THE ANGRY SKY

THE ANGRY SKY The first day was probably the worst. That was confirmation. You can't prepare yourself for that. I have Parkinson's disease. That's what I had to come to terms with. I had to pick up the pieces of my life and I had to start all over again. When I came into this world I came into it for a reason, I needed to know that it was worth it. I needed relevance. I wanted clarity. I had to move forward with my difficult journey and not waste any time as I had done in the past. This was my new life. However, challenging it might turn out to be. This was my time and it had to be now. The sky was on fire the night before last and it was angry. That was the warning and this was the confirmation and there was nothing I could have done to change it. I was a man on a mountain with an angry sky and I was paying the price. When you see something unusual that you have never seen before it makes you wonder. I was writing my journal in the summer room at the back of the house and, it must have been the early part of the evening because I happened to glance up and look out the back window and the sky was red. The sky was on fire. It was angry with me. I was angry with myself for being so indecisive and wasting some of my best years when I was fit and healthy and I sat back and did absolutely nothing. I sat back with a beer in my hand and I laughed at the clouds in the sky for blotting out the sun. And now I was paying the price with a sharp dose of reality. I had Parkinson's and that was that. And I could have accepted the fact that I had a serious neurological condition and taken the medication right from the start. That would have been the easy thing to do. That seemed to be the sensible thing to do, but something inside me was saying no. That wasn't right for me. I have always been impulsive and free-thinking, and illogical in some ways, but that was my thought process right or wrong. And if I made an error of judgement I only had myself to blame. But, I wanted to have a little bit more time for relative normality. And nearly forty-seven years later I am about to reach my sixty-fifth birthday, I am still on my journey, in relatively good health and I feel heaven-blessed. But my journey began when I was a teenager and still in full-time education at Cannock Chase Technical College in 1974. Academic life was a completely different world from the one I was used to because I was mixing mainly with mature students for the first time and that meant that the rules for studying and social behavior were more relaxed than school had been. The major difference was the structure of each day because I was attending lectures and seminars which felt very different from what I was used to. We weren't required to wear a uniform which was different in itself. I was transitioning into an adult world. But unfortunately, I wasn't maturing as a person. I was a juvenile in an adult world, which was a cocktail for disaster academically. Any self-discipline was thrown out the back window. I turned into this strange youth come prospective adult who was trying to act mature but in many respects was quite the opposite. I drank alcohol for the first time which wasn't helping my self-discipline to want to study. And, I was mixing in a completely different social world which meant that I was being invited to lots of parties and drinking so my priorities changed, that's if I had any priorities at all because I had no plans for what I was going to do. I turned to this weird kind of party animal number three who had no focus on what he was supposed to be doing, or what time of the day it was with a permanent smile on his face and a constant hangover. But as much as it was wreckless I suppose I was enjoying the here and now without a care in the world for the future. But, what the hell I had just turned seventeen, and I was trying to act like I was twenty which produced some rather comical situations at times but I didn't care because when Rob Keene looked in the mirror after spending two and a half hours grooming himself and trying to look like Robert Redford's younger brother which was a total impossibility considering how ordinary I looked, I was enjoying myself. But even so, I still had to write essays and turn up on time when I was expected to, so I had no time to think about anything of any importance in my party animal delusional world. I will always have a slightly blurred vision of the three years I literally spent roaming around the overtly long corridors of Cannock Chase technical college because, in some ways, they were good for me but in other ways, they were very bad because I was putting far too much pressure on myself. I had no specific plans for what I was doing or where I was going but it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time. And in that respect, I was very short-term and couldn't see further than the end of my big nose. But I didn't see a big nose and big ears when I looked at myself in the mirror every morning. I had this fantasy vision of myself as looking like something in-between Mick Ronson and Robert Redford's identical twin brother. Or at least that's what I wanted to believe but the reality of my appearance how I actually looked was comically very different. I thought the sun was shining out of my back side. I was halfway between leaving secondary modern school and adult life and as far as I was concerned the sky was the limit. I was developing a big bulge in the front