Date: 2008-07-01 17:56 Subject: Rocketing the bureaucracy Clearance: Public Temper: accomplished

We've just had an excellent Service Development Group meeting. I'm really loving working at Willow View, and one great thing about being volunteers is that we have the spare time and energy to get done the things that do need to be done, but which the staff just don't have the time to do. Deb, our manager, mentioned that she really wants to write a journal article about the way that volunteers are becoming a vital part of the acute daycare service that WV provides, but... no spare hours in the day :(

It was good to be able to say "Well, I have written a few papers in my time..." :)

Actually, I'm thinking of writing two: one, probably for Mental Health Practice, concentrating on the nursing end of things, and another (can anyone suggest an appropriate journal?) more on the administrative end.

And I've been asked to write a really stinky letter to the Trust. Our ADL kitchen and equipment is seriously below food hygiene standards, and we'd been promised (up to and including the actual setting aside of the necessary money) a thorough refurbishment. Except that Deb has just been told that Finance has cancelled it. Prof Weich has already sent a steaming letter about it to various people in the administration, and the SDG is going to write another. The big problem is that if H&S say that the kitchen is below standard, we won't be able to use it. That doesn't just mean no baking session on Wednesdays, and no Community Lunch on Fridays, but no shopping trips, no menu-planning groups... the kitchen is a very important part of what we need to do.

Furthermore, the IT Team has said "Nobody is allowed to buy and install equipment on the network but us", and that puts our use of the donated printers into question. If the worst happens, Deb has said that I can bring one home and do the colour printing here. So one way or another, we'll work round it all.

Meeting with Ian about our website to organise... and tomorrow I have a Partnership Forum meeting to attend.

Life really is very good!

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Date: 2008-06-26 19:51 Subject: Amber game... Clearance: Public Where: Xenotech Temper: thankful Tags: amber

joseph_of_amber has just updated his diary for those of you who are interested or involved in the game.

*nudges Darius and Uther*

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Date: 2008-06-26 13:36 Subject: Wow. Clearance: Public Temper: ecstatic

Wow indeed.

I'd be among the first to admit that there's plenty wrong with Big Pharma, but today Willow View was on the receiving end of some good stuff.

One of the company reps has given us Stuff. Not the usual box of ballpoint pens (though indeed there was a box of ballpoint pens as well) but an HP Deskjet 5150, an HP OfficeJet G85 and several boxes of ink cartridges for them. Their office has just upgraded its printing facility, and we're the lucky recipients of their old kit.

This is going to make production of the Willow View newsletter so much better and easier.

So: a very big thank you to Dovinda of Bristol-Myers Squibb. Much appreciated!

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Date: 2008-06-24 21:11 Subject: Spore Creature Creator Clearance: Public Temper: cheerful Perceiving: Creature Creator Tags: spore

I suppose everyone who's interested has heard of or stumbled across the Easter Egg in the Creature Creator's Main Menu?

Pretty! :)

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Date: 2008-06-22 04:48 Subject: Spore Clearance: Public Temper: creative Tags: spore

I'm having far too much fun with the Creature Creator.

If you want to take a look at/play with my creatures, my Sporepedia gallery is here.

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Date: 2008-06-17 20:31 Subject: A good day today Clearance: Public Temper: amused Tags: homer erectus, spore, wv

I ran my first lunchtime "Listening to Music" session at Willow View today. Two people turned up, which may not sound many, but there weren't many people at WV today. Since we had only a half-hour slot, I played them the first seven tracks from From Byzantium to Andalusia, one of my current favourite recordings. (Free registration on the Naxos site will allow you to hear the first quarter of any track; paid subs let you hear the lot. I'm a cheapskate.

Anyway, they really enjoyed the music. I'm going to try to choose widely among genres, to give everyone a chance to hear and enjoy something new.

