Strange nights spent away from where you normally sleep (usually no beds involved)

[Balderdasha]

That's an incredible distance. Are you sure there's no typo here?

No typo. She was a terrifyingly determined woman. And very fit. Much later on, as a woman in her late eighties with the beginnings of Alzheimer's disease, she had a row with my grandpa and walked out. He couldn't find her anywhere and was distraught. A couple of hours later, she turned up on foot at the factory where my dad worked, which was 14 miles from her home.

[Sporting]

My grandmother packed a lunch for herself, got on her bike and cycled 169 miles in one day to go and tell him off

That's an incredible distance. Are you sure there's no typo here?

[Balderdasha]

1998-2001. As a child, I never really learnt to ride a bike properly. I could ride one with stabilisers, but then we moved house when I was 5 to a house on top of a hill, and there was nowhere to practice cycling apart from hurtling headfirst down the hill at terrifying speed.

Then, soon after we moved into the house, we were burgled. The burglar didn't manage to get into the house, but broke into the garage. He stole all the family bikes, and all the discount pig meat out of our chest freezer. We were hard up so didn't buy new bikes for a while. By the time we did, I'd developed a fear of cycling.

Fast forward to my teenage years. I was at school in Cambridge and all my friends could cycle. Several of them had bike racks and I perfected the art of sitting side saddle and balancing oh the bike racks as my friends raced around the town. Age 16 I started dating a boy who cycled a racing bike with clip-in shoes. I used to sit on the back half of the saddle, knees tucked in, holding onto his shoulders while he pedalled standing up.

Everyone was in agreement that I should learn to cycle but I was terrified. These were the years where there was a house party every weekend. My boyfriend or one of my friends would give me a ride to the party, I'd get a bit tipsy and then I'd practice cycling on the way home. It was always around 2am, the roads were empty and quiet. At first, I could only ride in a straight line and I stopped by steering into wheelie bins. It took me ages to summon the courage to take one hand off the handle bars to signal.

By the time I started university though, I could ride a bike.

[Balderdasha]

2017. December. We were hoping to have a quiet Christmas. Early in the month, I woke up in the middle of the night with sharp stabbing pains in my abdomen. For the last six months I had been regularly going to zumba and yoga in an effort to halt my ballooning weight. So I tried all the yoga moves I knew to try and dislodge the pain. Nothing worked. Painkillers didn't work. Indigestion tablets didn't work. I woke my husband up and we googled the possible causes, deciding that it was serious enough to phone 111, who then told me to go to A&E. We were thinking possible appendicitis. Later on, my mum told me my dad had appendicitis, a fact I'd never heard before. Just like I only found out my grandpa had been diagnosed with schizophrenia after I had my psychotic episode. Would have been useful to know the family medical history.

Anyway, I got a taxi into hospital by myself and waited in agony for a couple of hours before they managed to get me on a drip and some more industrial strength painkillers. The conclusion from a barrage of tests was that I had suspected gall stones which were blocking a duct and causing deranged liver functioning.

I had to stay in hospital for three days. Fortunately, December is usually a quieter month for my husband and he was able to look after the children. The gall stone managed to dislodge itself without the need for surgery, but I was told there would be more and it was just a matter of time before I had another painful attack. I was put on a waiting list to have my gall bladder removed, and advised, if possible, to lose weight before the surgery. Those three days, with someone bringing me meals and the chance to read rubbish on my phone, were like a mini holiday. I think I even posted on here at the time.

Edit: I almost forgot, I was also put on a strict low fat diet to try and prevent any more flare ups before the surgery.

[Amor de Cosmos]

My grandpa died. My last grandparent. A few days before his 95th birthday. He'd been a little bit under the weather and staying in bed at his care home, but the day he died, he got out of bed, demanded (and received) kippers and vanilla ice cream for breakfast, then went back to bed and had a mini stroke. He held on just long enough for my mum to get there and hold his hand, then passed away relatively peacefully.

This reminds me of my Dad's death. He'd gone into hospital the day after my Mum had gone into a care home, supposedly for respite care (which eventually lasted four years until she died.) I phoned my Dad every day. Though a nurse told me he was very ill, he sounded relatively chipper for an 88-year-old. Chatty, coherent, we talked about his beloved Blades and how his grand-kids were doing. I never mentioned Mum, because I knew he never forgave himself for agreeing to her "incarceration." One evening he told me he'd been given a can of peaches, which he was really looking forward to. He went on and on about them, then began getting distressed because he couldn't find them, "Where are those peaches? I bet someone's taken them!" "Nah, Dad they've just been mislaid, you'll find them in the morning." He died that night. I don't think he ever found the peaches. I'm pretty sure they never existed.

[Balderdasha]

2008. The ten days in a cupboard in Hong Kong that I mentioned briefly in another post.

My grandpa died. My last grandparent. A few days before his 95th birthday. He'd been a little bit under the weather and staying in bed at his care home, but the day he died, he got out of bed, demanded (and received) kippers and vanilla ice cream for breakfast, then went back to bed and had a mini stroke. He held on just long enough for my mum to get there and hold his hand, then passed away relatively peacefully.

I was due to travel to Hong Kong with the graffiti boyfriend two days later to visit his mum. I obviously suggested cancelling but my family were adamant that I should still go and said they'd postpone the funeral until I got back ten days later. I went to view the body with my sister and nieces before I left. We wrote notes on little cards decorated with poppies from the funeral home and put them in his coffin. Only the oldest nieces were meant to go in but the youngest niece, younger than two, screamed until she was allowed in too.

My grandpa was a complex character. His mother came from a relatively well-off family, but she had an affair with a railway man, refused to marry him or have an abortion and was kicked out. My grandpa was born into poverty in 1913, a slum dwelling with one standpipe at the end of the road where they had to choose between bread with butter OR jam OR dripping for dinner every night. His mother married an alcoholic abusive divorcee later and he acquired step-siblings, then half-siblings. When he went to school, my grandpa refused to take on his stepfather's name and insisted on using the name on his birth certificate, much to his mother's shame. He revelled in being illegitimate, a bastard.

My grandpa excelled at school and met my grandmother at Sunday school aged 13 or 14. They dated off and on until he won a place at Bangor university to study history. They continued writing to each other until one day a letter arrived where my grandpa described suspiciously romantic hill walks with a fellow female student. My grandmother packed a lunch for herself, got on her bike and cycled 169 miles in one day to go and tell him off. She then went to Belgium for a year as an au pair to teach him a lesson. They married soon after she returned.

My grandpa qualified as a teacher and my grandparents began moving around the country with his teaching placements. They had their first daughter at the start of the second world war and gave her a German name as a protest at the futility of war. They discussed spacing their children five years apart so they could afford to send them to university (obviously the children were going to study at Cambridge). Sometimes they had to move because my grandpa got too close to another teacher or female student.

My grandpa was exempt from conscription for two reasons. He was too old and he was in a protected profession. He signed up anyway to get away from my grandmother and their baby. My grandpa mostly told rip-roaring tales about the war, all camaraderie and cooking beans out of a tin over the fire. He led a radio unit whose job was to sneak ahead of the front lines and lay communication lines as the troops advanced. Later, he was posted to Palestine. But whenever we ate at a restaurant, he always had to have a seat with his back to the corner with a good view of the exits. Once, he told me the story of being among the first troops into Bergen-Belsen after the war and how they accidentally killed some of the emaciated prisoners by feeding them cooked sausages too quickly. My grandmother ran a home for evacuees while he was away.