of my jeans which I was having great difficulty keeping under control. I was slowly but surely leaving my youth behind and growing pubic hair. I had discovered sex for the first time and life was changing. It was a time of cool sunglasses, bell-bottomed jeans cheesecloth shirts and long hair, record collecting, concerts and alcohol, and kissing the girls, that's if they were willing, and if you were lucky, who knows? But even if you weren't it was always worth a try. Another thing to brag to your mates about. It was a fun time but the overriding thing was the music. The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Alice Cooper Genesis, Yes, Steely Dan, Thin Lizzy, Robyn Trower, Kiss, Sensational Alex Harvey Band, The Tubes, Queen, Cockney Rebel, and Be Bop Deluxe I loved them all. But it didn't just rock music because I liked other bands and styles as well such as the Average White Band, Rufus featuring Chaka Khan, Joan Armatrading, Linda Lewis, Kiki Dee, Steeleye Span, and Fairport Convention. Two of the great albums that I bought in 1974 were by Stevie Wonder called Talking Book and Innervisions. I can remember buying Rufusized featuring Chaka Khan. Genesis The lamb lies down on Broadway., Roxy Music Country life, Sparks Kimono my house. There was some great music around. I had enough money to buy tickets for rock concerts which made following the music scene even better. I'd just left secondary school and was heading into college life at Cannock Chase Technical College so it was a time of change for me. You can never relive the past but you can write about it. The biggest love of my life has always been my music, because I couldn't get a girlfriend, especially in my early adolescent years, that is until I was seventeen and then I must have eaten something overnight because I looked in the mirror one morning in 1975 and all I could see was Robert Redford staring back at me and I became this supercharged sex machine with long blonde hair, cheesecloth shirt, and a big nose, which I blame my dad and grandad for. I was going to Cannock Chase Technical College for the first time and I didn't have to wear a school uniform and it felt great. For some strange reason only known to God, I had changed from Adrian Mole into Robert Redford and become a member of the hole-in-the-wall gang with tight jeans and a bulge in his pants. Those were the deluded thoughts of Robert James Keene of twenty-seven Devon Green Rumer Hill. And even worse, I'd discovered lager, which was to become even more comical when I strutted around like some prime cockerel covered in his brother's old spice aftershave at the entrance to the technical college. And even more important lessons had transformed themselves into lectures and seminars and Robert James Keene had become a student and was absolutely loving it. But first I had to grow some facial hair like a mustache. Oh, and I had lectures to attend and essays to write and my education to think of but that paled into insignificance compared to what I was about to discover. I was about to discover girls. The whole of my teenage years had been built on the foundations of Bolan and Bowie strutting their stuff down the corridors of my education. I was living in a glam rock fantasy world of birds, cool dudes, lager, and of course Lord of the Rings, and somewhere underneath all the verbal flannel was the real Robert James Keene. I was seventeen going on eighteen and I was trying to transition from adolescent to adult life and I was stuck in a lift somewhere in between. But teenage wildlife has a habit of catching up with you and that came in the form of exams every year and somehow I had to put the hard academic work in to try and find my way through them and come out the other side. It was like being Dustin Hofman in the graduate but playing it out in real life. And it wasn't funny because I couldn't focus or concentrate on the things that were important. I was spending my time going to rock concerts festivals parties but I was young and I was able to burn the candle at both ends. In fact, I've lived most of my teenage life on very little sleep. I've been a member of the wide awake club for so long that I can't remember when I joined or what I joined for because I kept falling asleep mentally during the day. And somewhere around this time was when my first serious girlfriend came into my life with long black hair and kinky boots. Valene Thacker from Norton Canes. I have absolutely no idea why she took an interest in me, maybe it was the three pages that I recited from Lord of the Rings whilst standing at the bar in the Royal Oak but whatever it was we seemed to enjoy each other's company and off we went. Which only added to my lack of focus in the world of my education. I was literally bungling my way through my teenage life from day to the next with Valene on my right arm. This is my teenage song which still resonates in my brain and I will sing it for as long as my memories remain. I will remember them until my dying day because I was young, healthy and I was enjoying my reckless abandon. And if I was being honest I hadn't got a clue what I was doing but whatever it was I had a lot of fun doing it. I was an innocent bystander watching teenage promiscuity in its finest hour and I was loving every second of it. The Sundance kid had developed new powers because I very soon realized that looks weren't everything and that if you can make a girl laugh and even be slightly