Mibbes aye, mibbes naw...

I had an interesting conversation last night with someone last night about a topic that is only going to become more important over the next year or so - the Scottish Independence debate.

I am genuinely undecided on which way I will vote when it comes around.  I am proud to be Scottish, but have no real problem with being British and am proud of the things that Scots and people from the other British nations have achieved over the years.  

Nationalism troubles me deeply however - far too many terrible things have been done "In the name of a piece of dirt, For a change of accent, Or the color of your shirt" to quote Rush's song "Territories" - which pretty much echoes my feelings on the topic.  I try to judge people (if I need to) based solely on the person that they are - where they happen to have been born is irrelevant.    

However, my real issue with the current Independence "debate" is not anything to do with Nationalism.  It is simply that I have seen nothing yet that can be reasonably described as debate.  Childish yah-boo yeah-but-no-but squabbling, yes, reasoned, adult debate, no.

All of it seems to be "if you vote yes, we'll do..." followed by something great that they probably can't guarantee that they will be able to carry out.  Or "If you vote no, then maybe..." followed by some dire apocalyptic consequence.  Neither side seems to be able to back these statements with anything even resembling hard facts.  Surely someone, somewhere is able to provide us with actual, definite answers to these sort of questions?  What we really need, I think is an independent (irony, we do that, yes!) assessment of the key issues, so that we can make a realistic and informed decision as to which box we want to check.

Maybe we could even extend real, grown up, sensible debate into the rest of politics too?  Nah, it'll never happen...

Just a Spanish Minute...

Hola!  We're just back from a wee sojourn in Southern Spain, recently enough that our collective skin tone has not yet reverted to our natural Scottish light bluish tinge...

While we were there, we headed off on a day trip to the Alhambra in Granada for our token bit of culture.  And it is indeed a stunning icon of the medieval Moorish culture of Southern Spain.  Our guide pointed out a feature of it's decoration that got me thinking a wee bit (oh no not again, I hear you cry!)  The outside of the Alhambra is quite plain, but the inside is beautifully decorated with intricate designs - as our guide put it, they "kept it to themselves"...

It made me think about how much is to be gained from sharing our creations - be they arts, scientific discoveries or even just daft blogs by depressive weirdos!  The thing is, I suppose, that you don't know what other people will gain from or do with what is shared - in work, for instance you can share something that you have learned and save your colleagues from having to discover it themselves.  Another way that I have seen this bear fruit is by sharing our experiences with Christopher, we have hopefully given other TOF parents, who are earlier in their journey, some idea of what they can expect.  I know that we have gained from the experiences of others.

I suppose that there is a risk sometimes of "oversharing" or perhaps becoming self-obsessed (which seems to be quite common these days) but I think if you can foster a sensible "interrnal editor" and a reasonable degree of self-awareness, hopefully you can realise what to share and when to have as positive effect as you can.  (Or you can put it in a blog that people can read or ignore as they see fit!)

The "Spanish Minute" idea is another thing that I encountered on holiday - it is like a less extreme version of "manana"- as in "the show will start in 5 minutes... 5 Spanish minutes, that is".  I remain unsure of the exact correlation between "Spanish" and "normal" minutes but I am pretty sure that it is always a ratio greater than one!

Skin Deep

The past couple of weeks have been quite hard for us, I think.  Sleep has been a very scarce commodity in the Rennie household.  And it is nothing to do with my depression or Christopher's TOF issues, but something that is probably way more common than either of those.  

I am talking about the fiendish scourge that is eczema - the demon itch that can drive even the most disciplined soul to scratch themselves in a frenzy.  I, myself have suffered from skin complaints, as has Freya - we both know the impossibility of resisting the urge to tear at your own skin until you bleed in an ultimately futile attempt to make that damned itch do away.  So it is difficult for us to tell Christopher to stop scratching, though we must.  

It is also difficult to come into his room at some obscure hour of the night, half asleep and nerves shattered by the howling that has woken us, to find him writhing about on his bed, crying unconsolably and feverishly scratching at himself, often with blood all over his legs.  We seem to have every lotion, potion, cream and ointment that exists from the simple emollients to the fierce steroid creams and the positively vile icthopaste bandages.  Many nights he goes to bed bandaged neck to ankle, looking like an extra from a b-movie.  It is no joking matter, though we try to make light of it for him.  

