A Lad from Featherstone

For my previous post click here. Sherborne Abbey, Dorset.  Easter Saturday 2015. I have always liked churches and I am not averse to a 10 minute nap on a pew. Some folk call it meditation.  The calm is welcoming. I couldn’t get into the Abbey on Easter Saturday, except during a hymn on the half hour and that was 40 minutes away. Dejected, I read Poem of the Month for April 2015 displayed at the entrance. It read: The prayer stool: I leave aside my shoes , my ambition: Undo my watch, my timetable: Take off my glasses, my views: Undip my pen, my work: Put down my keys, my security: To be alone with you, the only true God. It made me wonder who my true God was. Ten years ago I was a RYA (Royal Yachting Association) instructor skippering a 42ft yacht leaving Dartmouth on passage to Guernsey with five students, as you do.   It was a 14 hour trip, crossing shipping lanes and entering Guernsey through the northern channel with treacherous seas and danger

For my previous post click here. Why do so many men over forty kill themselves? BBC News 13th April 2015 ’A hundred men die a week. It is more prevalent than at any time in the last 14 years and men are four times more likely to end their own lives than women’. Hang on, that means a man in the UK commits suicide every half hour.  Surely not! Well I didn’t as I am writing this blog.  It did cross my mind at 44; before spending two years on Prozac, but that’s for later. Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.   (Wikipedia) His thesis states that there are five layers to our needs as human beings. It also tells us that the 1 to 5 order cannot be circumvented i.e. It is a progression and can only take place in the prescribed order. Even the rich and famous fall foul of the rule

For my previous post click here. January 2009. Boarding Cunards Queen Victoria leaving Southampton for New York My ex-wife drove me to the cruise ship terminal in Southampton as I had decided the only way to write this story was to make it part of an adventure. So off I went, all alone, on a big scary ship.  As I placed my hand luggage on the security scanner I started to shake, more on the inside than the outside.  I felt hot, my chest was beating and I felt dizzy. Shit I am having a panic attack.  I walk through the scanner and as my hand luggage pops out of the scanner it is taken to a desk and I am beckoned over.    They search my bag.   I smile; my heart is trying to explode, sweat is running down my armpits and my legs are weak. At last I am free. I to rush to my steerage class cabin, lie down on the bed and use my panic attack abdominal breathing  technique  to calm down.  My acupuncturist says rubbing the soles of your feet on the ground whilst sat stimulates a reductio

For a link to my first ever post click here. Five hundred miles last week. Dewsbury of all places!  It has an amazing open air market, more like a bazaar. There is also a wonderful, if architecture is your thing,  Victorian shopping arcade.  Cool.  The week ended in the mosh pit at a Skunk Anansie concert in Brixton, as you do. Driving home on Sunday reminded me of a life changing weekend some forty odd years ago. I discovered the power of sex, drugs and rugby on a cold, wintry weekend in February 1967. I was at the tender age of 14. I was living in Yorkshire and attending Normanton Grammar School where I had become something of a good rugby player or rather, a bloody good rugby player.    I had received a letter the previous week advising me that I had been picked to play in the final England under 15’s school boy trial at the Chepstow Army Apprentices College.     The college was infact located in Beachley which although on the welsh    side of the River Seven, was in fa