» Public Transport Trauma

Greenwich - January 2008
Was at Greenwich station a in January this year on the way home from work (can't remember why I'd changed trains there - can't have been important).

Two chaps were apparently being friendly, generally "joshing" with each other when one glassed the other - in public.

Attempting to get involved proved to be a foolish idea, although I did try to face the bottle holding chap down in an non-confrontational fashion when someone else on the platform called the police and an ambulance. It's as easy as it sounds.

Everything seemed to slow down. Me grabbing my scarf and giving it to the bleeding bloke and at the same time trying to keep the bottle holder apart from him to avoid his (and I quote) "f---ing finish the c--t".

Ambulance arrives. Police arrive. Victim treated and driven off; ambulance team try to give me my scarf back - erm, no thanks.

Police start to chill the drunk / stoned (never did find out which) bloke, although they did have the advantage of holding a baton over their shoulders ready to thump him. Didn't have one of those myself.

Never heard anything else about it but did throw up later on that evening when I'd phoned my friend to tell him about it who called me a "stupid bastard" and that I "shouldn't have gotten involved". What was I going to do, let one guy kill the other?

Apologies for lack of funny.
(Thu 29th May 2008, 15:34, More)

» What's the hardest you've tried to get dumped?

Simple, but effective - being myself
***Tangential-to-topic alert***
***Unfunny alert also***

This is a long one but I'm afraid to say that it worked (in getting me unceremoniously dumped).

I met someone a couple of years ago whilst in the depths of a seriously depressive episode (unmedicated at the time - now medicated, thankfully, see below) and fell absolutely head over heels for her (walking on air, giggling like a teenager (I'm in my late 30s),the whole nine yards).

She (G) was everything I had ever wanted in a partner; hugely (intimidatingly) intelligent, funny, physically attractive, talented in everything (i.e., as well as being a scientist type was also an outdoorsy type and a musical type) ... absolutely everything.

All went swimmingly. We met on the Tuesday evening, on the Friday went away for the weekend to pick up my car and drive back to the UK, moved in together on the Sunday, got a dog, spent Christmas together, met her family and friends, joined in all of the family events and everything seemed to be going swimmingly were it not for the skeletons within my closet all of which I'd hidden away in the interests of not losing this wonderful human being that I'd met.

HUGE Mistake.

Two days after coming back from a great holiday in June 2007 to the Maldives for a weeks' diving, she left me. The skeletons that I'd made tangential allusion to (but by agreement between us we hadn't explored together) avalanched and overwhelmed us both.

At that point I reacted in a typically overdramatic fashion and threw myself headlong into work. She said that none of the skeletons mattered but that, having kept them in place for so long, she couldn't and wouldn't come back.

This threw my sideways and I've since been in treatment on a regular basis, my health insurance paying a fortune to a consultant on a weekly basis who's managing to pay his mortgage on the basis of all of my (perceived or real) inadequacies.

My consultant has a quote from me that he uses on a regular basis - "My crime is being Edmund, unfortunately my punishment is also being Edmund"

I've been being medicated with lamotrigine (50mg) and venlaflaxine (225mg) since November 2007 and it's been increased twice (current levels in parantheses). I'm now in a long-wavelength, low-amplitude, low-frequency cycle and feel a LOT better if emotionally somewhat numb.

Do I miss the emotional highs (the hypomanic states)? Yes, sometimes - I got huge, superhuman amounts done in limited time and managed to produce a very high quality of research / patent output.

Do I miss the lows, standing on a bridge calculating velocities and, to quote the Barenaked Ladies, "Frightened of jumping / In case they survive"? Hell NO.

As for the cattle market that is the field of human relationships, I've been "off the market" for the last year and I'm now only tentatively beginning to feel my way back to it. It's difficult, especially when the full weight of my past comes out - I fear hiding things from people but at the same time try not to act like a human tsunami of all of the crap from my past irrespective of the good stuff that's gone with it; anything other than total disclosure from the outset seems to be an act of betrayal by me and I have to learn how to temper this.