The hardest thing though, is hearing him say "I want to give my body to someone else" or "I don;t like my skin, daddy".  These are not the sort of things that you want to hear from anyone, least of all a four year old.  Once, the blood is cleaned away, the creams and bandages applied, and the tears have been soothed away - something that Freya has a particular genius for - then Christopher starts to reassert himself over his skin, and he talks about how he doesn't like the creams, but he knows that they help his skin.  

I am weak compared to my boy, but his strength of character lends me strength - coffee will push the tiredness away long enough to get the working day over - but my beautiful family are my true love in this world.  "Beauty is only skin deep" they say, but Christopher, to me, is beautiful to the core.

A modest man...

...Who has much to be modest about.  Attributed to Winston Churchill, allegedly speaking about Clement Attlee, his wartime Deputy and postwar successor.  Quite a put down, but my brain being the odd shape that it is, was twisting it about a bit and set me wondering if that might not be a good thing, ultimately.

I have long had my own little theory (which I may have unconsciously plagiarised from somewhere, I really don't know) that we all spend our youth "growing up" and becoming more and more convinced that we know everything, only, if we are fortunate, to spend our adult years learning just how wrong we were.  Perhaps we reach a stage where we doubt everything and know nothing...  I don't have a problem with that.  

Doubt is good.  

Questions and the journey to try to answer them, which inevitably leads to more questions - unless you are intellectually moribund perhaps - is the joy of life in my view.  And I know that I have been at stages where I have reached that point of mental rigor mortis - the darkest times, the most terrifying places in my mental landscape.  Slowly, though, the way back from there has become apparent and I have gradually freed the rusted gears in the me machine,  I know that I am not as mentally agile as I was back in the day, when I managed to persuade a certain seaside academic institution that I deserved a receipt for the mental effort that I had spent there.  

Now though, that thought doesn't bother me as much as it did, because I have got my hunger and curiosity back, along with the humility (I hope) to realise that I can learn from anyone that I meet.  Particularly from a certain small boy who, like all of his kind can reflect our conceits and self-deceit and show us how ridiculous we are sometimes.

I think that we need to recover some of our childlike qualities, stop trying to be so smart and so full of our own importance - and find as much as we can to be modest about

Six words to drive you mad(der)...

"Cheer up! It might never happen!"  Or a variation thereof, generally uttered by (probably) well-meaning people - who have absolutely conception of the nature of depression...  

This week is apparently "Mental Health Awareness Week", and I saw a fairly good article on the BBC Website regarding mental health "role-models", suggesting that the "traditional" famous role-models with mental health issues (Winston Churchill, Stephen Fry etc.) are perhaps not the best ones for those of us less exceptional folk with mental health issues due to their unusual circumstances and that we need more everyday role-models.  Or at least that was my reading of it, possibly somewhat distracted by a ham roll and some soup, given that I was reading it while lunching at my desk.

But it got me thinking (Nooooooo!  Not that! I hear you cry...)  I'm no sure that I need any role-models - I am quite capable of being depressed and coping (mostly) with life without someone to show me how.  Necessity shows me how.  I think that what we still need is less fear, more understanding and for a lot of people with mental health issues a lot more support.  I am lucky - I get a lot of support from my wonderful friends and family and have also benefited from a succession of understanding managers at work.  I have also been helped by medical professionals and the medication that it seems I will probably be taking for the rest of my life.  There is no all better, as I have said before, but there is better than before.  

An analogy for the way that I experience depression came to me the other day.  I think that it is like being tired - that exhausted, bone-weary tired after you haven't slept properly for days.  (Lets pretend that going for a kip is not an option!)  You can force yourself to carry on, you can do your best, you will have times where you get a kind of "second wind" and can almost forget just how tired you are, and of course you can drink coffee or energy drinks etc. to lessen the symptoms - but you cannot simply decide not to be tired, you cannot just "buck your ideas up" and just be well rested.  That, for me, is pretty much what depression feels like - without the "good night's kip" get out clause.

Was that summer that just happened?

