JAWS

Witness for the Defence

Your Honour, my boys done wrong. They hold their hands and their teeth up to Joe Allen's mouth and neck and they apologise with all the intellectual mimicry that they can muster. My boys ave never gotten into trouble before, it's just that they get paid so much to kick a ball about, that they get bored sometimes and want to get a little taste of a player wot is smaller then em. I wouldn't say that either of my boys were bullies your Honour, it's just that I have brung em up the way that I thought best, you know, to get your biting and amateur dentistry in first before the other player can run rings around you.   

Witness for the Prosecution

'Eich Mawrhydi' which means 'Your Honour' or 'Your Big One' in Welsh. Throughout his career, Joe Allen has been a target for the bullies of the professional game due to his artistry and deftness on the ball, his quick thinking and his ability to make big galoots look even more gormless than they already do. Here you see a picture of Joe in his Liverpool shirt, a team that many professionals aspire to play for but never achieve this highest of accolades. Joe has played for them and excelled for them in many games. This must still rankle with the less able professional footballer in the 'inglorious game'.

Your Honour, you have seen the footage from MOTD and the photographs from the newspapers. You and the general public should be left in no doubt that these horrible assaults will happen again if he is not protected by referees and match officials. Let Joe do what Joe does best and play football and let the biters and amateur dentists pursue other careers in food tasting and orthodontics. Diolch yn Fawr your Honour.

  

Imprisoned for my Sensitivity

Imprisoned for my Sensitivity

I am a ‘Born Again Highly Sensitive Person’ and I write this singing Hallelujah having discovered the Highly Sensitive Refuge on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.

I say Born again because I was given a diagnosis of ‘Highly Sensitive’ by my first Psychiatrist at the age of 21 when I was hospitalised for two weeks. Eighteen years later at the age of 39 I was given the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder by my second Psychiatrist. So what had happened in those 18 years? I had repressed my sensitivity as men are meant to do. Repressing sensitivity in my case led to binge drinking and self medicating my sensitivity with cannabis thus leading to a drug induced psychosis.

Dear readers and fellow HSPs I have been imprisoned for my sensitivity.

On 7/7/2005 I was sitting outside a Coffee Shop in Amsterdam when the news of the bombs in London came through. I over reacted to this news as I had over reacted to other news stories in the past. I began a ‘Shamanic Trance Journey’ or as the medical profession would classify it ‘A drug induced psychosis’. The bombs in London triggered 18 years worth and longer of repressed sensitivity. You can imagine that I am writing this now with a huge sense of relief and gratitude in finding the highly sensitive refuge. Writing has been my salvation and the area to where I have sublimated my sensitivity. I no longer touch mind altering substances. I only have to watch the news to do that. I haven’t had a Television Set since 2005 and all my news is carefully filtered in bite size chunks through my Computer Screen. I am expressing in writing, here, my preference for the first diagnosis. I have not taken psychotropic medication for my ‘alleged’ Bipolar Disorder since 2008 so a full decade and I think that if I was a full blown manic depressive then I would have had a repeat of the symptoms which led to the Dutch Court and Justice System declaring me 'not guilty' due to insanity and the Psychiatric profession in the UK diagnosing me with Bipolar Disorder as opposed to Borderline Personality Disorder which was the preference of the prison psychiatric team in the Netherlands. That is an awful lot of diagnoses and disorders for a highly sensitive person. This highly sensitive person spent 114 days in a Dutch Prison between August 8th and December 9th 2005 because I had over reacted to the bombings in London but also because I had used threatening language in a bank. The fact that I had only a tattered shirt, dirty jeans and flip flops on when the police came to arrest me testifies to the ‘Walk of Cain’ that I endured between 7/7/2005 and 8/8/2005. A full month of madness sponsored by various credit cards. Needless to say when I came back to the UK I was a less sensitive person. I wrote a blog about my experiences which was then turned into a book by a mental health publisher. I have also subscribed to the idea that I am mentally ill but perhaps I have been highly sensitive all along. What if sensitivity became pathologized and we all ended up in the DSM V. Granted mine was an extreme case but it does make me wonder how many sensitive people have been misdiagnosed as mentally ill and needlessly medicated and poisoned. Highly sensitive people living in an insensitive world have to take great care. They have to become their own police. The policing of their own thoughts and reactions. Today 13 years on, I am a withdrawn highly sensitive person. I do not engage or take part in this world.

I utilise many avoidance strategies to stay safe and well. I am now 52 years of age and am a carer for my elderly parents. Although this role can be stressful it assists me in avoiding many outside commitments and responsibilities that can be a challenge for some with high sensitivity namely conventional work and romantic relationships. I tried these things in the past and they proved far too stressful for me. It has been very cathartic for me to write these words for possible publication on the highly sensitive refuge website. Writing is what I do now and what I wish to do in the future. My sensitivity allows me to write ‘clenched fist’ poetry, spoken word about politics and the issues that I feel strongly about. I have also started writing novellas about a protagonist called ‘Ken Frane’ who is ‘The Last of The Cardiff Docks Detectives’, crime fiction, urban noir is enjoyable to write but I find that they end up being an anti-detective novellas in the fact that they do not have standard, fulfilling and resolved endings.

I did not know that I was highly sensitive until I was 13 years of age when in school, I over reacted to an injustice, it was such a distressing and shocking over reaction that bore no relation to the injustice perpetrated but it left the residue or the seed for further over reactions in the future. I call them over reactions in hindsight. Perhaps they were the correct and appropriate reaction but in such a repressed and stiff upper lipped culture as the UK in the late 70s and 80s they appeared to be over reactions. I withdrew into myself as a teenager because I had been witness to treachery and betrayal and I realised what humans were capable of. Unfortunately this distrust has stayed with me but writing this is indeed an act of forgiving myself and for forgiving those others. Insignificant events all these years on but they lived in my head like repetitive intrusive thoughts for years. I bring this article to a close with a cautionary note to myself. I can now embrace my sensitivity which I repressed for so many years but I do wonder now what I will be able to do with it now. A middle aged man, past his best, his best years taken by a misdiagnosis perhaps, his best years taken by the repression of his sensitivity.  Thank you for reading.

YN GYMRAEG

Concrete Factory

I am the owner/impresario of a concrete factory.

Ever since I played in the sand pit at school with a matchbox toy of a concrete mixer, I have had this yearning to concrete everything over.

From buildings to bridges, from sandpits to schools, I made it my life's work to cover every living thing in immovable stone.

We used to have parks where wildlife would roam. 

The little voice in my head said concrete it!

You see you know where you are with gravel and scree,

but I had a friend as a kid who did not agree.

He would walk around dressed as Tarzan and told everyone he lived in a tree.

One day I was looking down on the ground and upon my head he did pee.

I vowed that day I would concrete him over,

 I would build a motorway from here to Dover.

He warned me in colourful language that the earth needed to breath,

 the more he went on, the more I did seethe.

A hobby became a passion and one of those an obsession.

I got money from government who seemed to agree with me. They allowed me to build a concrete factory on the site of that big old tree.

I ended up with a cigar and a Roller or three

 but on the darkest of nights I couldn't help but think of me old mate, the one whose Dad had a bright orange Ford Capri.

He'd warned me if I carried on with my course of action that I would be confronted by the 'Lot's wife faction'

These were environmental activists, tree huggers the buggers, dressed as human statues, all in greys and brown.

Wherever I went with my concrete mixer,

 they would sprout up round the town.

They were like weeds, they were seeds who planted the revolutionary idea of rewilding. 

So instead of concrete carbuncles there were wild boar and wolves running free.

 It was fun to watch the traffic wardens scrambling up that big old tree.

As you get older you begin to see that not everything is meant for profit

 and you hark back to the words of the old Cree 

"Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last river poisoned, the last fish been caught, will we realise that we can't eat money" 

So it is now I that is dressed like Tarzan climbing from tree to tree and me mate is driving on the concrete I built, 

still in his Dad's old orange Ford Capri.

Further Reading

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2018/02/three-men-and-concrete-mixer.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2017/12/re-welshing.html

Nol i'r gwaith a nhw

Nol i'r gwaith a nhw

https://golwg360.cymru/swyddi/2018/anogwr-gwaith-adran-gwaith-phensiynau

Yr eliffant yn stafell 

a'r dyn drwm ei glyw

nol i'r gwaith a nhw 

Ni welsoch chi’r 'rioed y fath halibalw 

nol i'r gwaith a nhw

Ribidires ribidires nol i'r gwaith â nhw 

Ribidires ribidires nol i'r gwaith â nhw

Dau anabl, dau sal, dwy isel, dau'n gaeth 

i nol i’r gwaith â nhw 

A dau ar ei gwely angau

i nol i'r gwaith â nhw

Ribidires ribidires i nol i’r gwaith â nhw 

Ribidires ribidires i nol i’r gwaith â nhw

enaid hunan niweidiol, rownd ei gwddf? rhaff 

i nol i’r gwaith â nhw 

Yn fawr iawn eu diolch am gael erlyn fel hyn 

i nol i'r gwaith â nhw

Ribidires ribidires i nol i’r gwaith â nhw 

Ribidires ribidires i nol i’r gwaith â nhw

Y llygod ffrengig oedd yno, un bach ac un mawr 

i nol i’r gwaith â nhw 

yn rhedeg o gwmpas ar ras hyd y llawr 

i nol i’r gwaith â nhw

Ribidires ribidires i nol i’r gwaith â nhw 

Ribidires ribidires i nol i’r gwaith â nhw

Ribidires ribidires i nol i’r gwaith â nhw 

Ribidires ribidires i nol i’r gwaith â nhw

Work sets you free anaye?

Duality of Thinking

With thanks to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news for the three stories featured in this blog post

As a fully paid up 'loon' who has spent time in Mental Hospitals & Prison for my mental health condition, I would like to write this blog post with a duality of thinking. I will take 3 different stories from today's BBC News website. Here is the first one. We are now hearing on an almost daily basis that there is a Mental Health Crisis in this country and for sake of argument I mean the Dis-United Kingdom. The second story is this one. Here we have an incident where those who look after those in mental and emotional distress have their lives put at risk by the environment that they work in. The third story is from France, from the continent of Europe from whose Union we will be leaving soon. All three are disturbing stories. All three have the toxic environment as a commonality! Pray tell, what does said loon mean by toxic environment?  In the last story

"Police sources told local media that the boy had refused to do his homework and was hit with a broom handle".

The eponymous broom handle that is suspended above all of us came down on this nine year old, allegedly wielded by his 19 year old brother with his mother apparently encouraging or condoning the punishment. Was this act possibly carried out as an act of jealousy? Was the brother holding the phone under his chin whilst administering the blows with a blunt instrument. 
In this blog post I will argue that the communal society that we live in is tantamount to being hit over the head by a blunt instrument and in the case of the Scottish Hospital and in London on a seemingly daily basis, blunt instruments have turned into sharp instruments designed to kill.

Who is responsible for the Mental Health of a human being?  Who is responsible for the Mental Health of the young women and girls in the first story?

Is it the Government? (and this is where my duality of thinking is introduced). However much I would like to blame a government for my mental health especially a Conservative Government I cannot do this. I could implicate Thatcher's Government in the nurturing aspect of it as I became ill at the age of 13 in 1979 when she came to power. What I as an individual was witness to on a nightly basis through the Television screen were images of an uncaring, cruel government. Children know who are the uncaring, cruel ones and who are the kind ones. It was not Thatcher and the Conservative Government that caused my mental health condition although I could argue that they contributed unwittingly to it.
The youngsters of today are surrounded by such a toxic soup of an environment that is it any surprise that they present as unwell?
Bullying of the cyber and in person variety, an exam passing at all cost education system, the pressures of fitting in with the peer group. Disfunctional home lives
often caused by austerity and poverty? Poor choices made by family members, after all are we all not 'human' whatever that means.

Are we all responsible for the mental health of our younger generation? 

The answer has to be yes. So instead of beating them for not doing their homework, instead of subjecting them to the most brutal of toxic environments, instead of expecting the impossible from them in terms of academic results can we not just allow them to be young and carefree or do we have to use the blunt object as a stick in the carrot stick encouragement stakes?

Governments are there, I would argue, to administer the money and treasury, not to care. I don't believe the lumbering leviathan that is a government are capable of caring even if there are individual members of it who are kinder and more compassionate than others.

What would our ancestors from the 1970s think of the daily 'Mental Health' hysteria? (interesting choice of word dear loon)

Well I would argue that many of them were dead by their 50s because they were not able to talk about what it was to be human. They were in work and drinking and smoking to deal with emotional issues. Today we are much more advanced in our understanding of Human Psychology and Mental Health BUT I would argue that we are as useless and impotent in knowing how to deal with it as we were back then. Of course we could write a prescription and get the human souls on medication to change the 'alleged' chemical imbalance in the brain or we could all work together with a common goal to change our toxic environment, after all these are your children I am talking about, not mine.      

Further Reading

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2018/08/one-size-fits-all.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2014/11/cars-tvs.html

The Sleazy Streets of Aberystwyth

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Ever since the downfall of a local politician, a former Westminster and Cardiff Bay bubbler, who bore a remarkable resemblance to a character from the Wind in the Willows,  Aberystwyth had gone down hill fast. From the Clock down to the offices of the NFU Mutual on Pier Street were now lap dancing establishments, strip joints and Go Go Bars more reminiscent of Gomorrah than Goginan. The Camera Obscura on top of Constitution Hill was now showing Triple X rated adult entertainment with concessions for OAPs. My God any senior citizen who makes their way up there deserves a concession (if not a hand job). Train loads of sex tourists were now arriving at the end of the line station having seen the headlines of the Cambrian Sleaze 'Porn flashes up on town centre screen'. Amsterdam had had it's day as the European destination for sex traffickers and with Britannia and Brexit looming, the punters were now scouring around for more fertile soil. Many of the shops in the not so quaint Edwardian seaside centre had been on their collective arses for some time with the rent and rates from the local council putting them out of business. So all this publicity had opened the flood gates to the caravans and carousels of chaos to come up from the 'Cofiwch Tryweryn' wall in Llanrhystud. Bodlondeb now had a new use, it was to be requisitioned by a brothel keeper from Birmingham and he would rename it 'The Chicken Ranch'. 
Arriva trains Wales had changed it's trading name to "I'm coooooommmminnnggg" which was proving a bit of a pain for the sign writers. The Devil's Bridge Railway line had changed its name to the 'Old Devil's bumping and a grinding batty box' railway line.  

Dominos Pizza taking in the Job Centre and Careers Wales was the Gay quarter with the Rainbow flag flying majestically over a narrow black doorway with the neon sign 'The Cock Ring' Librarians, College Lecturers, Lawyers all passing by.

There was no more frown in this town and gown. Students of both genders were supplementing their Student Loans by handing out flyers to the throbbing crowds making their way to the Plaid Clitoris club on Pier Street. They decided to leave the Welsh Poppy sign above the door as it was rather reminiscent of something. Business was booming and it was 'Last Stop Sodom & Gomorrah' for this previously 'fur coat and no knickers' seaside town. It was now most definitely a 'No coat  & fur knickers' kind of town.

 

Complicit Conts

If your husband, father, brother or son went down to the American Embassy to pick up his passport or visa and you found out later via MSM and other vicarious sources that he had been strangled, dismembered and dissolved in acid then the very least you might do is phone 101 or write a strongly worded letter to the Western Mail. This state sponsored assassination occurred in the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul so it's the Middle East and like a poorly organised rugby trip it appears "that what happens in the Middle East, stays in the Middle East" I mean, they look different to us and they have got different laws and rules that you need to abide by, after all they are Islamists and we know that the more militant wing of that group can be a tad brutal to say the least. Britain are supplying arms to the Saudi Arabians and they are allowing their pilots to train for genocide in RAF Valley on Anglesey. Now you see if Wales was an Independent nation and not a pissing Principality of Prince Wing Nuts dominion we could say no to this but as in the case of Wylfa B and Hitachi we have to agree to something that we know intuitively is bad for us and the shark fisherman of Wales is wondering on this 'super soaraway caturday saturday,' is that what we are experiencing in UK PLC since the Brexit vote of 2016, is a permanent state of self disgust. As individual bods we can do 'ffwc all' to influence the power brokers and war machine to stop killing innocent people so we go gambling, drinking and taking drugs. We partake of a slow form of suicide. Being addicted to making money as a Capitalist, Business, Entrepreneur is a form of spiritual death "Oh woah, hang on you can't say that, we wouldn't have the Dragon's Den, the Apprentice and all those shows with Evan Davies squinting into the lens if we weren't addicted to greed and it does give people jobs". Let me tell you now 'gwboi' that the Shark Fisherman of Wales is so sick of the 'jobs' argument that he is likely to drown the next person on a witch's ducking stool who makes it, which brings me back to the husband, father, brother, son who has just gone down to the American Embassy and been killed in such a horrible fashion. You might excuse his demise because you remember that in an argument with his wife, mother, sister, daughter that you interpreted that he was giving off 'misogynistic' signals. You remember that when he was reading the paper or watching the news that he shouted out "That F******g Philip Green" and you knew that he was a Jew and that you came to the only conclusion that was left open to you, that your beloved family member was 'Anti-Semitic'. Now I don't know what has gone into our collective drinking water apart from fluoride and the results of fracking but I can tell you that we are gulping down hysteria and group think! As a 'loon' I am ever watchful for 'normals' using the terminology of 'mental health' to make a point and therefore I must acquiesce to women and Jews when they feel persecuted but we are attacking each other when we should be attacking those who send their children to private education and who get treated by BUPA because they have been feathering their nests whilst we have been distracted by caring about the future of the world. Here endeth the lesson.