i4detail's posterous

Please use this number and maybe save a life

The day started well enough. A sunny Saturday morning in January. My husband and I bumped into our youngest daughter and her boyfriend in town and we all wandered in to M&S to get a sandwich and have a chat.  Our daughter, who's 27, is one of life's sunbeams - beautiful, caring, vivacious, intelligent; half an hour spent in her company and you feel warmer and... well, just a little better than you did before.

Her beautiful face crumpled in total, ashen despair

So, we were very happy to be sitting with her and her lovely boyfriend, just catching up on news.  Her phone rang and she saw that it was one of her best friends and answered it with her usual bright greeting.  Within seconds we knew that something was terribly wrong.  We watched her beautiful face crumple into total, ashen despair.  She stammered some questions, all the time her eyes fixed on her boyfriend, with tears pouring down her face and looking as if someone had just ripped her heart out.

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Taming the mind monkeys

The tag line to this blog refers to a nocturnal problem I suffer from, along with millions of other people.  You know, that moment in the early hours of the morning when you're dragged from a deep sleep to lie in a restless, brain-stewing state.  Your mind is full of a hundred things, bubbling away and trying to get your attention, with no chance of slipping back into a peaceful sleep.

The Buddhists talk about this as monkeys dashing about in your mind, too excited and restless to let you focus on anything; just plain disruptive .  I have a HUGE colony of mind monkeys in my head.  They're nocturnal.  There are many different types, sizes and characters.  They gang up on me.

The first ones to appear are usually the

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Is your Bank Manager in quarantine?

"I stared at the man sitting opposite me as he studied the sheets of paper I'd pushed towards him. In his late 50s perhaps, pale and podgy from a life lived in an overheated office under the glare of "environmentally friendly" fluorescent lights. I was trying to see if the index finger of his right hand was distended or over-developed after a lifetime of stabbing at a calculator keypad, but I couldn't quite see. He shuffled the papers, staring at the neat rows of figures, colourful pie charts and graphs.

He sat back in his chair, a black mock leather swivelly chair set a few inches higher than mine. He looked at home and comfortable in his surroundings. I was not comfortable; my chair was small and grey and hard. A "can't wait till I get out of here" chair.

Eventually, he looked up, a voice just slightly tremulous, saying ... 

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