My last few hours have been swallowed by the Spore-monster, because I downloaded the freebie version of the Creature Creator which was released today. It's pretty good, though I did find one glitch: if you have pairs of fore- and hind-limbs too close together on the spine, and switch the front pair from fore to hind a few times, you can end up with stray polygons. Which is very lovely if you want patagia, but not so much otherwise. Fortunately you can make the stray polys go away again by separating the limbs a little.

So here's my second attempt at a Spore creature. I'm afraid that I just had to call him Homer erectus :)

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Date: 2008-06-13 21:03 Subject: Missing Dad badly... Clearance: Public Temper: sad

I'm really not looking forward to Sunday, Fathers' Day, the first one since he died.

His birthday last year was only a week after his death, so I was still numb. At Christmas I could distract myself with the rest of the family.

Now, with all the Fathers' Day stuff in the shops and on the media, it feels like I'm surrounded by the word 'Father', and it really hurts, not having someone to choose a card for and make a 'phone call to on Sunday.

I'm trying not to be self-indulgent with my feelings of loss, but it's tough.

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Date: 2008-06-13 19:58 Subject: Opera synopsis Clearance: Public Temper: accomplished

I noticed that the Wikipedia page for Waiting for the Barbarians was lacking a synopsis, so I've cobbled one together here.

If anyone's seen a performance, or has the CD notes or the libretto, and would care to take a look at what I've written and edit it or give me some suggestions (LJ comments or mail), I'd be grateful.

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Date: 2008-06-13 01:21 Subject: Excellent performance! Clearance: Public Temper: bouncy

I've just got home after last night's Barbican performance of Glass's Waiting for the Barbarians.

It was really very good indeed, and rewarded with plenty of well-deserved applause. My only niggle was that, perhaps because the stage was mostly occupied by the orchestra and chorus, the soloists sang, rather than performed, their parts; since the plot summary in the programme was fairly sketchy, the lack of action meant that it wasn't always clear what was happening in the drama at any particular time or where (the set being definitely minimal - translucent painted and lit drapes) it was taking place.

Good enough, in fact, that I felt it was a real pity that there was to be only one performance - I'd certainly have wanted to see it at least once more. Waiting for the Barbarians just may displace Akhnaten as my favourite Glass opera so far. There is a two-CD recording of the 2006 Amsterdam performance available if you want to give it a listen; Amazon has details here.

Many thanks to mister_jack for the transport to and from, to mrph for being the ticketmeister, and to both of them and jambon_gris for an evening's good company.

And now I'm really weary, so off to bed...

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Date: 2008-06-08 23:54 Subject: English as she is spoke... Clearance: Public Temper: bitchy

Heard Friday morning, BBC Radio 4, the Today programme. Someone (can't remember who) being interviewed (can't remember what about):

"... and I've personally witnessed that myself..."

Sheesh. Double redundancy.

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Date: 2008-06-08 23:48 Subject: Yay, opera! Clearance: Public Temper: excited

No, not the web browser...

mrph, jambon_gris, mister_jack and I shall be attending Waiting for the Barbarians by Philip Glass on Thursday, if all goes to plan.

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Date: 2008-05-29 15:44 Subject: Back from hospital... Clearance: Public Temper: sore

All done - they decided I didn't need an overnight stay. Jus kindly came and collected me.

Three left-hand facet denervations. This time it hurts rather a lot more than I remember it having done last time.

Thank you for all the love and good thoughts.

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Date: 2008-05-27 10:38 Subject: Where has the time gone... ? Clearance: Public Tags: life

I've been awfully lazy, or busy - probably a mixture of the two. I should have updated *ages* ago, but I kept putting it off because there was something else about to come up and it seemed better to catch up all at once. Procrastination, as they say, is the thief of time.

Whitby Gothic Weekend was, as always, utterly brilliant, marred for me only by the fact that I left my fentanyl patches at home (doh! *never* done that before, and shall be careful never to do so again!) so had to limp along, not just metaphorically, on the morphine. Uck. But it was wonderful to catch up with people again.

Much time has been sucked up by replaying UFO: Enemy Unknown which I played incessantly over a decade ago and it's still absorbing, for a fifteen-year-old game.

