Mother love and naughty boys...

I wonder why a lot of women seem to be attracted to men who bully and abuse them?

What makes them stick around, taking verbal and mental abuse, even physical abuse sometimes? How can they respect the man they are with when he belittles them in public, shouting them down when they have an opinion, destroying their relationships with others, simply because he wants to and can.

What makes some women put up with the actions of these petulant, demanding, pulling-the-wings-off-insects, schoolboy men? 

Maybe they are all just naughty boys in the eyes of these misguided women.

Is it some strange type of mothering or perhaps it’s a form of Stockholm syndrome, capture-bonding as it’s sometimes called. Maybe it starts out as an okay relationship only to become over time - with marriage, children and a greater reliance on the man - a hostage type situation.

Of course, Stockholm syndrome doesn’t necessarily require a hostage scenario, all it requires is a “strong emotional tie that develops between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.” I think that describes an awful lot of marriages. I personally know of one at least.

One explanation of Stockholm syndrome suggests that the bonding, let’s call it misplaced love, is a response to the trauma of becoming a victim. It can take years, but eventually the victim completely identifies with their aggressor as their subconscious dumbs down and defends itself. The victim comes to believe in the same values and version of truth as their aggressor and thus ceases to be a threat in the victim’s mind. In this way the victim can love him despite his actions.

Maybe this explains why the likes of Eva Braun, Myra Hindley, Maxine Carr, Rosemary West and all of the others go along with such awful atrocities, joining their very bad men in their terrible acts, covering and lying for them and losing themselves in the process.

What other reason could there be? Oh, I’m sure that these controlling men make their women feel very special and I’m equally as sure that they can be very nice, even charming, when they want to be. But why let their insecurity lead to total control? Of course there are women out there who have been brought up to feel that they don’t deserve any better, or perhaps they really don’t know any better. He’ll scare and manipulate and some women are more afraid of being alone again than of being in a controlling relationship. Some women even believe truly that they can change their man and after a lifetime of trying the realisation that they’ve failed and wasted their lives in the process can only add to their lack of self-identity.

Perhaps in the final analysis these women do what they do simply “because I love him.” But after a lifetime of control that sounds like an excuse, something like the sound of one hand clapping to the other hand’s demands.

Not really cricket...

As a child I never learned to ride a bike or fish, these are things that came to me much later in life and subsequently I’m a wobbly bike rider and I lose most of my fishing tackle in the weeds. It’s not that I didn’t want to learn I did, but in our house failure wasn’t allowed and that hardly encouraged you to try something new.

All the other boys on the estate went fishing and dashed around on bikes. I often wondered how they learnt to do it until one day I realised that they’d learnt from their dads who’d shown them what to do, even holding onto the back of the bike seat, running along beside them until they could balance on their own.

Of course my dad was a busy man and he wasn’t really interested in fishing or bikes. He was interested in football and cricket though. I’ll never forget those happy days in the park and on the beach as he powered yet another goal past me or bowled me out for another humiliating duck. How I laughed as he ‘quacked’ me and tossed me the tennis ball. Of course this was always followed by his innings, which went on and on as he knocked every ball I bowled into the far distance either scoring a six or running back and forth twenty or thirty times until I emerged bloodied from the hawthorn bushes with the ball.

As he often used to remind me: I was rubbish at football and cricket. Eventually I gave up playing beach games, taking myself off to paddle in the sea on my own as my dad didn’t like the water much.

Later, in my teens, I discovered I was pretty good at rugby and got on to the county team. My dad even came to watch one match, but disappeared to one on my mum’s friend’s houses after ten minutes or so. Well it was cold, and it would have been rude not to pop in (she was a redhead my mum met in hospital whose name escapes me), besides my dad didn’t really like rugby.

Anyway, that's why I don't play cricket and why I’m not racing in the Tour de France this year.

Oh Vicar...

It seems to me that God isn't going out of business anytime soon. Maybe I should have become a vicar, a steady job with security. Of course to be one I suppose it helps that you believe that Jesus actually was the Son of God and did all those things that the Bible says he did. But unfortunately I don’t. Not unless Jesus was a biblical David Blaine.

Mind you, perhaps belief isn’t so important. Good presentation, counselling, and communication skills could probably get you by, and if (as I do) you have a penchant for a little flower arranging – well, the job is as good as yours.

I’m not sure about the uniform though. Those dog collars look a little uncomfortable and restrictive. I do cut a dash in a black suit though, and purple really is a great colour. The hours seem good. A couple of services a week, a sermon to lift from the internet, and the rest is drinking tea, eating biscuits and wandering around jumble sales and fetes.

Now what denomination would I be? Catholicism is definitely out, as is being a Baptist – they don’t drink do they? No, I think I’ll stick to C of E. Well, at least I’ve got first level membership to that one and I was once asked to join the church choir - I declined. 

Yes, that's it. I’m going to become a vicar and spend my time riding around on a bicycle wearing clips and dinging my bell at my parishioners.

Off now to brush up my praying. God bless you all.

My top ten smells...

Smell, it’s the most emotive of the senses. Smells can take you back to that fantastic holiday you’ll never forget, that special person who is long gone, even that time that you really don’t want to remember.

