more about A Town Unlike Alice

3 1 2010

John my son reports the website as unfinished but assures me it'll be all singing all dancing once finished, no doubt if you're feeling a bit jaded it'll tell you to put your feet up and make you a nice cup of tea as well. I wanted to launch it tomorow because it'll be my ahem-th wedding anniversary, John says he can have it roughly displaying the work by then, I suppose it'll be a bit like the ferro concrete shell of a building you see when they're putting up another monolith in the City, you can see the sky defined in building shape, gaping windowless and roofless, but it takes an imaginative effort to people the shell with office workers, plastered walls and golden reflective windows, the portico proudly displaying the logo of some multi national firm. And, ha ha, sheltering half a dozen desperate smokers to give the proud logo that Third World association, as a smoker myself I like the anarchic homeless suggestion fellow smokers give to their places of employment!

Let's try another paragraph and see if I can keep to the subject, my website address is www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk, mind the concrete blocks, stacked pipes and don't touch the wiring, clap your hard hat on your head and have a look at A Town Unlike Alice. Because it's about schizophrenia I've made it dramatic and sexy, in the compell your attention sense, after all the media can't report anything about a sufferer without sensationalising so if one wants to redress the balance on the side of truth, one must make that equally compelling. All the characters are based on real people and their actions have really happened, the taping of Alice's mouth is a dramatisation of what it's like to be treated as a taboo weirdo, no-one talks to you, anything you say is treated with suspicious wariness and people nervously look round for your keeper if you express an opinion, I kid you not. It's like being the scapegoat, hung about with bells and bundles and driven out of the village to take away the bad luck or evil eye or whatever and it's a horrible way to feel. Like an extreme of finding yourself among peple who don't like you much and trying to make conversation to carry it off, aware it's not going down well and wishing the ground would open and cover you, anything to get out of the situation. Such reactions from people you've known for years add to the misery and isolate you further, and one thing any sufferer from schizophrenia is, is miserably, God forsakenly unhappy and isolated.

The point of the Gospel quotation about the Good Samaritan is self evident, who is my neighbour? Alice and anyone like her when people treat her like that and make her feel ten times worse. I wrote Town Unlike with gusto, turning tables on unthinking attitudes and paying off old scores, to paraphrase Burns there's a schizophrenic among you taking notes, I may have been made to feel bitterly unhappy, it didn't stop me thinking and paying attention to what went on. People like me have no white bandages to signal the need for considerate treatment and sympathetic interest, we look the same as everyone else, my blood still runs cold at some of the things people say right out loud like the road sweepers going through the hospital grounds when I wasa patient, hope we don't meet no nutters said one to the other as I walked past! I suppose they expected swivelling eyes and foaming mouths like the old cartoons of Tony Benn, they didn't give me a second glance and I was both hurt and amused, it was an unkind and stupid thing to say but their happy complacency and unawareness was funny when the worst sort of nutter, from their point of view, was two feet away on the same pavement.

It's an appropriate time of year to say fear not I bring you glad tidings, but if you look at Town Unlike you'll see you have nothing to fear despite popular prejudice; popular prejudice is what I fear most, it prevents people from thinking critically and from seeing what is under their noses. The mentally ill were slaughtered along with the Jews in Nazi Germany. All the best to everyone for the New Year, Anne Rees.