For Year’s I beat myself up with self-persecution and hate. I’d persecute and hate others too, after all, it couldn’t be ME that was in the wrong! Yes, I was the tyder of bad bearings – the giver of bad news, and the ultimate collector of sadness and sorrow. Self-inflicted mostly! Partly due to an illness I had become involved with (Bipolar) and part was due to the medicinal use of alcohol, the crutch that I had gotten so used to using to make me ‘think’ that I was OK. Ha!…what a joke that was, but it would put me through sheer hell, and take me a very long time to find that out.
New Year’s Eve 2016 and I was at my girlfriend’s house getting ready to watch the fireworks on the telly. It was around 10:30 p.m. and I had a Eureka moment! A sudden sense of both longing, and desperation, all at the same time – I wanted to get more beer so that I didn’t run out while the fireworks were still blasting away, and I could also sit and listen afterward to Hootenanny with Jools Holland…these three things had been a staple of my New year’s Eve for as long as I can remember. So…on my bike I got and started biking like a madman, around the streets to find an open shop! It didn’t occur to me that there would be NO shops open on a New Year’s Eve and at tha time! No I knew best and off I went. 30 minutes or so later I returned to Fran’s and was completely knackered, sweating, tired, wet for the rain and feeling generally dirty. It was at that point when I sat down and said to myself “Rob! What the fuck are you doing!? You don’t need this, or, even at that time wanted it. I was a mess! Unfit, both physically and mentally and on that particular night, I said I’d stop it. And I did! 🙂
