A huge thank you for the many expressions of support and well wishing from across the world following my 15 night sentence at Sheffield’s Northern General, whose staff at every level I cannot praise too highly.
I was released on parole this morning, with enough meds to stock a small pharmacy and strict instructions to “not overdo it”.
I’ll see what I can do. Pain and fear have a way of shrinking one’s perspective, though even that had its upside in making surrender to the ministrations of others a choiceless act. Nor was that surrender betrayed. Chapeau to the cleaners and porters and dinner ladies, the technicians and trolley pushers, the doctors and nurses – ah, those nurses! – whose attentiveness and good humour was not always immediately obvious but proved unfailingly genuine. In spite of neoliberal everything, Britain’s NHS still cares. Massively.
But I spoke of shrinking perspective and its attendant surrender. At the most physical and intimate levels that was the case for me. But at another level I found the space to think more deeply about the savage and ever more transparent insanity of a world ruled by and for a tiny few. (After the first days, when I hadn’t the energy to read or listen, I began spending several hours a day doing both.) I mean the space to think about said insanity in ways my normal fire-fighting blog posts don’t permit. I aim to speak to that in forthcoming posts but, as instructed, will start short and easy with third party writings and podcasts – on Ukraine, Iran and the impact on the West both of their criminal drivers and of consequences I do not believe have begun to sink in – that caught my eye or ear as I lay opiated in my hospital bed.
Love and solidarity.
Phil