After the war, they had a second daughter. It quickly became clear that she had communication difficulties and she was diagnosed with severe autism. My grandmother had trained as a nurse and a special needs teacher and threw herself into the task of raising her. She still wasn't speaking five years later when my mother was born, but she learned to speak as my mum did.

When their oldest daughter was 14, she was struck down by polio. She was one of the first patients to benefit from an iron lung and survived, albeit paralysed and wheelchair bound. For the next ten years she was mostly confined to the house, but effectively raised my mum. She taught her how to cook, sew, knit, brush her teeth, maintain a household. She took a long-distance secretarial course and gained distinctions, then sadly died aged 24.

By this time, my grandpa was a headteacher, one of the first of a comprehensive school, and the family were dressed immaculately for the funeral and drilled that it was their duty not to cry, to uphold the dignity of their position as the headmaster's family.

My aunt eventually made it to university to study music. My mum studied biology in London but had very little interest in it. She wore seventies mini-skirts and flares, hung out at the Playboy bunny bar, travelled to America in the summer holidays and earned so few marks that 'they could be counted on one hand'. The dream of a daughter going to Cambridge was forlorn.

Despite having raging arguments for most of their marriage, mostly about my grandpa's infidelities, my grandparents stayed married for over sixty years. After retirement they designed and built a bungalow in three quarters of an acre for their dotage. They travelled and brought back traditional costumes for me and my sister from various countries.

When I was young, my grandmother started to develop Alzheimer's. It started with her forgetting the ingredients for baking cakes. It was eventually so bad that she couldn't speak and remembered no-one. My grandpa cared for her, almost entirely by himself for 14 years. He would dress her every day in smart matching clothing and jewellery, take her out to cafes for lunch, and make sure that she had her hair done professionally every week. He knew that she had always been proud of her appearance. After she died he maintained that those 14 years had been his privilege and were the achievement he was most proud of.

I graduated from Cambridge when my grandpa was 92 years old. He came to the ceremony. I was pleased that he got to see that, and he appreciated the fact that I was one of three graduands who refused to kneel.

When my grandpa died I was dislocated. He was never physically affectionate but I loved him and I knew that he loved me. When I was little he would wear tea cosies on his head to entertain and let me draw unflattering portraits that highlighted his ear hair. Later, we would discuss politics, philosophy, economics.

Getting on a plane to Hong Kong two days later felt wrong and I didn't know how I was going to cope with the holiday.

My boyfriend's mother, let's call her Elizabeth, my boyfriend referred to her by her first name, was kind and friendly, and occupied a small flat in a tower block. By UK standards it was tiny. For Hong Kong, it was a modest apartment. Many apartments in Hong Kong come with a cupboard-sized room that is designed for the live-in help. This is where me and my boyfriend stayed. Every morning, when we woke up, Elizabeth would be checking all the share channels on the TV in the lounge. She made a modest income from selling insurance, and earned more money on the side by trading shares. Each day she arranged multiple trips to different restaurants, to meet various friends and extended family. Often, she alternated between standard restaurants and vegetarian restaurants, kindly catering for my diet. Hong Kong vegetarian restaurants are amazing. I ate so much one day that I have a photo which looks almost identical to how I looked while 3 months pregnant. Food baby.

One day, me and my boyfriend hiked out to see the golden Buddha on Lantau Island. I somehow put my hip out of joint and it was incredibly painful. I think my joints still hadn't fully recovered from the three peaks challenge. Elizabeth arranged for us both to visit an osteopath. I watched the osteopath gently manipulate my boyfriend's limbs and decided it wasn't so bad. But when it came to my turn, the osteopath examined me, lay me on my side and then, with no warning, body slammed my hip back into the socket. The pain was excruciating, and then was followed by a worse procedure involving scraping along my nerves with some sort of sharp shell. I cried. Elizabeth was amused. She declared it was because I am a water sign. Whatever the pain, it did seem to fix my hip and I've never had major problems with it since.

Another day, we went out shopping to buy shoes as a Christmas present for my sister. She loves extravagant platform heels and you can find some amazing varieties in Hong Kong. The shopping centres are so well-lit and so cut-off from the outside world, that we accidentally shopped until 2am without noticing.

It was a good visit, but tinged with sadness over the loss of my grandpa. Sometimes I would cry with no warning and struggled to hide it from my boyfriend and his mother.

When we came home, we went straight to my grandpa's funeral the next day. My aunt, the one with the autism diagnosis, held it together to sing a beautiful opera song, then cried at the end.

[Balderdasha]

Summer 2017, we decided we deserved the type of holiday that you just throw money at. All inclusive in Majorca. A week without having to cook, clean, think of activities for the kids. The only problem was that we couldn't find our daughter's passport. After two days of ransacking the house, my husband said "I think your sister has it". Initially I thought, that's crazy, why on earth would she have it? But I knew she took various documents from our safe while I was ill and she was looking after my daughter. Some of them made sense, like she might need her red book of vaccination records in case my daughter was ill and the GP needed historical info. So one night, on my way to a zumba class, I phoned my sister and asked directly if she had the passport. There was a pause and my sister said something along the lines of 'oh dear, maybe I do still have that in a folder somewhere'. I could hear the lie in her voice. I think she kept it because she worried my husband would somehow smuggle the children out of the country (she follows lots of stories of Middle Eastern men abducting their children on Facebook. The fact that my husband only has an Italian passport and doesn't speak a word of Italian hasn't registered).

I made an abrupt decision and instead of going to zumba, I told my sister I was coming to collect the passport, got on a train to the nearest station to my sister, got a taxi and met her on her doorstep. She handed over a folder containing my daughter's passport, her red book, her birth certificate and various other documents. I was angry, but just glad to get the documents back. My sister told me she was worried about me. I said the only thing she needed to worry about was the fact that I had just needlessly spent two days turning my house upside down. I got back in the taxi, back on the train, and came home.

The holiday to Majorca was relatively uneventful. The plane ride was torturous. My son was too young too have a seat of his own, but old enough that he thought he should have his own seat. Cue 4 hours of being strapped to my husband's lap, kicking the seat in front, head-butting my husband and repeatedly shouting 'get down, get down'. We swam lots, ate far too much. This was me at my heaviest, with a BMI of 31. One day my son grabbed hold of the beside lamp and burned his hand. We made a complaint, nothing happened, and it healed quickly. We didn't have the resources to pursue it further. My daughter loved the children's club. My son liked running around the mosaic paths in the resort. We relaxed a little. After a year of utter hell, we were all still alive, and it was sunny.

[Balderdasha]

September 2016. I was home from the mother and baby unit but still not well. My mother-in-law came round every morning to help get my daughter ready and walk her to school. While walking along holding my daughter's hand, I would have visions that she had been eaten by piranhas and all that remained was her hand. I had to regularly look at her to reassure myself she was all there. I struggled to talk to the other mums at the school gate.

Somehow, in September, we went on a mini break to Brighton. I don't remember much about it except that the room we booked was actually an enormous suite so we could sleep easily for once, and we paddled on the pebbly beaches.

At this point, I was on such a cocktail of medication, that I was effectively knocked out from 7pm to 7am, so my husband had to do the whole night shift with our soon, feeding him bottles of milk two or three times a night.