I had my volunteering interview for Willow View last Thursday - and here I am at WV, volunteering, right now. Actually I'm not a proper volunteer yet, since I still have to get a clean police check (mandatory for anyone working with children or vulnerable adults), but so far as I know I have a clean record :)

And I'm doing Art Therapy here - one-on-one, not group work. 12 weeks to start with, to see how I get on. I'm really loving it!

Yet another installment in the Saga of Kay's Spine: I'm having more surgery on Thursday morning. They haven't actually told me what they'll be doing to me, but given that they've said that it'll be an overnight stay, it's almost certainly another bout of facet denervation. Nothing to worry about, so please don't fret yourselves about it. I promise I'll post when I'm home and up to sitting - or if I'm not sitting I'll ask stgpcm to post for me.

Anyway, best get on with the show... *waves to spacebod*

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Date: 2008-04-02 15:57 Subject: And so, here we are... Clearance: Public Temper: accomplished

It's been very busy. Being at Willow View has been very much like being back at school in all the good ways, so I've really been keeping my head down and working hard. But now I've been discharged, and I'm still doing well, it's time do do a catchup post.

The first thing that I need to say is that Willow View is a brilliant place. I still think the name's a bit crappy, but apart from that it's - well, I won't say that it's the perfect place for people with acute mental health needs, and I'll explain that later on - but it's certainly a great example of how to do things a lot better than it seems that they're done elsewhere.

The four 'core' courses that I did (Anxiety Management, Dealing With Depression, Assertiveness, and Anger Management) were real eye-openers. I thought I'd learned a heck of a lot during my therapy with Jill, but I found out that I still had a lot to learn that could only be done properly in group work. Then there were other, more activity based, things to do, of which I found Art Therapy to be the most fascinating for me. I'd always seen myself as very much a 'words, not images' person, but Art Therapy was a real awakener! I am, it seems, quite visually creative (though I still don't find it at all easy to think in images yet), but somehow I'd managed to convince myself that I wasn't. It's wonderful to learn things like that!

The other wonderful thing that I (re-)discovered about myself is that I am actually good with people. It wasn't long that I'd been at WV before people, both service users and staff, started saying to me, "When you're doing better, if you'd like to, it'd be really great if you could come back and do some volunteering work here." Initially I resisted the idea, but as more people said it, I had to think hard about whether they could all be so wrong or not. So... after my statutory three months away, I'll be volunteering at WV, all being well.

And then, somehow, I got encouraged to be a member of the Service Development Group there, which was just being brought into existence to work on ways of improving the service that WV gives, because, as I said earlier, even though it's great, it's not perfect; there are things to be improved. It's an interesting mix of people: one senior clinician, one acting manager, one staff nurse, one nursing assistant, one volunteer worker, two former service users, and Tony and I who were just about to be discharged from WV. Then, at our first meeting, somehow (I'm not quite sure how it happened) I was chosen as chairperson for the first few meetings...

If you'd told me at the start of my time at WV that I'd ever be able to do things like that again, I just wouldn't have believed it.

Also, if all goes well, some time towards the end of this month, I'll be starting voluntary work at Coventry AIMHS (Actively Improving Mental Health Services), in charge of producing their quarterly newsletter. I say "if all goes well" because they're currently moving from being funded by the local health care Trust to independent charitable status, so things are rather up in the air for them right now.

Anyway, I'm about written-out, so I hope you've now got a bit more of an idea about what I've been up to for the last couple of months. And thank you all for sticking by me though all the rough times.

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Date: 2008-01-13 13:27 Subject: Looking back on the first week Clearance: Public Temper: accomplished

That was a good week, that was. I like Willow View, and I like the people there.

