Alice belongs nowhere because people are so terrified of her diagnosis and so ignorant about the illness - schizophrenia - they panic, ostracise her by being suspicious and believing the myths rather than getting to know her, and by using abuse as if she was less than human and "other", somehow not one of them. Town Unlike is an account in poetry and prose of Alice's meeting with Cathy, an inquisitive arty type who takes the trouble to get to know Alice, and the exciting developments in the town that is so unlike Alice that are the consequence.

Town Unlike is going to be published on my website in the New Year, details to follow, at present there is nothing to see because my son John is busy setting it up - why have a dog and bark yourself - I don't mean that nastily, John works in IT and it's just taken me an hour to set up this blog instead of the ten minutes the how to website promised me, aha they'd reckoned without sausage fingers and a bewildered brain resembling sausage filling, my usual approach to anything technical and proud of it I am not! I can write poetry and prose, publishing in so called little magazines with lots of success and no money, it's just that if I sit in front of a computer I'm sure I'm going to break the thing and so I freeze into a prolonged blonde moment and can't take in the simplest instructions. I'm a blonde so I'm allowed to say that.

I know about schizophrenia from personal experience, I've done the psychiatric hospital thing twice and it's not a bit like what you might think. My impersonations of the nurses used to bring the house down on the ward, my friend Robert and I used to scrump apples and keep the ward supplied with fresh fruit, even the most withdrawn patients would drift into the kitchen for a sweet smelling apple. We looked out for each other, given the labels and abuse society heaps on the mad meant we shared a freemasonry purely because we'd found ourselves in hospital, we were all in the same boat. There was a girl with a new born baby in when I was, I used to look after her baby when she was eating her meals or chatting to other patients, not like the mythology is it?

Town Unlike is an attempt to show how wrong the mythology is, I wrote it as an eye opener and as an education, after all if no-one tells you what madness is really like, how can you be expected to understand? The biggest unfunny joke in the world is so called care in the community, the community reacts as if we were rabid dogs, where's the care in that? Anyway, writing down the truth is better than shouting at the TV and hurling thrillers into the bin because their abuse annoys me, or wondering with a snarl what my friends would think if I used racist abuse the way they use abuse about my illness. Watch this space, there's plenty more to follow.