In November, we went on a city break to York. As we sat down to dinner the first night, my daughter said she wasn't feeling well, then vomitted all over the table. We left a Ł20 tip, ate nothing and hurried back to our room. My son and daughter took it in turns to vomit for the remainder of the holiday. We saw very little of York. The Yorvick Viking Centre was closed due to flooding, with just a temporary mini exhibition in the church next door. The hotel lobby had a table with an iPad table top that you could play games on. We spent most of the weekend there. We didn't attempt another city break for a long time after.

A couple of days before Christmas, my son managed to get into a cupboard in the kitchen, pull out a pyrex casserole dish and smash it on the floor. My husband picked up the big fragments, hoovered, then for reasons known only to himself, swept the floor with his bare foot to check if there were any tiny shards left. There were. Having cut his foot, we sterilised it, put a plaster on, and thought little more about it.

Christmas Day, my husband managed to get up in the morning for present opening, but then was feeling feverish and went straight back to bed. To make things easy, we'd pre-bought instant Christmas food from M&S. The plan had been for my husband to cook it, but he clearly couldn't. I summoned all my available mental faculties and managed to put all the food in the oven for the right length of time while the kids were watching TV. We ate Christmas lunch around the table. I took a plate up to my husband but he couldn't face eating. That should have been a sign to me that he was really unwell, but I was too out of it to register.

Boxing Day, my husband's leg had started to go red and had lines tracking along the veins. Very bad sign. My parents-in-law came to look after the kids and we went straight to A&E. The cut from the pyrex meant my husband was developing cellulitis and possible sepsis. A harassed doctor drew round the lines of infection with a black marker pen, created a raised platform out of cardboard chamber pots and told me to press an alarm if the infection spread.

I was terrified. I still wasn't completely sane. My husband was (and still is) my carer. If anything happened to him, what would happen to me and the kids? I couldn't look after us on my own.

My mum came to the hospital. I asked her to stay in my house to help me look after the kids so that I was still close to my husband in hospital. She refused and said she'd only look after us if we came to her house 40 miles away from the hospital. My mum is quite controlling and feels safest in her house. She doesn't like using other people's kitchens or appliances. I felt like I didn't have a choice. I had to leave my possibly dying husband in hospital and go to my mum's house.

Long-story short, my husband survived. He was still in hospital on New Year's Eve, my son's birthday. By that point I was back in my house with my mother-in-law helping out. We went to the hospital to celebrate our son's first birthday. Friends brought a chocolate cake. My sister-in-law came with her family and we all went out for a meal in the beefeater next door. Apart from my husband, he still couldn't leave his bed. I think he was still on an antibiotic IV drip. Our son was just learning to walk and I remember holding his hands while he led me around the restaurant.

Sometime during this period. My dad made a very callous comment while talking to him on the phone. I mentioned how ill my husband was and he said something along the lines of 'but as long as you and the kids are ok, that's all that really matters'. I've never really forgiven him for that.

My husband came home some time in January 2017. He still has one foot/leg bigger than the other, and has problems with circulation. We are very careful with broken glass now. But it could have been so much worse.

[Balderdasha]

2010 again. Another friend of mine had just split up from her boyfriend. This woman is a massive over-achiever. She has a starred first from Oxford. I met her while we were both teaching in China. She learnt Mandarin in a far more disciplined way than me, stayed there for three years and could read and write as well as speak it (no mean feat, you need to recognise a core of about 7,000 individual characters to read an average newspaper). In 2010 she was working for a magic circle law firm.

Anyway, she arranged an active camping holiday and invited me along. We stayed in tents in the New Forest over a bank holiday weekend along with two couples. I annoyed both of them by combining their names a la Brangelina and referring to them as that for the whole weekend (I can be a bit of an arse when I'm closer to the mania end of my spectrum).

The weekend's heavy schedule included hiking, cycling, and kayaking. I'm not a confident cyclist so me and my high-powered friend hired a tandem. The bike hire shop was busy so we got the last available model, an elderly, heavy, metal tandem. We cycled it about 10km through the forest before it fell apart, and we had to spend the rest of the day walking / carrying it back. Sometimes there were slopes in the forest floor and we sat on the tandem and free-wheeled through the leaf cover, but we couldn't pedal it uphill or on the flat.

I really enjoyed the kayaking. We went down a river, out the estuary and along the coast. I've never kayaked in the sea before or since and I'd highly recommend it.

Three years later, I was very grateful for my friend's impressive organisational skills as she co-ordinated my hen do for me.

[Balderdasha]

2010: I briefly mentioned before that when the graffiti boyfriend split up with me, I went hiking in the Himalayas as a response. This is the slightly more fleshed out story of that.

I was heartbroken. My schoolfriend had already arranged to go on a hiking trip in the Himalayas and asked if I'd like to join her. I phoned up and booked the trip that day without checking any of the details.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find my passport anywhere. As there were only two days until I was supposed to leave, I had to ring around the passport offices to find one that had an appointment free to issue a same-day passport. I struck gold with an 8am appointment in Newport, Wales. I had to get a hideously early train from London and email my boss to explain my unscheduled absence. I sat in the passport offices working on my laptop while I waited for the passport to be printed and was pleasantly surprised by how cheap cups of tea were from the local café.

Because I'd booked the trip at short notice, I hadn't been able to book the same flight as my friend, I was going to have 24 hours in Kathmandu alone before she arrived. This wouldn't have been a problem except that the day I was due to fly, my wallet was stolen. I'd got on the bus to work, carrying my massive rucksack because I was going straight to the airport after work. I must have looked like an easy target and someone took my wallet straight from my pocket. I managed to go to the bank in my lunch hour and take cash out using my shiny new passport, emailed my friend and transferred Ł200 into her bank account to use during the trip. I still wasn't completely happy travelling alone without cards, but there was nothing more I could do.

Flying to Nepal, the plane was diverted due to bad weather and we landed in Lukla, Tenzing-Hilary airport. I flicked through my guide book to find out where I was and immediately wished I hadn't. The page for Lukla had a big square of warning text saying 'don't fly to or from Lukla, it's the world's most dangerous airport'. I'm a nervous flyer anyway, so this was not great to read. We hung around there for a couple of hours, then had a very bumpy take-off and made it safely to Kathmandu.

I found our hotel and went for a wander. Found somewhere to take the photos I needed for my hiking visa, found a hiking shop to sell me all the stuff I'd forgotten to bring, had a nice dinner and an early night.

The tour my friend had booked turned out to be a 10-day hike to and from base camp on Annapurna. We were in a group of 14: a Kiwi couple, an Ozzie couple, a retired American who had never left the USA before, a British small shop keeper, a New York psychotherapist, the tour guide, the sherpas and us.

The hikes were stunning. Just walking through the valleys on the way up was immensely therapeutic. We stopped at little hostels for lunch and to sleep in. One day, after lunch, all the hikers were getting itchy feet and wanting to start walking again. The tour guide and the sherpas were sitting around, staring at the completely clear blue sky, showing no inclination to move. People grumbled a little bit, but we clearly weren't going to head off on our own. Fifteen minutes later, there was a huge thunderclap and hailstones the size of golf balls started plummeting from the sky. We ran inside, chastened, and never questioned the guides again.

Five or six days in, I got sick. Probably a stomach bug. Might have been exacerbated by the altitude. Whatever the cause, I was vomiting off the side of the mountain three or four times a day and couldn't eat anything. One night, I shat myself in my lovely silk pyjamas and vomitted in my red moccasin slippers that I'd bought from a bazaar in Morocco. That was definitely a low point. One of the sherpas silently took my slippers away and washed them in a stream. I still had to keep walking, but I agreed to stay at the camp just below base camp and rest for the day rather than getting a photo with the base camp wooden sign.