I am not really much of a one for flowers.  I don't think that it's a dumb machismo thing - cos I am not really much of a one for that, either.  They just don't really do much for me,  Perhaps part of it is down to the fact that I am, at best a grudging and somewhat inept gardener - few, if any, things that I have deliberately tried to grow have done so.  I have even managed to kill off mint, which I was assured generally takes over and grows like a weed for other less inept would-be exponents of the dark arts of gardening.  Perhaps it's not that; whatever it is, it generally concerns me not a jot.

There is, however one particular flower (if it is truly a flower - I don't know, or much care for that matter) that I do love to see - cherry blossom.  I think that there are few things more beautiful in nature than a flowering cherry tree in full bloom.  I still intend to replace the poster of one of Van Gogh's studies of cherry blossom that I acquired in Amsterdam, then foolishly neglected until it was too trashed to frame.  

I got to thinking about this because I noticed the first blossom emerging on the tree that is a few feet from the door of Christopher's nursery.  It has evidently been conned into coming out of hiding by the random day or two of sunshine that our wondrous Scottish weather has decided to throw at us, no doubt to pull the rug out from under our over-optimistically sandal-clad feet by then hitting us with a couple weeks of rain/hail/snow/plague of frogs more befitting a Scottish May.  I think though, joking(!) aside, that this is a clue to one of the reasons that I think I like it so much - it is a sign of impending (slightly) better weather.  Which is generally a good thing for my (and everyone else's) mood, coming from the darkness of winter into lighter mornings and longer evenings that make life that little bit better.

On a related note, I was interested to see research (done in Edinburgh) that suggests that the health benefits from exposure to sunshine (decreased likelihood of heart attacks and strokes, it seems) may well outweigh the elevated risks (but still quite low in Scotland) of skin cancer.  Particularly if you manage to avoid getting burnt - everything in moderation I suppose.  Though it is quite hard to get sunshine in anything other than moderation here!

So let us rejoice in the "cherry blossom in the market square", and try to forget how soon we'll be back to "dancing in stilettos in the snow"...

A Mistaken Perception...

I don't know if it is really more common now or if I just notice it more because I am a parent, but it seems to me that there are a lot more cases where people are killing themselves and taking their children with them.  Whatever the circumstances, it is distressing, but I wonder if it is often  at least in part, down to a warped perspective of the nature of parenthood?

I can see that in many cases, it seems to be one parent denying the other "possession" of the children as part of a divorce/break up.  Obviously, these people are not functioning quite "normally", but the bit that confuses me most is where they get the idea that they are in whole or in part the "owners" of their children?  This is certainly not the way that I think of parenthood (though I in no way claim to be an expert).  

My view is that we, as parents, are merely caretakers of our children - bringing them into being, feeding, protecting and educating them and guiding them to adulthood to make their own contribution to the world.  They owe us nothing, other than perhaps a little gratitude and maybe respect (assuming we have earned it) and they are in no way our possessions.  I have seen my son on the boundary between life and death - at one point with a heart rate of 253 - and have had to make decisions (no-brainers really) such as signing consent forms for surgery, that no parent would want to have to make, but it is not my decision to end that life or anyone else's.  His life is his own, and always should be. 

This brings me to another thing that I have encountered in news stories recently that I find difficult to handle.  I am an Atheist.  I am very happy with that and feel more at ease with that aspect of my life now than I ever have.  However, I have no real issue with people having religious beliefs. I can't really understand how they rationalise them, but fair play to them.  There is a definite line in the sand, though.  I think that where religious belief starts to require the suffering of others then it loses validity for me.  

An example of this is the stories that I have seen where religious parents (often, it would seem, American) have failed to get their children proper medical care, preferring to rely on prayer and ultimately resulting in the death of the child ("God's Will" my arse).  This is, in my eyes, one of the grossest types of dereliction of the most important duty of parenthood - to protect your child to the limit of your abilities.  Any god who wants your child to die is worthless in my view.  

I have decided (partly inspired by an interview with Neil Peart that I read recently, though mainly through years of contemplation of such things) that I can see only one rule I need (laws of the land notwithstanding) and the best way that I can think of to formulate it is "Wherever you can, lessen suffering".