interested in the conversation you are having with them then they will enjoy being with you, and then you are halfway there? Halfway to where? Well, that will start to make sense later. But for the time being Robert James Keene of 27 Devon Green was having a rather spiffing time. and I discovered J R R Tolkien and Lord of the Rings which was even better because now I had something interesting to talk about over a pint of lager with the lads in the Royal Oak Cannock instead of the girl with big knockers on page three of the Sun newspaper. I was developing a strange attribute called charm. I could even recite a bit of poetry by Dylan Thomas which was even cooler for a dude like me. Oh yes, Robert James Keene of number twenty-seven Devon Green Cannock had finally turned into the creature that he had always wanted to be. I had become a cool dude. I could talk about Tolkien and Dylan Thomas and girls were finding me interesting! Of course, the girl on page three of the sun with big knockers was still high up in the conversation over a pint of lager in the Royal Oak, and music and football and the next game of pool or table football but now I had more strings to my bow because now I could talk about English Literature and Lord of the Rings. Well actually I was still only halfway through Fellowship of the Ring and that had taken me three weeks to read but I had also cheated and flicked through the other two books and read a couple of pages here and there so that I keep up to speed with the professional Tolkien worshipper's who could recite every single bloody word. But to be taken seriously and have the great honor of being allowed to join the fellowship of the Royal Oak you had to buy a fluorescent map of Middle Earth and stick it on the bedroom wall directly opposite your bed because if you were very lucky and there was a full moon and you were stupid enough to have left your curtains open your map of Middle Earth would glow in the dark. Whoever came up with the phrase Life's a long song was dead right as that particular saying could definitely be applied to me because I was sailing through student life like a rudderless ship, not caring in what direction I was going but enjoying every minute of it nonetheless. And fortunately for me the next two or three years while I was at Cannock Chase Technical College, particularly in the first two years I was having a great time without a care in the world, going to loads of student parties, not getting back until early hours, if at all and then staggering back up the road to the college and starting all over again. But when you're eighteen years old and you think the sun shines out of your own backside, as I did, physically I was able to do that. But I wasn't thinking of the future, I was thinking of the here and now, and I knew that it would catch up with me sooner or later, but not just yet. As far as I was concerned, every time I looked in the mirror all I could see was Robert Redford's twin brother but I was living in fantasyland as you can imagine. The funny thing about drinking over at the Royal Oak and not going back to lectures was that we ended up having a drink with the lecturers who were teaching us and very often we'd rock up halfway through the lecture, apologize to the lecturer concerned then a couple of hours later ends up playing darts with the same lecturer after we had finished our lectures for the day. Where was the sense in that? But you don't see sense do you because you're enjoying yourself too much and more importantly you are learning about adult things and adult life, or at last, that's what I was trying to do, but if I was being honest, I was fumbling my way through life pretending that I knew everything but actually knowing very little. But it was serious stuff and I was trying to act sixteen going on nineteen which was quite embarrassing really because the image did not fit the reality. I can remember every single miserable bus journey I made over to Wolverhampton Polytechnic each day because the weather always used to be so miserable and uninviting. The smell of the hops from Bank's brewery in the center of the town as I jumped off the bus at the old bus station and trudged passed the grand theatre towards the Poly. I would briefly stop to have a quick look in the window of Sundown Records before going to my first lecture. But, by this point, I knew there was something wrong with me, but I didn't know what was causing it so I carried on as if everything was alright. And I buried my thought's in what I had to do because I had a lot of serious academic work ahead of me so I had to try and knuckle down and get on with it. It was my first term and so I had to get to know the students who were going to be my friends for the next three years. It was pretty much the same as it had been at Cannock Chase Tech except there were a different set of people and the building bigger. Life was starting to get a little more serious by the day., but because I had such a lot of coursework to do I didn't have much time to think about anything. When I enrolled at the Polytechnic in Wolverhampton in September 1977 It was done on the spur of the moment, because it seemed the right thing to do. But, I was already struggling with panic attacks and anxiety issues, and the last thing I needed was three more years of academic pressure after struggling with my O and A level exams. But, that's what I did. I signed up for a three-year degree course with more