The hostels all had lounges with seats built around a central table with gas burners underneath to keep your legs warm. One of the sherpas stayed behind with me. He taught me Nepalese card games,and how to count to ten in Nepalese, and told me a traditional tale about a boy who was a pumpkin. There was something about a princess falling in love with him even though he was ugly. There was another story about a farting bear.

I had a bit of a crush on this sherpa, but he had a wife and kids back in his village. The next day, when we were walking down the steep mountain, he stayed to walk at my pace as I stumbled along and vomitted. He kept trying to persuade me to let him carry me. I held out the whole morning, feeling that it would be humiliating for me, and a strain on his back. He laughed when I said I was too heavy and insisted he regularly carried loads twice my weight. He eventually wore me down by complaining that I was too slow and that he wasn't going to get to eat lunch. He gave me a piggy back and ran down the hill jumping from rock to rock. It was absolutely terrifying, but we got there in time for lunch.

[Balderdasha]

2009. I went to secret garden party festival. There were great things about it, a tent full of cushions you could lie in and draw on, a wooden boat on a lake that was burned down on the last day with fireworks and fire poi performers. But it just made me feel old. I was working quite a full-on long-hours consultancy job at this point. I went with my then boyfriend and his group of friends who were a couple of years younger physically and almost a decade younger mentally.

One guy had a ridiculous name. Let's say his real name was Leroy, but everyone called him Meroy. He was one of these white guys with long, stinking dreadlocks who thought that playing bass guitar in a struggling band made him more interesting than he was. He would wake up absurdly early in the morning and start bongo drumming in the grassy circle our tents were pitched around, and shouting out odd 'hilarious' phrases like 'bum your mum'. I wanted to murder Meroy.

Also, the guys who were wandering the site selling drugs had a whole new set of drugs that I'd never even heard of. They were pushing PCP, 2C-B, DMT, GHB, and anything else that was just a bizarre string of letters. The names alone scared me.

I ended up going to bed much earlier than all the others, and sometimes napping in the tent in the middle of the day. It made me realise that with the job I had I needed more relaxing holidays, without Meroy around.

[Balderdasha]

2007. This was when I was part-time flat-sharing with Sally in Chongqing. The spring / Chinese New year holidays were coming up. We both had offers to go travelling with boys, but for various reasons, we had gone off men for a bit. Instead, we decided to travel together.

Arranging visas outside China was quite complex and we wanted to put our burgeoning Mandarin skills to good use so we opted to fly to Hainan Island, a Chinese-owned semi-tropical island with white sandy beaches. The following ten days were probably my most surreal holiday yet.

We stayed in a youth hostel that had poetry, jokes and inane witticisms written all over the wall. There we met a French guy whose life story was fairly unbelievable. When we met him, he was in the middle of an argument with the hostel owner about the fact that he had harpooned the owner's goldfish. He didn't dispute this fact, and it got him evicted. He then slept on the beach and woke up to find that all of his belongings, including his passport, had been stolen. All he had left was his Bermuda shorts, a pair of flip flops, and a set of golf clubs that a friend had kept in a locker for him. This was problematic because he needed to get back to Guangzhou, Southern China, border of Hong Kong, where his job was to hang out in night clubs and drink with wealthy Chinese businessmen. Fortunately, his dad was some sort of diplomat, so he was going to get a new passport fast-tracked. Given Chinese bureaucracy, that meant a possible new passport in weeks instead of months. In the meantime, the French guy, let's call him Pierre, started teaching golf to the children of a local Chinese bigwig, by teeing off from the top of one of the apartment blocks he owned. After the first lesson, the Chinese dad had the roof of the building astroturfed to create a more realistic golfing experience. Pierre came out drinking with us in the evenings, and one night emerged from the nightclub toilet completely mummified in toilet roll.

We also met an older white-haired divorced lawyer. He claimed to be one of five Canadian lawyers who had negotiated the transferral of Nunavut to Inuit control. For the last ten years he had alternated one year living in Canada being a lawyer and then one year living on an island or a boat somewhere around the world, making ends meet by contributing to radio shows.

One night we went to one of the posher hotels and got chatting to the Cuban band members. They took us to an underground nightclub which was furnished entirely in red leather, had women dancing in cages and seemed mostly to be frequented by Russian mobsters. One of them outlined his plans to distribute homeopathic medicine to China. We made our excuses politely and left as fast as we could.

Before we went on the holiday, Sally had been chatting on some sort of travel forum, asking for tips on where to visit. She got some advice from a guy who lived near the mountain on the centre of the island, which is called Wuzhi mountain, literal translation Five-Finger mountain. We began to refer to the guy who lived there as Five-Finger-Phil. It's the tallest mountain in China and he persuaded us it was worth visiting.

Five-Finger-Phil was also Canadian and was teaching English at a school. He shared an apartment with a retired Iowan farmer and the farmer's Chinese girlfriend. We ate dinner and watched ice hockey while the farmer explained his vision to bring organic banana farming to Hainan Island. They told us the story of the island's university.

Apparently, in the 90s the Chinese government experimented with devolving government to regional parliaments and let Hainan's Li minority have full control of the budget. Millions of yuan were sent across for building roads and sewerage systems, etc. But the Li government spent all the funds on building themselves truly palatial parliament buildings. When someone from Beijing eventually came to audit the funds, the Li government was promptly dismissed and direct rule from Beijing was reinstated. The palatial government buildings were bequeathed to Hainan university. Now, I have no idea if any of that is true, and I can't find any reference to it by googling in English. All I know is that Hainan university has amazing buildings despite having relatively few students enrolled. It's proper sweeping marble staircases and columns and arches everywhere.

While staying with Five-Finger-Phil, we went to visit an abandoned theme park. The park had originally been intended to be an ethnic minority theme park. China officially recognises 55 ethnic minorities in addition to the Han majority. Ethnic minority status is stamped into identity documents and affects many aspects of life. There is a sort of positive discrimination system at university, for example, although it doesn't really make up for the fact that all courses are in Mandarin Chinese, never minority languages. At the time of the one-child policy, ethnic minorities were also given more leeway to have two or sometimes more children. Anyway, there are loads of these ethnic minority theme parks across China. They are set in vast grounds and have examples of all the different types of traditional houses that the different minorities build. When built, the plan was for the park to be home to 'real-life' ethnic minorities who would wear their traditional outfits, do dances and singing, and cook traditional foods, like some sort of human zoo. Somewhere along the way, funds were mislaid, and the park was left to decay. When we visited it, a lot of the buildings were still there, including temples or sacred buildings from various religions (a Buddhist temple, a Daoist one, a mosque), but they were all overgrown. There was one family still living in the middle of the abandoned park, who sold a limited range of souvenirs and snacks. It would have made an amazing paint ball site.

When we went back to the beaches, we bought ourselves Chinese bikinis, complete with twee frills, and spent a couple of days just lying on the beach watching the Chinese tourists. There was a real trend at the time for Chinese families, often three generations and extended aunts, uncles, cousins, etc, to all travel together and all wear matching beach outfits. It was like playing an amazing live version of Where's Wally.

[Balderdasha]

2002 again. Cusco, Peru. The night we got back from the Inca Trail. I was tired and went to sleep, but the others went out drinking and watching the England-Argentina World Cup match. I woke up after a couple of hours, feeling refreshed and lonely, so went out find them. This was one of the first times I'd walked around a strange city abroad in the dark on my own, and it felt oddly liberating. I looked in a few obvious bars and found my friends quite quickly.