So - if someone called Edmund drops in to your "real" (non-online) life - feel free to ask him a series of difficult questions and I can guarantee that he'll answer them with abundant total and complete candour. Just please don't be disappointed that he's done that when you ask.

Peace and love, y'all.

Ed.
(Wed 11th Jun 2008, 6:08, More)

» Impulse buys

Oh, G.
I was thinking about how best to address the question of the "impulse buy" when I was thinking about Georgina, my second ex-wife - for those of you who are aware of the sorry tale, Georgina was my sixteen-day wife.

There was a *lot* of impulse buying within my relationship with Georgina but I think the biggest way of describing impulse is to describe the first eleven days of our relationship.

Day1 (Thursday) - email Georgina via a website; she'd posted what I believed to be a tongue-in-cheek ad

Day2 (Friday) - receive reply

Day3 (Saturday) - no contact

Day4 (Sunday) - no contact

Day5 (Monday) - more contact via website and email through PM system; SMS during Monday evening when I was visiting a friend

Day6 (Tuesday) - agree to meet that evening in London for dinner; lose my mind (not really lost, it was already gone) and, within two hours of having met her, ask her to marry me. She treats it as being flippant. Walk from restaurant to London Eye via Tesco where we get a bottle of champagne which we spray together into the Thames. Spend night at hotel together.

Day7 (Wednesday) - email. A lot. Grin (a lot (me)). Flippancy confirmed by email.

Day8 (Thursday) - ask her to accompany me to Prague that weekend where I need to collect my car and drive it back to UK having left it there a few weeks previously. Spend much of Thursday kicking myself about flippancy of comment on Tuesday evening and worry about having cocked up spectacularly.

Day9 (Friday) - in the morning, take an hour off work and visit jeweller at Canary Wharf. Spend £2500(ish) on single diamond in white gold engagement ring. In the afternoon, meet Georgina at Paddington to go to Heathrow where I keep ring on me throughout, including asking security chap at terminal 2 to not ask me to take it out and show it to him. Travel to Prague; spend evening in Crowne Plaza Hotel in Prague Dejvice.

Day10 (Saturday) - walking across Charles Bridge in the middle of Prague, I go down on one knee, and asked her to marry me. She said yes. We drive the 700km to Koln, our stop-off point on the route to Calais.

Day11 (Sunday) - arrive in Calais late morning, and whilst waiting for ferry I get a very interesting (no, really) lecture in cloud formations. Ferry; arrive in UK. Drive to my new place that I was renting for a year. On arrival, I ask the question "so, you moving in then?" to which she replies "yeah, alright then".

End of tale. Ed = dickhead for having cocked it up SO spectacularly. Much as I wish she did, she doesn't read b3ta as far as I know, so I can write this next with near impunity:

Georgina I love you with my whole heart and I miss you. It's been 715 days since you left and I love you and miss you more today than I loved you and missed you 714 days ago but less than I will tomorrow; please, put me out of my misery.
(Fri 22nd May 2009, 23:06, More)

» Unexpected Nudity

February 1991
I'm a little baby soldier in Saudi Arabia (205 GenEvac Hospital RAMC - King Khalid International Airport, Riyadh) and have been on shift since about 1130am, working, sitting chilling in the sun, working some more, sitting chiling in the ... you get the picture.

My shift finishes at midnight so I've decided that, given that it's now 10pm, I'm going to nip down to the rest area and have a shower.

Operating with the expectation of immortality, I'd taken a gamble (damn! this should have gone into that QOTW. Ho hum.) that we weren't going to be getting SCUD-whipped at that time, especially given that most of our whippings happened between 1am and 4am.

Go into the changing area, put down my small-metal-gun, get into the buff and get my shower gear out from my sports bag (medics - cleanliness = godliness) to nip into the shower with.