I’ve had a long think about my favourite smells. Some almost, but didn’t quite, make it - pear drops, creosote, a beer or two. Others were never even close to getting on the list – babies, 4711, frying bacon, salt and vinegar crisps.

Anyway, here’s the list and over time I’ll probably write about why I like each smell so much.

1. Cut grass

2. The road after rain

3. Cooked onions

4. India

5. Soap

6. Clean sheets

7. The sea

8. Rum and ginger beer

9. A freshly opened tin of Coffee

10. Paraffin

Big rain…

There was big rain in the night. I lay there, the indigestion bile burning in my throat, wondering how I had arrived at this particular point in time. Sometimes the rain soothes, but last night its beating drummed on my mind like the snares of a dozen devil drummer boys marching me with a ceremonial rat-a-tat-tat to hell.

The hourly, on the hour, wakings are back and nothing, not even the comfort of a small, white, warm cat lying beside me, can stop them from breaching my sleep. It’s not insomnia, I have no trouble falling asleep, but the repeated wake-up-calls leave me exhausted. Of course I can send myself back to sleep in moments, picturing the blackness surrounding the single story building, flowing in through the open window, smoothing across the floor to where he lies like a mountain of corruption, smug and secure in the knowledge that he is the all powerful big man.

He’s always the big man… rat-a-tat-tat.

I mumble something. A dog barks somewhere in the distance. Something… somewhere… and before the deed can be done, the pouring blackness of suffocation started, I wake up, throat burning and itching, and make my stiff-kneed stumbling way to the bathroom again for another sip of water - cold and iron.

I lay listening to the rain. It seems to be talking. If only I could make out the words. I savour the taste of cold and iron as I fall back into the black and slide through the open window. This time there might be thunder.

Summer solstice...

I got up at this morning just before five to watch the sun come up. Of course I couldn’t see it, but then I never expected to. It wasn’t so much the cloud, although it was a little cloudy, but living in streets with houses around doesn’t give the best view of the rising sun.

It wasn’t cold either as I welcomed the day with a sip of red wine and the crumbling of some bread into the small hole I’d made in the ground. I’ll try anything to make my plants get a spurt on. Litha, the first day of summer, summer solstice, the standing still of the sun. Sometimes it feels like the sun really is standing still, or at least stop - starting - stop - starting as the summer stumbles on.

Meanwhile at Stonehenge the sun was welcomed with chants and prayers, scattered flowers, singing and applause as twenty thousand people met to witness the sun’s rise. At Avebury, just along the road, only 500 turned up. This year though, surprise, surprise, it was too cloudy even on Salisbury plain for the sun to be seen. Of course the good old plods were there with their sniffer dogs to spoil the fun, moving through the happy crowds and arresting 22 people. Yes, as my good old fun dad always says “CALL THE POLICE!"; they always know just how to (screw things up) sort things out.

But enough of bullies, here's a happier memory. Many years ago on a school trip bus, full of egg sandwiches and the smell of sick, we arrived at Stonehenge and spent an hour or two wandering through the stones with clipboards and pencils in hand. Obviously it was raining but there was no admission fee, no fences and nothing to stop me from sitting on the alter stone - and I did. Maybe it’s an imagined recollection but I recall I felt the stone pulsing as I sat there… or maybe it was just my bum throbbing on the cold, wet stone.

Monsters...

Not all monsters are big and hairy, some of them have toothy smiles and seem extremely charming, smarmy even.

Look, I don't care if he is 83, charming and a minor national treasure. I don’t care if he is in poor health or that he made millions laugh in the Seventies with his not-very-funny jokes and striped jackets. I don’t care that his fourteen victims are about one percent of Savilles – ‘only’ as his brief is on record as saying. All I care about is that his punishment matches his deeds.

Fifteen months imprisonment for what Stuart Hall did to girls as young as nine is an insult to everybody that isn't a pedophile. In reality he’ll serve half of that, only two weeks for each young girl he fiddled with. What is wrong with that judge, maybe he's nostalgic for It's a Knockout? I’m beginning to worry that our society is starting to accept that TV personalities in the seventies and eighties were ‘up to it’, that it was ‘par for the course’ and that ‘they were all at it’.

Well that makes it all right then doesn’t it.

The fact that for each girl that has come forward several others probably haven’t - not wanting to make their lives messy by raking up the past – isn’t even in that pathetic fifteen month equation. And what of Bill Roach or Tarby or Rolf? If they are found guilty what will they get? Will the courts and the public be so used and bored with it by then that we accept the slap on the wrist that some sympathetic judge hands out.

Meanwhile Ian Brady continues with his life sentence, without even the right to commit suicide for the horrors that he committed and rightly so. Yes, make him sweat out every last minute of his miserable life.

Stuart Hall’s sentence is far too lenient; my God you can get five year for not paying your tax and seven years for habitual shoplifting. Stuart Hall, the king of the funsters, might have been having fun with those girls but they weren’t. He didn’t kill any of them, but he did damage all them. He isn’t Ian Brady but he does deserve to be locked up for his forever. I hope someone sees sense and makes his punishment fit his crime.