Our tour guide, who was Argentinian, had sourced far too much cocaine, the dealer sold it for $5 for as much as you could grab with your fists. My boyfriend was pretty wired, so I gave him a head massage to calm him down. When England won the match, we won our tour guides Argentina shirt, and moved onto a night club to celebrate / commiserate.

The club was fun, we danced a lot, but it didn't ever close unless everyone left. By 9am in the morning, I was tired again so I found a sofa and curled up on it for a snooze (loud music has never been a barrier to sleep for me. I've slept standing up, leaning against walls in London nightclubs before).

I was woken up by a friendly Peruvian, who tried to persuade me I needed coca. I thanked him politely, but said I just needed sleep.

A few months later, at university, I was chatting in the kitchen to the girl who lived upstairs. We realised first that we'd been in South America at the same time, then narrowed it down to Peru, then Cusco on the same night of the World Cup match. We had been in the same nightclub, she'd seen me on the sofa chatting to the Peruvian guy, had briefly wondered whether to intervene if he was harassing me, then decided I was handling the situation fine by myself.

That girl remains one of my best friends. She did my make up on my wedding day and I went round her flat for dinner last month.

[Balderdasha]

Right then. Ayahuasca.

2002. The South America tour. Our tour officially finished in Quito, Ecuador. Our tour guide had been sacked about two weeks earlier for running round a hotel wearing nothing but my pink thong and blowing up watermelons while high as a kite. We refused to engage with the replacement tour guide and kept our original one. Despite seeming like the reincarnation of Hunter S. Thompson at times, he was incredibly knowledgeable about all the places we went to, very kind to me whenever we were hiking and I was the slowest person, and generally lots of fun.

We were supposed to be in Quito for only a few days, but I had contracted a horrible sickness bug and lost dangerous amounts of weight. We stayed for a couple of weeks while we were put in contact with a diplomatic family who were friends of my boyfriend's mother, who got me appointments with their family doctor. The doctor prescribed antibiotics and anti-nausea injections which for some unknown reason had to be jabbed in my bum.

While I was recuperating, the three teenage boys I was travelling with went on a mission to find ayahuasca. They toured Quito with a cactus-identifying book until they found the right variety growing in an old lady's front garden (not a euphemism) and persuaded her to sell them a large specimen.

First attempt, we went to a volcano crater on the outskirts of Quito and the boys chopped the cactus into easily swallowable chunks. This didn't work as it was impossible to eat the necessary dose without vomiting. As I was recovering from weeks of involuntary vomiting, I was fairly obviously disinclined to try it.

Next, the boys read that the cactus needed to be boiled down and reduced. As we were long-term guests in the hotel, the owner let us use the industrial kitchen for the task. We had huge metal vats of cactus boiling and bubbling away, while the chef used the next gas ring to cook breakfast for a large American tour group. The end-result was a thick, sludgy green liquid, that looked similar in texture to orange juice with bits in, but a deeply unappealing colour.

We went on a trip to some hot springs in the mountains. Me, the three boys, one of the boy's girlfriend's who he'd got into thousands of pounds of debt in order to fly her out to Ecuador for two weeks, our tour guide, and his new girlfriend who he'd met a week before in Peru and had decided to tag along with us. We were all staying in a ramshackle caravan, but it didn't matter because the hot springs were beautiful. I babysat my boyfriend, another male friend, the tour guide and his girlfriend, while they drank copious amounts of ayahuasca and then spent hours talking gibberish. My boyfriend tried to explain in very earnest detail the wonderful fractal patterns he was seeing in the rocks around the hot springs. The Peruvian girlfriend threw up her portion and it had no effect, but everyone else tripped for about 8 hours solid.

[Balderdasha]

V2001. Despite having spent years hanging around with teenagers who smoked weed, took poppers, ecstasy and MDMA, cocaine, mushrooms, ketamine and even ayahuasca at times, by the age of 19 I had tried nothing other than alcohol and the occasional cigarette. Strangely, despite having bipolar, I have always been cautious about trying anything mind-altering. Maybe it was even because of having bipolar. Most of the effects that people described when under the effect of various drugs, I could mimic through simple sleep-deprivation. Want to lie in bed feeling your limbs being alternately tiny and huge? Yep, I could do that one sober. Want to feel like the room around you was swaying, rocking, spinning or distorting? That happened to me fairly regularly. I used to get sleep paralysis and could control my dreams, so whenever anything scary happened in dreams I just consciously grew wings and flew away.

Anyway, I digress. After watching the effects of the aforementioned drugs on my contemporaries, I made the scientific conclusion that I would like to try weed, because maybe a calming effect would be good for me, and no-one seemed to have a bad experience unless they ate too many hash brownies in one go and didn't moderate their dose well. The problem at this point was that everyone I knew had been smoking it for years and I didn't want to feel foolish in front of 'experienced' users.

Fortunately, one of my female friends was in the same boat as me, so we devised a plan to go to v2001 to try it together. And we did. We bought some weed off some guys we met in a music tent. I already knew how to roll joints because I did it for friends when they were too wasted for hand-eye coordination. We probably smoked too much because in the middle of the night I had to crawl out of our tent and throw up just outside the doorway.

I lost a contact lens in the grass (lawn grass, not the smoking kind) and ended up trimming blades of grass with nail scissors in a futile attempt to find it. We watched Coldplay, and Kylie Minogue, often sitting on the shoulders of men we'd just met who, for whatever reason, were happy to boost us up to where we could see. We ate lots of beans on toast and drank tea.

At the end of the festival, I changed into clean clothes to go home, but my friend deliberately kept on her mud-caked trousers and boots because she knew her grandmother would be at home and she wanted to see her face when she walked in.

I'll tell the ayahuasca story another time. That one's quite good.

[ursus arctos]

Very much so

That is one of the most bizarrely baroque "suicide attempts" I've ever heard of.

[Sporting]

This is the best thread I ever started here, and the reason is mainly your wonderful anecdotes.

[Balderdasha]

1998 onwards: Some time after Soul Survivor, in my letters to and from the boy, it became clear that he was referring to me as his girlfriend. I had a long chat with him about how I wasn't ready for that label, and we carried on being in close contact.


I had to do work experience for school, and at the time, I wanted to be an interior designer. I managed to get a placement at an interior design shop near my grandpa's house, so went to live with him for a while. My grandpa lived in a bungalow that he had designed with my grandmother after they retired, on three quarters of an acre of land planted with rhododendrons, fire pokers, antirrhinums, daffodils and rose bushes. As a younger child I loved wandering the gardens, picking petals and making 'perfume' by mixing them with water. While in my interior design phase, my grandpa had let me decorate one of the bedrooms with very amateur scenes of sunflowers and trees, and this was the room I slept in.


My grandpa did his absolute best to accommodate me. He made me breakfast, tea and supper every day (which was slightly odd as I usually only ate one meal in the evening) and drove me to and from my work experience. It was still a strange atmosphere for a teenage girl though. My grandpa watched cricket and golf in the evenings which I found very dull, and he served unexpected foods like prunes for breakfast, which I didn't quite know what to make of. But, we did crosswords together and chatted and I'm very glad we had that time together.