About the only hard thing was the number of times that it seemed I had to tell various people the same things over again. Gary (nurse) on Monday, during my induction; Elizabeth (doctor) on Wednesday; Betty (my named nurse) on Thursday. Some of this was apparently due to my notes not having arrived. Yes, I know that there are very good reasons to be cautious about medical notes being stored on an NHS-wide information system, but giving a detailed medical history three times in a week to people who share the same building seemed a bit extreme. Then again, it did give three of the staff members (most necessarily, I think, Betty) an opportunity to get a personal understanding of me that reading notes doesn't necessarily give.

There are surprisingly few of us there. I know that some people are still off sick, but I asked Gary how many people there were, and he said that there are about twenty users and six staff, not counting administration. Given that there are around 300,000 people in Coventry, it just doesn't seem possible to me that this is anything like an adequate provision. And yet I heard that the WV kind of facility isn't at all generally available in the NHS. So I'm feeling very lucky to have got the chance to go there.

The best thing about it for me is simply that there's always someone to talk with, whether it be in one of the formal activity groups or simply while making a cup of tea or having lunch. I feel like someone who's crawled out of a desert into an oasis. So much so that I almost begrudge the weekend break :)

Apparently the head bod at WV is someone who seems only to be referred to as "The Professor". This person (I don't even know whether it's female or male) is apparently based at the University of Warwick and turns up only for clinical reviews. She, or he, is always spoken of in hushed tones and with much reverence, it seems to me. Now I've dealt with plenty of professors in my time, and one thing that they've conspicuously failed to inspire in me is reverence. Some of them, to put it plainly, have been utter idiots. We shall have to see what this one's like when I've had my first review.

I'm sorry I haven't updated during the week, but mostly when I get home I've been too tired to do much more than curl up with a book and a cup of tea. I'm hoping that this improves when I'm more used to having a clock-determined day.

In other news, Mum continues to do well, and asks me to pass on her best wishes to all of you.

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Date: 2008-01-07 15:23 Subject: Distinctly better than it could have been! Clearance: Public Temper: calm

I'm back, and I'm fine.

Jus very kindly took the morning off so that he could drive me to Willow View and hang around in case I needed to beat a hasty retreat. Luckily that wasn't needed! Every time I felt the panic start to rise, I thought of you all wishing me strength, and that really did help.

Things were actually very quiet there: many staff and patients "service users" were off due to the current norovirus/SRSV outbreak. I spent the morning with Gary, giving a seriously detailed medical history (they wanted everything, not just the psych stuff), then we broke for lunch. I said goodbye to Jus, and just as he left, who should appear out of the old hospital building opposite the Willow View entrance but giantpanda, youngatheart, Bethany and Chris? Lots of hugs and "Happy New Year!"s, and then I went back inside for lunch (sandwiches: I had prawns in Marie Rose sauce and rocket). Two large mugs of tea later, and I was about ready to provide the urine sample for my physical examination. I must have eaten more over Christmas than I thought I had, since I've actually put on some weight! Urine normal, bp and pulse normal, BMI nothing to fret about. Then Gary said I could go home if I wanted, since there were too few staff to run the afternoon's group sessions :(

Home I am, enjoying the relaxing effect of a cup of Twining's Calm tea (camomile, redbush, lavender and cocoa bean), by the kindness of the most excellent fascicle. It may sound a bizarre mix, but it really is more than "pleasant" (my general reaction to tisanes), and I also picked up a bottle of reduced-price valerian infusion from Boots. Tonight, I think, I should sleep well.

Now for a session of mild pandiculation, and then to start on Volume 5 of Jenny Nimmo's Children of the Red King series. I have resolved to read them unto the bitter end despite an ever-increasing feeling of same-oldness, which for me set in sharply after Volume 2. Unfortunately I really did like Midnight for Charlie Bone, the opening volume. After that, the inventiveness really did seem to dry up very quickly. Any differing opinions out there?

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Date: 2008-01-07 08:13 Subject: Well, here I go... Clearance: Public Temper: nervous

"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." — Samuel Johnson

Not that I'm going to be hanged, but you know what I mean. With all the best will in the world, hot milk and honey and 20mg of Temazepam, I couldn't sleep last night. The mind just wouldn't turn itself off.