pressurized exams, which would eventually tip me over the edge with serious health issues but I didn't see that and thought I could push my way through it when in truth my petrol tank was already running on empty and I was about to do serious damage to the engine. And it's easy to see in hindsight, but I was eighteen years old and didn't think further than the end of my nose. But, I was excited and, looking forward to it so that's how I perceived it at the time. It was one of those 'oh well' decisions because after finally getting my O and A levels I still hadn't got a specific career in mind so I carried on studying. I was always a pretty sociable party animal but at the same time, I was happy in my own company so I used to dip in and out of the social scene. I wasn't living in the halls of residence in the first year because I only lived ten miles away so I commuted each day by bus to save money. My time at the Poly was a contradiction in many respects but that was because of Parkinson's. It was my first year as a degree student and I felt a little uncomfortable because I had only decided to do the degree course a week before it had started so it was a bit of a rush job. And because I was late I couldn't get any student accommodation in the student halls of residence so I was having to commute from my family home each day from Cannock to Wolverhampton and back again. And the trouble with not being in student union accommodation was that you tended not to hear about a lot of the social life that was happening such as the non-stop parties that were taking place and since I had been a party animal at that time and since that was partly the reason I got on the course in the first place I didn't want to miss out on any of the nightlife in and around the Polytechnic itself and for the first year that meant a lot of rough sleeping on people's floors or sofa's if they were available or even more luxurious accommodation although that usually proved most uncomfortable towards the end of the night because students accommodation tended to have very narrow single beds and there was only going to be one winner, under those circumstances, and it wasn't going to be me. So unless I managed to get the last bus back to Cannock which would have meant me leaving every single social event I ever attended early I had to ask some of my friends I had to let me sleep on their floor or walk it all the way back home from Wolverhampton to Cannock which was dodgy at the best of times because there were a lot of gangs roaming around in that era such as The Temple street gang for example and if you lived in and around the Wolverhampton area at that time you would certainly have heard of them. So it wasn't very safe to walk around the back streets of Wolverhampton by yourself late at night but I ran the gauntlet many times during my first year as a student because I had no other choice. But that was the sort of person I was at that time. I'd just turned eighteen and I really didn't care about the dangers around me. All I cared about in 1978 was enjoying my life. The academic qualifications and all the rewards that went with getting a good honors degree were peripheral to me at the time because that wasn't what I was doing it for. The truth of the matter was that I didn't know why I was doing it but it seemed a good idea at the time. I had no preconceived ideas of what living with Parkinson's would be like for somebody who had just turned twenty because I hadn't told anybody and the reason for that was that I didn't want to be seen as some kind of freak. That was the last thing I wanted. I wanted to live as normal a life as possible for as long as I could without making a fuss about it. I suppose in a way I was embarrassed about the fact that I was showing signs of Parkinsonism and all I wanted to do was lock it away in a dark box and not let it out but it wasn't quite as simple as that. I had no idea when the symptoms would change or worsen and I got on with living the life of a twenty-year-old, who should have had his whole life in front of him but it didn't feel like that at the time. I felt scared and all alone but I'm glad I did it that way because it taught me a life lesson. I didn't read any books or make any attempt to find out about it because I thought that the less I knew the better, which might sound illogical in some ways because any sensible person would probably want confirmation of what the illness was, but I knew instinctively without being told. Confirmation would mean realization and I still hadn't finished studying. I felt very isolated because of that as there were no computers, mobile phones, or internet to access any information but that was the way I chose to manage the situation I found myself in. I was twenty years of age, into the second year of my degree at Wolverhampton Poly by scamming my way through the first year of botched exams and getting just enough coursework in on time to have barely enough marks to get through. I was a prescription addict courtesy of the family doctor who put it down to worrying too much and examining nerves and prescribed me tranquilizer's in the form of Tranxene. which when mixed with alcohol made me as high as a kite, but what the hell, I felt really good but then again who wouldn't when you mix tranquilizers with alcohol? I was floating in a sea of tranquility when I was supposed to be learning how to swim but I really didn't care at the time because the music was