This is a dead blog

If you want my new home, you should ask for the link. This will be deleted at the end of the year.

Everybody’s out on the run tonight but there’s no place to hide…

Barrow Gurney Mental Hospital opened on 3rd May 1939.  In its infancy, it was commandeered for servicemen who had been injured during WW2, especially for those suffering from psychological distress and conditions with a stress related component.  It was famously named Britain’s ‘dirtiest’ hospital following an inspection in 2005. It closed the following year.

Sooner or later your own self will always catch up…

I’m getting a bit closer to the dirty history surrounding my ancestry. After several conversations with my old dear, hours spent looking at websites and picking holes in the stories I’ve been given, I’m starting to get a true picture of just who my family are. The great uncle I knew nothing about is still living around the corner from the house I grew up in. I haven’t found out if he has kids or not so it’s still entirely possible, although very unlikely that I’ve slept with one of my cousins or some other crazy shit the rentals didn’t consider when concealing themselves.   I’ve found a document online that has opened another chest of secrets. It’s potentially explosive and I’m now toying with getting a real copy of it to confirm my suspicions but I’m not sure I should. I know I said I wouldn’t go looking for any more skeletons but something is uber suspect here and if people want their secrets to remain hidden, they picked the wrong person to lie to.

I know people lie all the time but when I give someone the opportunity to lay it out on the table, free from criticism and they continue to lie,well they are picking up the rope to hang themselves. I’m a fucker like that.   Poppy asked me tonight how I am able to process all this without flipping out. I can’t really answer that. I suppose because I’ve been drip fed mis-information for so many years, none of this really surprises me.  It disappoints me, but there’s not a lot I can do about that. I will ponder on the implications and consquences of getting my hands on this information before I go marching off to any archives.

In all the hullaballoo of finding all this nonsense out, I neglected to mention the loss of 7lb in two weeks, I was very happy indeed. To celebrate, I gave myself the weekend off and instead of flogging myself into misery, I allowed myself a pizza. And 5 pints. And chinese take out, and chocolate and… you get the idea. I hadn’t intended it to go that way, I was going to have my pizza and a few jars at the pub but that turned into a night on the lash. And you can’t have a night on the lash at my age, without eating your way through the hangover. Add that to horrible news and I just couldn’t be arsed with weighing food and spending every moment thinking about all the things I couldn’t have.  Well I mustn’t have eaten as badly as I thought because I didn’t put any weight on and as of this morning I’ve dropped another couple of pounds. I’m now mere pounds away from my goal weight of 10 stone.  Of course all I’m doing is reading about food, imagining peoples heads as pieces of cake, watching programmes about food, thinking about what my next meal is and so on. Hopefully it will only be another couple of weeks until I can cut myself some slack before Weight Watchers strips me of all my food allowance and all I can eat is vegetables.

Still loving work, loving the time off even more. I’m only working three days this week and two of those are lates. I feel like I have so much free time these days. I’ve agreed to go for coffee with someone from school at the weekend and then I’m going to watch a mates band. It’s a Rammenstein tribute act. A really awful one. No cannon of doom spitting out fireworks. They don’t even spew jets of jism over the crowd, maybe a couple of sparklers stuck in a joss stick  holder. I dunno, but it’s going to be toss. Poppy’s boyfriend, the one I trust about as much as a tory, is going to be there and will probably be his usual abrasive self.  Not to mention the myriad of knuckle grazing metallers tossing their mullets around with gay abandon. I have no idea how I am going make it through the evening.

It only takes one tree to make a thousand matches…

Life has a way of never allowing you to get too complacent doesn’t it? You get things sorted and you begin to think that things are on the up again just before something else comes along to knock you sideways. I went to visit my old dear on Sunday afternoon because John has gone off to build his castle in France and won’t be back for a while. We were just having a casual conversation about the family in general and I mentioned that the names on my birth certificate don’t add up with the story I’ve been told. She tells me that she had to change her name when coming over from Ireland so she couldn’t be found. Understandable, Ireland was hardly forward thinking in the sixties and if she was trying to protect her and my sister from being found and dragged back to a life of misery then fine. Then she tells me that Dad changed his name too and there was an uncle that lived around the corner from us that Dad never made himself known to. My surname is bullshit, just some name he picked for himself and I have family in this town that know nothing about us.  Things start slotting into place for me – I’d never been able to trace Dad when trying to do the family tree a few years ago. Now I’ve had a bit of time to process it, I realise it’s just a word and it shouldn’t really change a lot but I was still upset that none of this had ever been discussed with me.  An ommision of the truth is a fancy way of lying if you ask me and oh how my family loves it’s secrets and lies.

Anyway, I buggered off back to my house and started digging around and I still couldn’t get anywhere. I know a lot of records in Ireland have been destroyed but I was able to trace my Nana because she died in the UK.  I stayed up way too late rooting around and my head was a bit frazzled but I got sod all sleep. Something wasn’t adding up for me.

I went back around Mums the following day and did a bit more digging. She got pretty arsey with me when I told her I didn’t understand why there had to be so many secrets – my sister knows all about her history and it was never hidden from her. My brother and I have never been given the full story and I didn’t understand why. Mum was raring up at me saying things like it’s only details and how she only made decisions for the sake of the kids. Anyway I got the full story from her point of view, why she left Ireland and why she stayed hidden until Dad died. Then I had to open my trap. I said I understood why she left Ireland but I still didn’t know why Dad had left and asked what he was running from. Was it the police? I watched her face drop and I could see she was backed into a corner. She then tells me Dad was married. Oh and he left three daughters behind. She tried to give me some romantic bullshit about how everyone was forced into marriage over there and when he saw Mum, he told her he was never going to let her go blahblah and that’s why he followed her to England. Nice try but he did a really cunty thing. The cherry on the top of all this mess is that my sister knew all about it. No wonder she has such utter pity for me.

So I have three half sisters I know nothing about. I don’t know if they know he’s dead. If it were me in their position, I’d be really fucking angry at the stunt he pulled. Actually I am angry about it. I always knew he was a little bit shady as far  as business goes but this takes the biscuit. Mum thinks it’s all history and there’s nothing that can be done to change that. Well if it’s only history, why has it been so well concealed? There have been ample opportunities to let my brother and I know about this since we’ve grown up. She doesn’t quite grasp that it’s not the details that bother me as such, but the absolute lies that the family is built on. But if I tell her what I really think, I’m condemning her as well as him and it’s not my place to judge decisions they made over 40 years ago. They had their reasons and whether I agree with them or not, I have to live with them.

From my perspective, it’s just another example that you can have people in your life and never know them properly. That days, months and years go by and everything you ever held to be true is bullshit and the people you are supposed to trust the most, are mugging you off. Even the one thing you are told is everything you are, your name, is fabricated. Everything is a lie and you were stupid enough to believe it.