Fortunately I didn't spend the time gloomificating. I have a couple of pages of notes for what may well be a new story. I've already got two of the characters nattering in my head. Then again it may turn out to be nothing; but at least I wasn't running up the walls.

As to the zombie stuff: I've got an offer to do roughs from one of my favourite artists! I'm going to wait and see how he reacts to the story, but I think he may be just the guy for the job.

It's just struck me that one reason I'm reacting badly to the prospect of attending the Acute Day Service is the name. "Willow View". It smacks of the whited sepulchre. Of course, they couldn't get away with calling it "Nuts Я Us", but it reminds me of what they used to call the mortuary at the hospital where my aunt used to work: "Rose Cottage". Indeed you can see willows from "Willow View", and "Rose Cottage" was a converted cottage and had roses growing up the sides, but... meh. I could happily have settled for "Coventry Mental Health Acute Day Service". It does, as they say, exactly what it says on the tin.

I'll post when I get back to let you know how things went. Wish me luck?

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Date: 2008-01-06 01:27 Subject: What I'd really like to do this year... Clearance: Public Tags: brains, zombies

Some of you may remember that a few years back I wrote a very short children's story (that's a very short story, 1400 words or so, not a story for very short children). People who read it liked it. Some of them liked it a lot and called me a "sick, sick man" *bows* :)

So it's more than about time that it got published. Way overdue. Children around the world are going to bed zombieless because of my lazy habits.

What it needs is what all good kids' books need: illustration. Did I mention the zombies? Oh yes, good. I know (suspect?) that publishers generally want to choose their own artists, but surely being able to give them an idea of what I think might do well would help? Or not?

Now I'd do this myself if my artistic abilities extended further than producing drawings which people look at and murmur "A person? An epileptic cow backstroking through gravy? Impressions of Pompeii, August 79AD? Go on, you tell me, dear!" It won't go. I want to entertain the littles, not condemn then to twenty years on the couch of Dr Freud.

Suggestions/volunteers? Also, any hints about how to get a kids' book accepted if you're Absolutely Unknown would be useful. I've done what I can do, but just don't know how to take it further

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Date: 2008-01-05 21:12 Subject: Nostalgia attack... Clearance: Public

I'm in a phase of re-reading books that I haven't looked into for years, and yesterday I started on this. It's from so long ago that I couldn't remember whether I had a chapter in it or not. Turns out not: so I wondered why not - what was I doing in 1991/2 that stopped me submitting YABP[1]? I'm pretty sure I wasn't rejected; I think I'd have remembered that.

I really should have kept an up to date CV, shouldn't I? And saved all the intermediate versions?

Heh. Like people back up their hard disks, oh yeah.

So I thought it might be fun to see what I could reconstruct from the Web. Unfortunately, not only do I have a common (Dutch) surname, there's also an academic publisher of the same name. This makes search that little bit harder...
( Provisional publications list )
Oh dear, there's quite a lot missing. Maybe I ought to ask MT, NB or JO for their publications lists and see where I co-wrote with them.

Then again, maybe it's all so long ago that it's not worth remembering. I mean, VR is just so Nineties. Does anyone still talk about 'virtual reality' or is it all just MMOGs nowadays?

[1] Yet Another Bloody Paper

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Date: 2008-01-05 01:58 Subject: To state the bleedin' obvious... Clearance: Public Temper: crazy

Depression really, really, really sucks. And not for any nice value of 'sucks', too.

Add anxiety, social phobia and all the other lovelies that my MCMI-III assessment showed up, add ice and stir. Add a green olive. Tasty.

Hel's teeth, I'm a mess right now. I don't know how I'm going to get through Monday, let alone the rest of it. Yes, I know that it's my broken-headedness that's making me feel this way, but no, that doesn't really help me get think round the feelings. My rational and emotional structures are pretty much orthogonal at the moment.

I'll be OK, I know I'll be OK; I just can't get myself to believe it.

Anyway, I'll stop washing my head at you and go get some sleep.

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