At the interior design shop I had a rude awakening as I was basically shop floor labour. I wasn't designing rooms in palatial mansions, I was unboxing trinkets and labelling them with a price gun. I was given a chance to create a display window, but the manager didn't like my efforts and I was demoted again. I was wearing very impractical 'smart' clothing that I had borrowed from my sister who was working in an insurance company at the time (long, black pencil skirts and high heels that meant I could barely move and certainly couldn't clamber around a stock room comfortably). The one highlight was that I got to design the cushions for Martin Brundle's lounge.


I had no idea who Martin Brundle was, but I was still having regular phone conversations with the Christian boy, and he was beside himself with jealousy when I told him. He was quite the petrol head. The yard outside his farmhouse was filled with half-built cars, either from kits, or models rescued from the scrapyard that he was in the process of restoring. I learnt to drive in that yard, and his grandparents fields, driving a custom-built TVR.


During these phone conversations, the boy was determined to find out if I was a born again Christian. He didn't like it when I questioned the veracity of various parts of the Bible (the bits with unlikely miracles), and when I refused to believe that Jesus was literally the son of God. The more he pressed me to believe, the more I resisted.


That summer, it was the boy's 18th birthday and I went to stay, along with a childhood friend of mine who had started dating one of the boy's friends via long heartfelt e-mails (a very early example of internet dating, hardly anyone had email at the time). The farm house lounge had been turned into a set for a band that his friends played in. The lead singer wrote lyrics about wanting to be a high school drop out, while simultaneously accepting an offer to study architecture at Cambridge university. It was loud and noisy and fun, with far too much alcohol for the number of teenagers present.


Late in the evening, one of the boy's friends started chatting to me about how nice it was to meet the boy's girlfriend and how he hadn't realised until that evening that we were dating. I stormed off to confront the boy about how I thought I'd made it clear that we weren't boyfriend and girlfriend and why did his friends think that we were? Half an hour later, the architect friend came to find me in a state of great distress. He took me to the upstairs corridor where the Christian boy had a box full of Stanley knives and was trying to throw them at his wrists, but was mostly missing and embedding them into the hardwood floor. I talked him down and we went to his bedroom to chat. The boy was also studying art A-level. His bedroom was painted dark purple and was cluttered with massive portraits of himself done in a David Hockney style. We talked for several hours, and agreed again to just be good friends.

[Balderdasha]

1997-1998: brushes with evangelism.


So, I was raised Church of England. I went to Sunday school every week. I sang in the church choir, including performing solos of 'O Little Town if Bethlehem' on Christmas Day. My mum played the church organ. We went carolling around the village during advent and sang at 'the big house' where the richest lady in the village threw a party every year. After we sang, we weren't allowed to join the main guests; we got relegated to the kitchen where there was a measly spread of crisps and lemonade.


Despite this, I went to a Catholic primary school, where they put itchy ash crosses on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, and I was deeply disappointed not to have a first communion (I wanted a pretty white silk dress too!).


As I got older, I became aware of other Christian sects. I went to a youth group at a Methodist church where we played table tennis listlessly. Once, they brought out a gymnastics mat and I tried to show off my one skill of doing front flips, but I was older than I realised and only managed it once before landing painfully on my back and deciding never to repeat it.


Some friends were Baptists and we watched them being born again in the local swimming pool. I got caught up in the atmosphere and wanted to wade into the waters fully clothed too, but my mum wouldn't let me. Talking about it afterwards she said I was perfectly welcome to be rebaptised if I have it careful consideration, but she didn't want me to do it on a whim.


I started going to Christian summer camps or retreats, first with my mum, and then alone. The first camp with my mum, I remember chatting with a teenage boy who used to wake up early and go for runs. I asked him about his motivation because it seemed very strange to me. He said he liked running because he could do it anywhere, any time, and all he needed was a cheap pair of trainers, otherwise it was free. I thought of him again, much later on, when I was running in the grounds of the mother and baby unit. The next camp that I went to on my own, I mainly remember a team building exercise where we had to make a kite out of a pack of unusual building materials we were given, which included sticks, black bin bags and flumps.


The summer of 1997 I went to Minehead Pontin's for a Christian summer camp called Spring Harvest. I went with my friend and her adoptive parents and we all stayed in one of the little cabins. My 14-year-old friend was trying to give up smoking (her parents didn't even know she'd started). She gave me her packet of cigarettes, told me to hide them in the cabin and not tell her where they were whatever she said. Five hours later she called me all manner of names under the sun and tore our accommodation apart unsuccessfully looking for her cigarettes (I had put them in a plastic bag in the top of the toilet cistern). She then stomped off to the nearest pub and bought another packet from the vending machine. That was an early and very effective lesson in never agreeing to police anyone's addictions for them.


At one of the Christan workshops I got chatting to a 15-year-old boy, and we spent most of the rest of the week hanging out together, talking, singing songs, mooching around the limited attractions. Much later, I asked him what had first made him want to talk to me, and he said it was my penchant for wearing low-cut crop tops and push-up bras. And there I was thinking it was my sparkling personality. At the end of the camp we swapped addresses and phone numbers.


The boy lived quite far away from me in the North of England so we chatted on the phone regularly and wrote letters. At one point we were sending each other letters every day and got quite creative with the format. I discovered that the UK post system will send anything that's got a stamp and an address on so I sent letters written in a spiral on paper plates, a letter that could only be read by magnifying glass attached to a plastic spoon, letters on labels stuck to crisp packets, etc. The boy invited me to visit. My parents were quite rightly wary of his intentions, but didn't want to thwart my friendship, so they arranged for us to do a family holiday to his hometown and all visit his house together. He lived in an enormous rented farmhouse with his parents, two younger brothers and an elderly, huge sheepdog.


After that, the boy came to visit me. We adopted all the accoutrements of a relationship, going on country walks holding hands, curling up on the sofa together watching films, but stopped just short of actually kissing or declaring ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend.


The next summer the boy invited me to accompany him to another Christian summer camp, Soul Survivor. This one was pitched more as a festival. I don't remember why I thought this was a good idea, but the festival was in Somerset and instead of my parents driving me there, they drove me to the Northern farm house where a three-car convoy of teenage boys were going to drive my friend and all of his friends down to Somerset. By this point, I was 15 going on 16 (and yes I was naive), and the boy and all his friends were 17 and had just passed their tests. I went on the first car with the boy, there was a relatively experience driver at the back, and the driver in the middle had only passed his test the week before and had never been on a motorway.


It was a joyful journey. We stopped every hour or two for snacks or petrol or to stretch our legs, or just to check that the boy in the middle wasn't having a total breakdown. We sang along to the radio lots. The boys were particularly fond of REM and Space.


At Soul Survivor we all pitched our tents and camped, one huge scout tent where we could chat in the evenings and smaller ones all around it. I remember:

• It must have been the year David Beckham wore a sarong, because loads of teenage boys were wandering around with towels or sarongs tied in immigration
• A group of Christians were Eddie Izzard fans and were roaming the site shouting 'cake or death' randomly.
• There was a strict no alcohol, no drugs policy, and bags were searched on the way in, so it was a strange atmosphere, charged, excitable but completely sober.
• There were loads of Christian rock bands holding gigs. We queued to get to the front / mosh pit area of one. I'm too small to usually survive well in a mosh pit, but the boy and his friends formed a cage around me with their arms so I didn't get squashed.
• There were seminars on various topics. One was on relationships and the speaker glued two pieces of tissue paper together,one pink, one blue, then ripped them apart to show that pieces got stuck to each other. I think the moral of the story was 'no relationships until you're ready to get married and never divorce'. In one seminar a woman talked openly about her experiences with anorexia. I went and found her afterwards; she was the first person I'd ever spoken to about my anorexia.
• There were also congregational / worship events. These scared me. There were thousands of people in the circus style tents, doing Mexican waves. The guys on stage had microphones and guitars and hyped everyone up more and more, until people started collapsing on the floor and speaking in tongues. As far as I was concerned, I was witnessing multiple epileptic fits (my friend's mum had epilepsy, I'd seen it before) and I was the only person seeing this as a medical problem and trying to get help. My friend fell to the floor speaking in tongues. I tried to put him in the recovery position while everyone around me screamed and praised hallelujah.
• The boys would play silly tricks on each other while they were asleep. One boy had his leg hair waxed off. I didn't think that was very Christian of them.

