Nina and I stopped for a quick tea in McDonalds Birmingham this evening. A man was sitting near to us. He wasn't at a table, but perched on a low wall. Young, with designer stubble and fashionably collar length hair. They were the handsome features that merited a second look, the incongruities about him merited a third. He was wearing a mod-style suit, with worn office shoes, thick grey sports socks showing. He had a bulging box briefcase propped up against a bulging black bin-bag. There was a stillness about his limbs, but his eyes and lips were restless. It was as though he was hanging on to his dignity through those vestiges of a professional life that maybe he once had, or aspired to have.
As we ate, my eyes returned to him. I watched the faces of the customers who noticed him, and thought of my own reaction, the alertness that a little fear brings, the weighing up of threat that happens when we meet madness. He didn't seem to notice anyone, too focused on his inner voices. I thought about inviting him to sit with us, but I didn't. Nina and I were talking about the cold, steady rain and had decided to get a taxi to avoid a ten minute walk. On the way out, I had a fit of concern that the staff would eventually send the man out into the rain. Just about able to communicate over his other voices, we got him some tea, a burger, and left the change to keep him topped up for the evening. He looked relieved, as though the hot drink was a great gift. I suspect that he was beyond ordering for himself, and that the coins may have been useless to him.
Back in the late 1980's I had a good friend who showed me her workplace, a huge mental health hospital in Leeds, then still open, but earmarked for closure. The wards were bare, echoing and cold. Walls the colour of chewed white bread. It was not a good place. I wasn't to know it, but a few years later, I would begin my career working with people with learning disabilities. I would see around a number of similar hospitals, all of which had been made smaller and had been improved by the means of decorative wallpaper borders. I learned about the biggies of mental health: depression, mania, manic-depression (which was renamed bi-polar disorder), and the hearing of voices that is schizophrenia. The learning disabilities hospitals closed after the mental health hospitals, and although they had to wait, people with learning disabilities had and continue to have a better deal.
It was always my contention that the language of the socio-medical professions aside, (and I'm not anti-choice or empowerment or client led services) people often need to be looked after. To have someone around to help us to get clean, eat a good meal, keep house, find things to do, find a place in society, we all need help with this some of the time, and some of us will need it for a long time, or all of the time. This tends to happen for people with a learning disability, perhaps because there is less distrust of them as a group, and greater public sympathy. There is monitoring of people with mental health problems, but a lot less care. Where caring doesn't happen, people sit in dirty ragged clothes, in places they shouldn't, hungry, cold, tired, talking to themselves. Strangers fear them, and because they are hard to get to know, everybody is a stranger. It was a sobering thought to me that the young man we met was just a year or two older that Nina's boyfriend, and looked a little similar to him. It can happen to any one of us.
We got to The Rainbow for Sam Isaac's gig. It's grotty in the way that I'm partial to, and the band area is a lean-to rigged to the back of the pub. The incongruities begun by the man at McDonalds didn't end. One of the support acts had an exceedingly odd country-western style set of songs, sung in a midlands accent. I can't say it was pleasant. Neither was being chatted up by the barman (well, once was Ok, but by his third attempt, I felt the need to run away). Sam Isaac is my favorite of indie performers. The band are really together and look good on stage. Sam's songs are intelligent and interesting. I especially like the chiming quality of the percussion. The turnout tonight was disappointing, and the music was spoilt by the sound engineering which can be summed up as turning everything up to full volume. My ears are still ringing and my sternum has only just stopped vibrating. I look forward to Sam's new album, Bears. Look him up on youtube, you'll like him.
We got back to the station to find that the train had been replaced by a bus. It took a long time to get home, but yes, we did have a home to go to, and I had the arms of someone who loves me to rest in.
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