carrying me a long long way, but that dark shadow that was lurking behind was never too far away and I literally couldn't shake it off in more ways than one. And, if anything it was starting to get worse as I slowly drank myself into a drunken stupor in Wolverhampton. But at least the alcohol was helping to hide the shaking until I sobered up that is and then the tremors got worse, but I did such a good job of hiding it with the tranquilizers from the doctor who kept allowing me to have without ever questioning why that I was living in dreamland and life was a gas because I was walking around with a permanent cheeky grin on my face. But I didn't care because I was riding on the wave of my own addiction and having a great time listening to some great music. I was living a lie and I knew it, but I did nothing about it and carried on as if everything was alright it's those moments that are life changers and can change everything and I did absolutely nothing. I was hiding the fact that I had a really serious illness about to engulf my life and I was pretending that everything was normal. How normal is that? But I didn't really know what Parkinson's was other than the fact that it was an older person's illness and not mine. I had a ticking time bomb sitting in my pocket and I was hoping that it wasn't going to go off. So I carried on with my degree course and pretended that everything was alright but it wasn't and I told no one. And somehow I managed to muddle my way through my degree course and get a qualification out of it, but it meant absolutely nothing to me other than relief. I was relieved to have got through it and not ended up with alcohol poisoning but I felt no sense of pride or academic achievement because I did it for the sake of it because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I felt like a piece of driftwood drifting in a sea of nothing. I had no past no present and no future, but life was carrying on around me, and all the people that I knew were moving on and doing other things and I was in suspended animation. So I shut myself away in my secret world and tried to forget about my reality and just listened to music. And then a penny dropped in my brain. I needed a job because I needed money. And that involved more stress and more lies on my part because I had to pretend that I was healthy and that I was employable. So I picked myself up off the floor and got on with it and found myself a job. It wasn't a very exciting job but it was the least stressful job I could find and it was a job non the less. I found myself working in a library of all places and I managed to bamboozle my way through interviews and pretended that I was perfectly healthy. But it was quite obvious to anybody that I was overqualified for the job. Who in their right mind would want to work as a library assistant and earn a basic wage when they had enough qualifications to be doing a professional job and earn a decent wage? And I was the only person who knew the answer to that one and I wasn't going to tell anybody, until one day I woke up and my hand started to shake and I just couldn't stop it and I knew then that the game was up and I just couldn't hide this illness that I had for so long anymore. By the time I'd finished my course at Wolverhampton Polytechnic although I'd managed to get a degree at the end of it all, it was a pretty poor one, to say the least as I only managed to get a third-class honors degree. But considering how little effort I put into the whole thing I was surprised I managed that get that. All I felt was a sense of relief that it was all over and I didn't want to have to go through another exam again. But the thing I hadn't taken into consideration was that life is one long exam and if you don't put in the effort you don't get through it. But you only learn that over the course of time and it usually happens when you least expect it. My whole life came to a grinding halt the day I turned on the television and saw a vision of my future. I was under the misapprehension that all those little tremors and clumsiness that I had been feeling over the last few years were nothing but exam nerves and I'd put any thoughts that it might be something serious to the back of my mind and more or less forgotten about it. Until I turned to the television and saw myself up there in a documentary about Parkinson's disease, and from that point onwards there was absolutely no doubt in my own mind what it was and I hadn't even been diagnosed at this point. But I knew as soon as I saw those classic symptoms, of the tremor and the walking and the clumsiness, it was all there right n front of me. But the biggest shock of all was the age difference. The men and women in this documentary were all old people and I was only nineteen years old. And as much as I wanted to believe my fears were misplaced but deep down I think knew that it was a hard pill for me to swallow. The biggest problem I had was my inability to be able to tell any about it because for some reason I felt a sense of shame and just didn't want to tell anybody about it, and kept it a secret locked away for nearly ten years until I was officially diagnosed at the age of twenty-nine. I have no way of describing how I was feeling during this time, other than using the word numb. And that's probably the nearest, and the other one that comes to mind is the word shock because I just couldn't get up off my own bed. My mom shouted up to me a