REHAB!

Blog Suspension lifted – it’s all I have as a writer, although blogs strictly limited!

I bumped into the sweet black guy at the St Luke’s refuge home opposite my London flat the other day and he told me why, for a year in my own kind of emotional hell, he kept calling me Andy. It happened often, when he was shuffling down the street, with his headphones on, smoking a fag and singing, sometimes wearing his bright red Elvis costume, and usually caught deep in his own hurt head. My own thoughts and emotions had become so raw and slow, searching for some kind of light, trying to stop time, writing that huge novel and imprisoned in the box of myself, it was all about seeing, in reality and imagination, and I sometimes saw his eyes literally bulging from his head, as though blocked emotion or understanding was pressing from the goggling sockets. ‘Andy I knew long back,” he said, “you reminded me of him. He was killed by the National Front.’ What kind of an animal is man, sometimes, and that’s not meant as an insult to animals, and what kind of bastards are out there? ‘You’re a good, guy, Dave’, he said, as he sloped back into his ‘dump‘, and I slipped him a quid and wondered if I’m any good at all. He made me feel better and as Tolkien had it, there can be evil tears. DCD