Happily lathering myself away in this large (i.e., 20+ person) shower in which I'm the only one there when the attack alarm sounds (and yes, it does sound like the one at the start of Two Tribes by FGTH).

"Bollocks", thinketh I, and nip out of the shower to put on my respirator (gas mask). Realising what a warm and generally pleasant shower I'd been having, go straight back into the shower and, respirator on, continue to shower for another 10 minutes.

Where's the public element, you ask?

Unbeknowns to me, the changing area - in the basement of the building we'd set the hospital up in - was a shelter for the microbiology team (only two chaps - thankfully), one of whom took a picture of me in respirator stepping out of the shower which I'm led to believe had for a while a place on a noticeboard in a hospital in Birmingham.

/facepalms
(Fri 29th May 2009, 8:17, More)

» Bullies

Past and Present - and apologies for the lack of funneh
*Past*

I was the stereotypical wimpy kid, apart from not wearing glasses. I also had the misfortune to be an intransigent little git and if I was able to reach back in time and give him some advice now I'd tell him to use his two ears and one mouth in proportion.

Naturally, my "standing up for myself" to the school bullies resulted in my being on the receiving end of an utter, utter shoeing at the hands of Simon F and another kid whose name escapes me. I do remember returning home with a severely blackened eye, cuts, bruises and wanting to go to another school.

Parents decided that this just "wasn't on" and that I'd go back to school the next day and face them down. My mother was a big John Wayne/Western films fan and I think that it was a fantasy she was having from having recently seen The Good The Bad and The Ugly.

Take a wild guess what happened? Utterly well-deserved shoeing, take two.

Arriving home that night (a Wednesday) Dad was back from work early and wanted to take me to school personally the next morning so that he could have a chat to the bullies in question and, knowing his sporting prowess (rugby / boxing), beat seven shades out of them. I pleaded with him not to do so and he eventually listened when I pointed out that his arrival on the premises might lead to (a) shoeing, take 3 and (b) the local police being called and him going away for a while (not to mention the end of his RAF career (that he hated anyway, but that's a different story)).

Went to school on the Thursday morning and was seething with anger, shame and embarrassment. I felt that I was fizzing with anger and that I wanted to go to my redoubt to compose myself and went through the school gates, into the building, upstairs and into the library (I was the full-on geek, including being a school librarian).

Simon F came into the library and started giving me a hard time and I ignored him as with the benefit of information asymmetry I knew something he didn't. At the apogee of his abusive commentary and his muttering about how much of a shoeing he'd led the two days previously and how much I was going to get that very evening the headmaster walked out of the cupboard and, without saying a word, grabbed him and took him down to his office, where he was suspended for two weeks.

In that time I kept a low profile; within a year of that incident I'd been instrumental in setting up the school rugby team and been appointed captain, leading the team (including Simon F) to victory in the county championships and eventually taking myself to sub-national team not-quite-glory.

*Present*

As some of you are aware, my second marriage lasted sixteen days. Since that time my ex- has decided that she wants to destroy me through a campaign that has, thus far, comprised:

1. Having me arrested for bigamy and assault, amongst other things (released without charge in both incidents), leading to a complaint by me to the IPCC

2. Making sure that contracts have canned me on the basis of her behaviours, not mine (including her being mentally ill), leading to me being tempted (but not brave enough) to sue her

3. Publishing both on the internet and via a couple of tabloids stories of how much of a twat I am - both of which newspapers will be sued when I've got enough money together to be able to support the action; sued for (a) gross violation of privacy (b) factual inaccuracy

In all of this, I've not reacted *once* direct to her. I've wanted to and, as some of you know, I'm still madly in love with her, but having fought SO hard to take the moral high ground thus meaning that I can watch as she slowly implodes on herself and then - when this has happened - I can then deploy heavy artillery to those sycophants around her who have failed utterly to consider that there may be two sides to every story and that hers is not the truth.
(Wed 13th May 2009, 12:54, More)