This was the last Christian camp I attended. The evangelism had got too extreme for me. There's a few further stories with the boy, but I'll park this one here for now.

[Sits]

I can think of four occasions in which one member of a couple sought refuge with me/us after a row/breakup. To the best of my knowledge, none of the pairs lasted more than another six months.

About thirty years ago some very good friends of ours had a huge row and she stayed with us for about five nights. They are still together and went on to have two daughters, now in their twenties. Exceptions which prove rules etc.

[Balderdasha]

Taking a break from the mother and baby unit, here is 1994-1995 and the German choir exchanges.


I sang in a local choir with my mum. When I was 12, we took part in an organised exchange trip with a German choir in a small town just outside Hamburg. Each family, or a group of three people, was placed with a local family. Me, my mum and my friend were placed with one family. My friend's mum, younger sister and brother were with another family. The family we stayed with were friendly, but a little quirky, probably as any family would seem to outsiders. There was a mum, an older dad, and an only daughter around the same age as me.


The family were quite health conscious and would give lectures on the health benefits of everything laid out for the evening meal (it usually resembled something that I would consider more of a lunch buffet, sliced cheeses and meats, black bread, various vegetables). The father delighted in stopping his car by the road on the way home, next to fields of fresh maize, and nipping in to steal just enough corn on the cobs for everyone for dinner. They cooked new potatoes in their skins, still with mud clinging to them, and then everyone was issued a little knife to peel the hot potatoes at the table.


They lived in a lovely, spacious house, but the strangest aspect was that they had a basement converted into a swimming pool, steam room and sauna that we weren't allowed to use. The daughter snuck me down once to look at it, it was amazingly luxurious and I loved swimming, but the daughter explained that her parents only allowed immediate family members to use it, for fear of germ contamination. That is the closest I have ever got to how it must have felt for people excluded from segregated swimming pools.


Me and my friend slept on mattresses on the floor of a play room. My friend frequently talked in her sleep much to my amusement. You could have semi-coherent conversations with her which she would remember none of in the morning.


We sang in concerts in churches and in halls. We went on a ride on a horse and cart through the forest. We went to a theme park and saw performers spinning diabolos in the squares in Hamburg. We met several other exchange families, including a boy who was a year and a half older than me. He was very tall and taught me the German word for 'arsehole'.


We had left my dad and my older sister at home to fend for themselves. We had also left them the task of looking after two six-foot iguanas that we were pet-sitting for a friend. After travelling back home by ferry, we discovered that my sister had tried to do the laundry, but mixed the wrong colours and accidentally dyed all her underwear and my dad's work shirts a horrible shade of purpley-grey. They had given up on the concept of washing up or operating the dishwasher and had just bought a stack of paper plates and plastic cutlery so they could throw them away after every meal. They had mostly been eating takeaway.


The next summer, the German choir were due to visit us. In the intervening period, puberty had hit me hard. I now had boobs, periods, contact lenses and a burgeoning libido. I don't remember why, but instead of hosting the same family, we were due to host the daughter we stayed with, the tall boy and another, older teenage boy. My imagination went into overdrive. The tall boy had transformed in my mind into an object of great desire since I last saw him, and I spent weeks imagining how attractive he would find me now I had boobs and contact lenses and some new clothes. I played out several scenarios of us sneaking off for romantic walks and having chaste kisses in the moonlight.


The Germans arrived and I was shocked by several things. Firstly, my imagination had scrubbed out the tall boy's severe acne (this must be dreadful for anyone who experiences it, I really wasn't a judgement teenager and I still found it hard to look beyond it). Secondly, it became immediately obvious that yes, he did fancy me. Faced with the presence of a live human testosterone-fuelled teenage boy who fancied me, living in my house, I had no idea what to do. He would come into my bedroom in the evenings and sit on my bed to talk. He would speak fluent English up until I tried to tell him to leave my room because I needed to go to sleep, at which point he declared "ich verstehe nicht". He would very gently stroke my arms and legs with a single finger which I found tantalising and confusing. He would try to kiss me on the sofa while my dad was lying on the lounge floor watching the TV. I claimed to be concerned that my dad would be able to see us in the mirror tiles by the fireplace, but really I found the acne too scary, and I was still actually too young to want to be kissed. One day we went on a punting trip and I ended up sitting in the tall boy's lap, facing my parents, with a pile of coats on top of my legs, while the tall boy stroked my thighs and I tried to keep a straight face. The tall boy and the older boy once went for a walk in the evening and got stopped by the police because they didn't look like 'locals' (gives you an idea how diverse my home town is).


Eventually, the Germans went home. The tall boy bought me some crumpets and some chocolate from the supermarket, we swapped addresses and promised to write to each other.


A couple of days later, I was on the bus to school and I got chatting to another girl who was in the same choir as me, but a year older and she went to a different school (the Catholic one down the road where the girls all wore much shorter skirts). She knew the tall German boy was staying with me and asked for his address because they'd been secretly snogging in the church gardens after choir practice. I was appalled and betrayed. I gave her his address, said nothing, and launched a campaign of revenge.


For the next month, I wrote multiple hate mails to the tall boy, always starting with a full page of bubble writing saying "arschloch". I never said who they were from, and deliberately sent them from multiple different locations so they'd get different post marks. Sometimes I wrote in my left hand so the writing was different. I wanted him to not know whether they were from me or the Catholic girl. I have no idea if he ever received these red letters, or what he thought of them if he did. I made a promise to myself that I was allowed to do this for one month only and then I must get over him, so that's what I did.

[Balderdasha]

Once while walking around the grounds I bumped into two startled tweenage boys, who had found themselves there by playing 'Pokemon Go'.

[Balderdasha]

2016: summer in the mother and baby unit.


At the start, all I could handle was the bare minimum of looking after my son, eating and sleeping, but gradually I became aware of more activities on the ward.


As well as the previously mentioned baby massage classes, there was a sensory room and a lady came in once a week to run a music session for the babies. She was young, very smiley, with auburn hair and played the guitar. I think my son had a bit of a crush on her. The room had LED lights, colorful bean bags and crinkly materials, and was generally just more interesting that anywhere else on the ward.


I had a meeting with a psychologist and a group therapy session once a week. An occupational therapist came in to do baking with us and sometimes walked us to the nearby mental health ward to use the outdoor gym.


Once I started to venture outside the immediate unit, I realised what a strange location we were in. It was a huge site, previously all mental health hospitals, but most of them had shut down when care switched to 'care in the community'. The mother and baby unit was still operating, as was a large general mental health ward (which I learned I had been in for a couple of days during my psychosis), but between them were loads of eerie boarded up buildings and overgrown forests.


