A Day in the Life

I often get on my high horse in this blog about inaccurate, unrealistic and misrepresentative portrayals of mental ill health in films and the rest of the media. You may recall that I was up in arms about a film called "Roommate", which to my mind contained one of the worst, most inaccurate and fear-inducing representations of mental illness I had seen in recent times. It is nice to report, then, that having watched the first episode of the American drama series "Homeland", which was screened for the first time on British television last Sunday on Channel 4, I can say that I was quite pleased with the portrayal of one of the main character's apparent mental "instability". The series stars Claire Daines as Carrie Matheson, a CIA officer who comes to believe that an American Marine (played by Brit Damian Lewis), who was held captive by Al-Qaeda for eight years, has actually been "turned" by the enemy and now, upon his otherwise heroic return t...

Anyone who regularly reads this blog may recall that a while back I wrote a posting entitled "That Obscure Object of Desire", after the Luis Bunuel film of the same name. In that instance my particular obscure object of desire was TV chef and all-round uber-babe Nigella Lawson. But, as Nigella, with her sexy, husky voice and comely curves has now been missing from our screens for a while, her place has been taken by another erotic obsession in my increasingly middle-aged, male psyche. All it takes to describe my new obscure object of desire is two words. And here they are. Kirstie Allsop. There you go. Kirstie. Allsop. Notice how even the name alone seems to trip off the tongue, taking a tap, as Nabokov put it, on the teeth. Kir-stie-All-sop. So what is it about Kirstie that gets me, and seemingly many other approaching middle-agedom males, in a lather? Well, for a start, Kirstie shares a certain, particularly sexy, attribute with Nigella, and that is her vixen-like voice. ...

I have now been officially discharged from mental health services. They have decided that I am now well enough to go my own way and seek my fortune. Or something like that, anyway. It was at a care plan meeting at my local residential unit yesterday that I was informed of this decision. I was asked how I felt about this, to which I replied that I was "OK" about it. What I think I really meant was, "Yippee- free at last! free at last! thank God almighty, I am free at last!". OK, so I'm being a little facetious, and the notion that being under the care of mental health services somehow means that you are not "free" is a bit unfair to them. After all, despite some (significant, to my mind, at least) glitches in my treatment, they have played an instrumental part in my recovery. Since joining the Pathways Group, for example, I only seem to have got better. Being part of the "Lifestyle Project", which was run within the group, also helped me on m...