couple of times but fortunately, she didn't come up the stairs because she thought I had fallen asleep due to my course at The Poly, but she couldn't have been further from the truth. And I've quite often wondered What if? And more importantly what if I had told my mom, maybe things might have turned out differently but the end result would have been this would have been the same. We all go through phases in life in the way we dress and style and during my student years, I wore a duffle coat dandy as we used to call them. They may not have been the most stylish garment anybody could ever wear but by god did they keep you warm and they would last forever. And for a would-be student like me, they made sense because they were cheap to buy and were multi-purpose. But unfortunately, there weren't many colors to choose from but that didn't matter because they were perfect for student life. But the real fashion accessory with the duffle coat was the Paddington bear-style scarf and woolly hat which was particularly appropriate for a damp and miserable place like Wolverhampton where it always seemed to rain. And you mix that with the constant smell of hops and water from Bank's brewery in the center of the town and you had quite a potent brew on your hands. And some days the smell of the hops and the rain meant you could feel tipsy before the day had even begun, especially on Monday mornings when the brewery used to do most of its brewing. But at least it made you feel happy and relaxed. The other great memory of student life both at Cannock Chase Technical College and Wolverhampton Polytechnic which tells you everything about my character and my attitude towards my student life and the education system in general was the ridiculous amount of time I spent playing on the pinball machine and the pool table in the common room and cafeteria. My god did I love playing pinball and pool respectively. But that was the semi-moronic entertainment that kept me going rather than worrying about the coursework that I didn't get finished on time. That was how my life was drifting along without anything to anchor it down and without any thoughts of where I would end up. Oh my, how I loved those games not to mention the table football as well and that was my student life wrapped up in a nutshell. the hat is apart from all the lectures and seminars that I never quite made it to but who cares when you are a teenager I was enjoying every minute of it. But when you consider how my life was about to nosedive and smash into an unmovable object like Parkinson's disease thank god I did. However, there comes a point where you have to get serious about the work that you are supposed to do and hand it in because if you don't complete the necessary course with the right grades and you don't get through your end-of-year exams with enough points you are forced to do a re-sit and if you don't pass those then you might as well forget it. And that was the pressure of academic life for me because I never did enough to relax when it came to the end-of-year exams. I had the concentration of a newt and was easily distracted by a pretty girl smiling at me than my next lecture about the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. But I was a romantic fool in a duffle coat dandy with my reputation to think of and Adolf Hitler was the last thing I wanted to think about. I was twenty years of age, into the second year of my degree at Wolverhampton Poly by scamming my way through the first year of botched exams and getting just enough coursework in on time to have barely enough marks to get through. I was a prescription addict courtesy of the family doctor who put my Parkinson's down to anxiety, and stress and prescribed me tranquilizer's named a drug called Tranxene. which when mixed with alcohol made me as high as a kite, but what the hell, I felt really good but then again who wouldn't when you mix tranquilizers with alcohol. I was floating in a sea of tranquility when I was supposed to be learning how to swim but I really didn't care at the time because the music was carrying me a long long way, but that dark shadow that was lurking behind was never too far away and I literally couldn't shake it off in more ways than one. And, if anything it was starting to get worse as I slowly drank myself into a drunken stupor in Wolverhampton. But at least the alcohol was helping to hide the shaking until I sobered up that is and then the tremors got worse, but I did such a good job of hiding it with the tranquilizers from the doctor who kept allowing me to have without ever questioning why that I was living in dreamland and life was a gas because I was walking around with a permanent cheeky grin on my face. But I didn't care because I was riding on the wave of my own addiction and having a great time listening to some great music. I was living a lie and I knew it, but I did nothing about it and carried on as if everything was alright it's those moments that are life changers and can change everything and I did absolutely nothing. I was hiding the fact that I had a really serious illness about to engulf my life and I was pretending that everything was normal. How normal is that? But I didn't really know what Parkinson's was other than the fact that it was an older person's illness and not mine. I had a ticking time bomb sitting in my pocket and I was hoping that it wasn't going to go off. So I carried on with my degree course and pretended that