I was taken off my section after a few weeks and remained as a voluntary patient. Even though I took part in all the available activities, the days were still long.


My husband read that exercise helps particularly with recovery after these episodes. He asked the staff why we weren't doing more exercise as part of our therapy and bought a badminton set for the ward. He also bought me a Fitbit and I would pace around the garden trying to do X thousand steps. Later on, with my consent, he downloaded a 'couch to 5k' app for me. One of the office staff agreed to come out of the ward with me while I ran the requisite intervals. I found a nearby field ringed with blackberry bushes and did most of my running there. My family found it very weird that I'd taken up running and thought this was evidence of my husband controlling me. It's true that I loathe running. But I don't loathe it as much as being incarcerated and suicidal.


When my daughter came to visit, we would all go on family walks up to the mental ward, where there were some wooden statues and a café where I could buy my daughter hula hoops and orange juice. We went blackberry picking together (this seems to be my daughter's only memory of my hospital stay), and made blackberry crumble back at the unit.


The nurses tried to provide stimulating activities for the babies. I have a scrapbook they made with photos and evidence of my son doing some painting, or playing with coloured spaghetti, or splashing in a paddling pool outside.


I took up knitting again. I can only knit in a straight line. I previously knitted myself a scarf as a teenager, took me about three years' worth of long bus journeys, and I wore it until I lost it last year. This time I knitted a scarf for my daughter.


My mum brought a 'make your own bird feeder' kit and we sat in the garden and painted it together.


We were supposed to plan evening meals together and help cook, but not many of the women were well enough to do this. One of them rebelled and ordered Domino's pizza to the ward five nights in a row. Often no-one had any clue what the plan was for dinner. An Iranian nurse would rustle up lovely vegetarian dishes from whatever vegetables were in the fridge. As I became better I would help write lists of ingredients, go shopping with the nurses and help cook. I remember the first time I helped make a lasagne and was let loose with a knife. It felt very weird to be trusted with a sharp weapon and I had to go sit in a room by myself for a while afterwards.


My son was weaned on the ward. We would have sessions to make sweet potato and red pepper purees. But mostly he was weaned on mashed banana and avocado or I made lots of eggy bread. One week, I was supposed to have a meeting with my psychologist, and my family had arranged to come en masse (my mum, my dad, my sister) because they wanted to use it as an opportunity to harangue my husband. It was far too many people in the room, one of the nurses later described it as a 'circus'. I lasted five minutes, then said to my husband 'I'm sorry, I can't handle this' and left the room. I went and collected my son and my daughter from the nurses, put my son in a bouncy chair and made eggy bread for both my children for dinner, teaching my daughter how to crack the eggs and whisk them. That was one of the first instances where I started to think 'you know what, I'm not actually that crazy compared to some of the people around me' and that maybe in the end I'd be ok looking after my kids on my own.


My son learnt to walk there too. They had a couple of baby walkers, one shaped like a lion and he would roar up and down the corridors in them, sometimes bumping into the other babies. You can only go in a mother and baby ward if your child is under one year old. I worried that I wouldn't be released before then, and then what would happen?


Eventually, I started to go on home leave. At first, all I wanted to do was sleep in my own, wonderfully comfortable, spacious bed, the IKEA one that my dad and husband built, which I hadn't yet had a chance to sleep in on my own. Weirdly, I found it easier to do mental tasks instead of childcare or housework, so I would come home from the hospital and spend hours catching up on our accounts and invoices for our business.


The early visits were a mixed bag. One day my son mildly burned his hand on the water jug that was heating up a bottle for him and the stress/guilt caused me to start to drift off. My mum then arrived and starting hysterically predicting that I was going to have another episode. We agreed I should go back to the ward and my mum drove me there. After a car journey with my mum, I was nearly psychotic again, having weird memories of a phrase my dad used to say to me all the time as a child 'brain the size of a planet, common sense the size of a pea'. I pretty much threw myself back in the doors of the mother and baby unit, and the welcoming arms of the always calm angel nurse.

[Uncle Ethan]

Thank you for sharing. The writing is stunning.

[Balderdasha]

2016: who else was in the mother and baby unit.


As some of the drugs kicked in and the psychosis subsided, I started to become more aware of the people around me.


There was a mother who had had psychosis like me, but her hallucinations had manifested as seeing people's pets leaping out of trees in front of her car as she was driving along the road, and spiders crawling all over her skin, and believing her baby daughter had been sent or possessed by the devil. We did baby massage classes together.


Another woman was there because of severe anxiety and depression, coupled with the fact that she had neglected her own health when her son was born, to the extreme of mismanaging her diabetes, so she was admitted to stabilise both her mental and physical health. She was kind and quite protective towards me.


Two of the women were trained healthcare professionals, one even a mental health nurse, who couldn't believe they'd found themselves on this side of the clinical experience.


The average stay was only a month or two, but as I stayed over four months in total, I saw more patients than most.


One mother was a teacher and gave impassioned speeches about how we had to fight this illness together. She came on walks with me, but didn't stay long.


One mother of eight was so skinny, malnourished and hunched over, that she looked like the survivor of some sort of terrible apocalypse. Her husband came and prepared an identical meal for her every night until the nurses realised that non-residents were not allowed to use the kitchen. She left very soon after. I only heard her speak once to clarify the number of children she had.


There was a young, teenage mother, I'd guess no more than 16, who brought tubes of sherbet and tried to get us to have midnight feasts.


One mother came all the way from Cornwall (the unit was on the outskirts of London) as it was the closest available space. She talked openly of her many suicide attempts and her arms bore the scars. We played badminton together in the garden.


There was a mum who spent most of her time making home-made baby food for her daughter. She was warm and sweet and you would never have been able to tell from the outside that she was suffering.


Another lady wore full-face war paint make-up, but dissolved into tears every time her husband came to visit her bringing flowers. I think she had physical injuries from a traumatic birth, as well as mental difficulties, and had to go to hospital regularly.


One woman had a son who had experienced some sort of brain trauma (a bleed or water on the brain, I wasn't quite sure) and a health visitor had written in his official notes that it was caused by her being an inexperienced mother. This accusation had caused her to question her instincts and become gradually more unwell. She was very sweet and very insecure.


One woman came in for a week only as a precaution. She had post-partum psychosis with a previous pregnancy, and if you've had it once your chance of having it with a subsequent pregnancy is 50% so they watch you like a hawk. She was so vibrant and cheerful and clearly sane in comparison to the rest of us that she felt like an alien visitor. She made jokes and had a really hearty laugh. I couldn't imagine ever being that happy again.


There were a few other mums who came for a few days or a week, but these are the main ones I remember.


There was a woman at the beginning who I don't really remember because I was so out of it. She was close to being released and doing lots of arts and crafts, knitting and colouring and so on. My family say she was very kind to me and gave me a tour of the unit. We're friends on Facebook now, as I am with several of the other mothers who were in the unit at the same time.


Since being released, I've met up with one of the mothers in real life. She came to a children's festival in my town and then came round to ours for tea later. She's had another child since our stay in the unit. She had a very different experience from me, in that she went into hospital because of experiencing extreme stress and everyone around her telling her that she needed help, but she didn't think she needed to be in there. I, on the other hand, once I came round from the psychosis, thought I was very very clearly mad, and should probably never be released to general society again. I genuinely thought I was going to spend the rest of my life in a mental institution. If I'd lived fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago, I would have done. Fifty to a hundred years ago I would have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Two hundred years ago I'd have been the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre.