Author Archives: puncturerepairkit

There is a phrase, somewhat unkind, I can’t help feeling: middle – aged men in lycra. I guess I feel as I do since I am one of them. Over the years I have amassed a drawer full of said items. The collection includes tops in Tour de France yellow, in polka dot design and cycle team colours of yesteryear. Naturally, over the years they have come to acquire sentimental value, replete with memories. But it is not of these pieces of lycra I write today. Instead I am focusing on my pair of bicycle bib – tights.

 ‘What weirdness is this?!’ I hear you cry.

Bear with me. On Thursday 28 October 2010 I came off my bike as I cycled through a gap in a wall meant for pedestrians, up the road from where I live. I have used this short cut countless times as I return home from rides out in the countryside since I moved to the neighbourhood in 2007. Examine the picture closely and you will see a tear at the knee. It’s from that tumble in 2010. A good enough reason to buy a new pair. If not straightaway, then certainly over the intervening years. But I don’t want to replace this pair. They remind  me of what that fall represented. I careered through that narrow gap at 10 miles an hour before taking a tumble onto the tarmac. Someone about to get into his car called out asking if I was alright. I pushed away his concern with that Orwellian phrase in Doublespeak: ‘I’m fine.’ As I sat there, staring at that small tear at my knee, aware that I was still in one piece,  I knew that there was something terribly wrong.

It was the first time that I glimpsed something that I couldn’t quite recognise, much less identify. I wrote a post about it: https://puncturerepairkit.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/tarmac/

In it I claimed that I had immediately recognised the true significance of the fall. Way back then I did realise why I had ridden through that narrow gap far too fast. What I had no idea about was what this realisation would mean for me in the long term. A couple of weeks later I saw a psychiatrist who confirmed that my problem was not uni – polar depression but Bi Polar Disorder 2 with Mixed Symptoms. And so it began (again). It took a few months coming off the medication I had been taking for years and finding an effective replacement.

In the previous post I wrote about the uphill struggle life has been for me recently. Last week I saw my psychiatrist and he decided that a change of medication was the next step after an increased dose was too much for me to tolerate. A positive move. right, to be looking at different options to restoring my mental health? Not so much, I fear. Last time we agreed that I would increase my dose. It turned out I couldn’t tolerate the side effects (drowsiness.) When I agreed to this increase in the mood stabiliser I have been taking for nearly 6 years it felt like a huge question came and stood in front of me, obscuring the view of anything else. Does this mean a steady increase of the dose with each (inevitable) relapse? Where would it stop?

Well, it has stopped – sort of. I agreed to start coming of one of the tablets I have been taking since 2011 and gradually replacing it with another. It feels like the tablets have simply stopped working, and I have to start over with something else. I can’t help but wonder – if it works at all – how long will it be until it, too, gives up on me?

I’m looking back at my former self and wondering now what I could say to him by way of encouragement.

The author Katherine Mansfield (1888 – 1923) wrote to her earlier self in her journal: ‘Dear friend from my life I write to you in your life …’What words of succour, encouragement and hope can I write to the me that fell off my bike that day? Graphic artist Ellen Forney (1968 – ) who herself suffers from Bi Polar Disorder wrote about her journey of mental health recovery in her graphic memoir ‘Marbles, Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me’. I read it every year. Each reading offers me new jewels of insight into what it means to be, well, me. In the final 3 panels she reflects on her journey, having been talking to her earlier self about how she has come to arrive at her present day self. She is looking in the mirror  brushing her teeth. The thought bubbles read: ‘But I mean, things are good? You’re ok?’ Then: ‘Well I can’t say things are always easy, but they’re good! And yeah … ‘ And the final panel: ‘I’m ok!’

Reading those final panels, I can’t see how it can ever be like that for me for very long.

What Happens

It has happened
and it happens now as before
and will continue to happen
if nothing is done against it.

The innocent don’t know a thing about it
because they are too innocent
and the guilty don’t know a thing about it
because they’re too guilty.

The poor don’t take notice
because they’re too poor
and the rich don’t take notice
because they’re too rich.

The stupid shrug their shoulders
because they’re too stupid
and the clever shrug their shoulders
because they’re too clever.

It doesn’t bother the young
because they’re too young
and it doesn’t both the old
because they’re too old.

That’s why nothing is done against it
and that’s why it happened
and happens now as before
and will continue to happen.

Erich Fried (1921 – 1988)

It was the summer of 2001. I was riding the 60 mile route from London to Brighton, on the south coast, for the first time. I had started cycling, as an adult at least, the previous summer (a fund – raiser for my children’s primary school.)This would be the longest distance I had ridden by a long, long way. I had been diagnosed with depression 4 months earlier and had spent much of the intervening period signed off work and in the care of my psychiatrist, G.P., family and friends. My preparation for the event had consisted of a couple of rides with my friend Ivan who would be joining me, up and down the rolling hills north of my home.

I remember the beginning of the ride, the peleton snaking through the south London suburbs early that sunny Sunday afternoon, before the group thinned out.

Nine miles into the ride I was picking up speed as I swept down a slope. Too late I saw the yellow – clad marshals signalling a left turn at the bottom of the hill. Instead of slowing down, passing the turning and going back, I steered my bike left, made the turn at speed, and came off my bike, landing on the tarmac by a grass verge. A St John’s ambulance paramedic was soon by my side and found me clutching my left arm. He inspected it and declared that since I had not broken the skin I was safe to ride on.

Gingerly I eased my way back on my bike and saw my friend waiting for me at the top of the hill. He had not seen what happened, and being the much fitter one, was waiting for me to catch up.

My left arm was so painful it was all I could do but hold the handlebars. I couldn’t change gear and cycled the remaining 51 miles of that hilly route without moving the chain onto the smallest cog (most useful for tackling the numerous climbs that made up much of the remainder of the route.)

I cycled on because the paramedic told me I could.

On arriving at the seafront not far from home, I dismounted in front of the 3 generations of my family who had come to see me finish and lay flat on my back. By now my left arm was so sore I had to ask for one of them to remove my cycling gloves.

After an uncomfortable night my wife took me to the Accident & Emergency department of our local hospital and the doctor I saw confirmed that I had broken the radius bone at my elbow.

I was my very own hero. I had cycled 51 miles with a broken arm! I have shared that story numerous times over the years, including in the archives of this blog. If cycling has saved my life – as I have claimed from the very first sentence of the first post back in the summer of 2010 – then far from making a mistake, that paramedic gave me the gift of rising: rising far beyond what I thought I could ever achieve. His mistake helped to save my life.

I took part in the ride 12 times in the next 13 years. As I reached double figures the ride became a kind of time trial as I tried to better my performance year on year. It was time to look for other cycling challenges.

In my role as a peer worker, I too have been that paramedic.

Once, I told my story of my recovery to a peer I was supporting in the early stages of his recovery. He had a history of suicide attempts dating back over a decade. Telling my story is something I do all the time in supporting people both individually, and in groups. I’ve been at it for a while.

The next time we met what he said  left me as breathless as I was at the end of that ride all those years ago. He told me that what I had described to him of my own experiences on the road to recovery had – quite literally – saved his life. He described how, only days earlier, having said goodnight to his teenage son, he had gone downstairs to his kitchen, had taken the largest knife he could find, lay down on the sofa in his living room and put the blade to his neck. He told me in a voice as steady as the steel on his skin, that it was remembering what I had described of how I cope with my persistent feelings of hopelessness and despair, that had stayed his hand.

There are times when even I have to steady myself. So I excused myself and headed for the toilet where I spent a few minutes controlling my breathing while resting my forehead against the wall repeating over and over again, ‘I saved his life? I saved his life! I saved his life?’ trying to convince myself of what he had just told me.

I composed myself and headed back out into the crowded café. At the end of our time together, as we emerged onto the street, I stopped him before he headed off and told him: ‘I didn’t save your life, G—, you did.’

As the Mist leaves No Scar

As the mist leaves no scar

On the dark green hill,

So my body leaves no scar

On you, nor ever will.

When wind and hawk encounter,

What remains to keep?

So you and I encounter,

Then turn, then fall asleep.

As many nights endure

Without a moon or star,

So will we endure

When one is gone and far.

Leonard Cohen (1934 – 2016)

Not writing. Not cycling. Nor a sorrowful face full of tears. Nor a  shuddering heart. Nor any shaking shoulders.

In fact, nothing much at all.

What is this vacancy? Whose are these slumbering eyes that guide me? Whose billowing arms far out at sea? Whose laggard legs calling me across this pebble shore?

This not what I signed up for. This was not in the small print. I did not agree to this. I did not give my consent. I did not say what you say I said.

Or did I?

I was born against my will, I breathe against my will. My heart beats and my blood moves against my will. I sleep against my will. I wake up, gasping for air.

I am at war with myself.

There are so many military metaphors. My grandparents, my parents, my uncles, my aunt – they all survived wars. My grandfathers fought in one on opposing sides. And I, who would fail any medical, who has never so much as handled a gun, or a grenade, I am fighting myself.

In my role as a Peer Worker, supporting others to cope with enduring mental health problems I pride myself in being the stretcher bearer in the picture. Helping to carry the burden. holding the hope for others when there is none they can see.

I cite it often as a key part of what keeps me well (enough) to live. I boast of my ‘spare capacity’ to reach out to others to support them in their personal journey of recovery. I support ex-servicemen who carry with them the horrors of active service that we coyly disguise with the acronym PTSD. I put myself on their battlefields of unfamiliar streets, house searches and shouting at children who do not know how to respond.

My ears are leaking blood from all the places I have never been. The Eastern Front, 1914. Kristallnacht, November 9 – 10 1938, Theresienstadt and Baranowicze 1942.

Is that me on the stretcher or is that me on the bicycle?

Futility

Move him into the sun—

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields half-sown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth’s sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918)