everything was alright but it wasn't and I told no one. And somehow I managed to muddle my way through my degree course and get a qualification out of it, but it meant absolutely nothing to me other than relief. I was relieved to have got through it and not ended up with alcohol poisoning but I felt no sense of pride or academic achievement because I did it for the sake of it because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I felt like a piece of driftwood drifting in a sea of nothing. I had no past no present and no future, but life was carrying on around me, and all the people that I knew were moving on and doing other things and I was in suspended animation. So I shut myself away in my secret world and tried to forget about my reality and just listened to music. And then a penny dropped in my brain. I needed a job because I needed money. And that involved more stress and more lies on my part because I had to pretend that I was healthy and that I was employable. So I picked myself up off the floor and got on with it and found myself a job. It wasn't a very exciting job but it was the least stressful job I could find and it was a job non the less. I found myself working in a library of all places and I managed to bamboozle my way through interviews and pretended that I was perfectly healthy. But it was quite obvious to anybody that I was overqualified for the job. Who in their right mind would want to work as a library assistant and earn a basic wage when they had enough qualifications to be doing a professional job and earn a decent wage? And I was the only person who knew the answer to that one and I wasn't going to tell anybody, until one day I woke up and my hand started to shake and I just couldn't stop it and I knew then that the game was up and I just couldn't hide this illness that I had for so long anymore. By the time I'd finished my course at Wolverhampton Polytechnic although I'd managed to get a degree at the end of it all, it was a pretty poor one, to say the least as I only managed to get a third-class honors degree. But considering how little effort I put into the whole thing I was surprised I managed that get that. All I felt was a sense of relief that it was all over and I didn't want to have to go through another exam again. But the thing I hadn't taken into consideration was that life is one long exam and if you don't put in the effort you don't get through it. But you only learn that over the course of time and it usually happens when you least expect it. My whole life came to a grinding halt the day I turned on the television and saw a vision of my future. I was under the misapprehension that all those little tremors and clumsiness that I had been feeling over the last few years were nothing but exam nerves and I'd put any thoughts that it might be something serious to the back of my mind and more or less forgotten about it. Until I turned to the television and saw myself up there in a documentary about Parkinson's disease, and from that point onwards there was absolutely no doubt in my own mind what it was and I hadn't even been diagnosed at this point. But I knew as soon as I saw those classic symptoms, of the tremor and the walking and the clumsiness, it was all there right n front of me. But the biggest shock of all was the age difference. The men and women in this documentary were all old people and I was only nineteen years old. And as much as I wanted to believe my fears were misplaced but deep down I think knew that it was a hard pill for me to swallow. The biggest problem I had was my inability to be able to tell any about it because for some reason I felt a sense of shame and just didn't want to tell anybody about it, and kept it a secret locked away for nearly ten years until I was officially diagnosed at the age of twenty-nine. I have no way of describing how I was feeling during this time, other than using the word numb. And that's probably the nearest, and the other one that comes to mind is the word shock because I just couldn't get up off my own bed. My mom shouted up to me a couple of times but fortunately, she didn't come up the stairs because she thought I had fallen asleep due to my course at The Poly, but she couldn't have been further from the truth. And I've quite often wondered What if? And more importantly what if I had told my mom, maybe things might have turned out better but the end result would have been this would have warned off far too soon.

SPIRIT OF MIND

SPIRIT OF MIND I have a spiritual awareness of myself now that I've never known or experienced before in which I've discovered a universe within me, which is so vast, so infinite that anything seems possible. If I reached up to the stars I could touch them. I could swim to the bottom of the deepest dark ocean. I could fly like a golden eagle. And that's because I have clarity where all my senses are enhanced and grounded by the natural world around me in which Parkinson's is a microcosm of nature and nothing more. Parkinson's restricts my physical body but it can never control my mind and that's where my hidden strength lies because if you have the strength of mind, the strength of purpose then you can live with physical discomfort, which is what I do. I do it without the help of science or technology and on limited medication for functionality as my dopamine-producing cells deplete. But I accept that and I live for each day now because each day is worth a hundred years.

