2-7-2021: Day 22
Woke up. Feeling broken.
The summer mist was blowing in, covering the tarmacked pavements, closing off the terraced streets and blanketing the seventies-style houses of this quiet pedestrian estate. The descending mist seemed to somehow mirror my waking thoughts, actions, and progress, reflecting the dulled inner workings of my chemically addled brain.
Start of the month. Time for the Lee Harris energy weather forecast for July. I have a curious affinity and strange Venn diagram crossover shared with this cryptic energy psychic or intuitive. He kick-started and features in my book ‘The Soul Asylums’.
He popped up on my phone feed a month into the first Lockdown, when I was down, out, and buried in the Trenches. And within hours I was rattling off words for the ages, for the first time in ages.
And tuning-in to Harris’s sermon from the garden mount, one line of his July psalms catches my attention – of fluctuating energy levels, coming out of the ‘institutionalised’ prison of Lockdown – as I go in search of a brew.
5-7-2021: Day 25
Outside, the sun has got his hat on, with a wink and cheeky nod, that today could be a scorching bake-off summer’s day. I am playing a four-ball of golf at noon for the first time in aeons, and I have a strange, slightly queasy feeling of doom.
As the sun rises in the sky, promising a midday stroke of sunburn for the sporting brave, I roll back the years to remember an emotionally fraught golf game with a hideous suicidal shadow.
I was swinging my club, damaged and uncomfortably numb, on the unforgiving third hole of Benfield golf course, on a gloomy misty-wet day in the late Noughties. I was not on my game. A long painful week earlier, I had come round in ICU from a coma after a drugs overdose in a Worthing B&B, and this was the therapy my family felt was needed. Blunt, practical and bonkers. This strange, sad, and mournful day endures, and somehow frames the fighting survivor mentality of my inner golfer today.