THE TREE AND THE WIND

Sometimes I sit on the highest branch near the top of this big old tree and I look down on the world below and I wonder if there is anybody following me up this tree of knowledge called the Parkinson's tree. We all know something but we don't know everything. I stopped fighting this illness a long, long time ago and I decided to make it my friend which is why I have been able to climb so high. Every branch that I've been able to climb has taught me a lesson, but I still don't know everything so I am having to revisit some of the branches that I've already climbed in order to learn a little bit more. In fact, we are all trying to climb this tree of knowledge and find out how far we can go. And I am near the top of the tree and I still have a lot to learn. But the higher I climb the harder it gets, and so every now and again I sit down on the nearest branch and have a rest. And, while I am sitting there having a well-earned rest I look down on all these thousands of people with Parkinson's disease running around the base of the tree screaming their heads off and getting angry because they can't clamber onto the first branch. And that's because they think that they are trying to fight this illness when what they are really doing is fighting with themselves, but they can't see it. You have to learn the art of humility in order to be able to climb onto the first branch of the tree of knowledge. WINDSONG I looked up at the trees outside my bedroom window and they were gently moving and swaying with the gentle breeze, backward and forwards, backward and forwards because the wind was singing a happy song to them and making them dance and feel alive. And they seemed so happy in that very moment together and yet within a very short space of time they would eventually wither away and fall to the ground as the seasons change. But they didn't know that was going to happen to them but I did and I felt so sad for them because their lives would be so short. And I felt very very lucky because my lifespan was so much longer than the leaves on the tree and I would have more time to appreciate the gift I had been given of a long life regardless of whether I had Parkinson's disease or not. And my illness seemed so irrelevant in the ways of nature because I was still alive and still had a quality of life that the leaves on the tree outside my bedroom window would never ever have the chance to experience. But we never think like that because we always feel sorry for ourselves in our own selfish lives. Everything that happens is part of the natural world and was meant to be.

47 YEARS I have to take each day as it comes now and accept them for what they are good or bad and move on. I don't dwell on them or analyze them in any way because they are what they are. But that's Parkinson's for you constantly changing, mutating in so many different ways and you have to take it as it comes and adapt accordingly. It's a very slow decline in physicality so slow and subtle that you hardly know it's happening but it's constant and always there but it's happening nonetheless. And, as the symptoms change you have to adapt to them because you have no choice, and I do that as I have done for over forty-seven years and get on with my life as best I can. Parkinsonism has become a reality for me, something I cannot change in my foreseeable future. I don't question it in any way and Parkinson's is now part of me, which may sound unacceptable to some reading this but by accepting it into my life I have found peace of mind and understanding. And now I can live with the symptoms and the pain because I have accepted it as being normal. The laws of nature selected me for whatever reason to have to live with this terrible neurological degenerative condition. However, in saying that while I have suffered and struggled to come to terms with certain aspects of it, I have also gained from it as well because as one-half of my brain has deteriorated the creative side has become a dominant feature and I am so grateful for that. And, although the functionality side of my brain has changed in a radical way because now I have become artistically more creative, a lot less functional. As my ability to carry out functionality has declined my artistic creative ability has blossomed. So, there are silver linings in amongst the negativity the irony being that it has been something I have been searching for most of my life and I have found it in the most unlikely of places. I have a clarity of thought that I have never known or experienced before. A cup of water has transformed itself into a glass of wine. Bread and butter have become a salmon sandwich, and walking on the moon has become a distinct possibility in my literal creativity. I have become my own universe in which anything almost seems a possibility. I can travel to the far reaches of an unknown galaxy without moving a muscle. The world is my oyster, the sky is the limit and my Parkinson's life has become that much more bearable. I have found my inner strength from my outer weakness and have dismissed Parkinsonism with a simple swish of my hand, and now life is bearable and perfectly understandable. I have created a safe haven that has freed me from Parkinsonism and I feel reborn.