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The Bastard Noose: Red Mist

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THE BASTARD NOOSE ALL PARTS The red mist, an uncontrollable and immediate descending of violence perhaps not everyone knows. I’ve had it many times in my life and I’m mostly not proud of it. As one friend told me “your mouth has at least talked you out of as many fights as it’s talked you in to.” Shame they weren’t the same fights. Once it comes, there’s no stopping it, but I have got better. Entering a mental health ward I was as polite as I could be. Thrown into a world which scared the life out of me I still didn’t feel as badly off as the poor guys I shared an 18 room ward with. I definitely wasn’t dangerous, but one incident made me lose it to the point I’d have genuinely killed a man. The thing with nut nut* units is that we/they are they unstable, combustible. You have seriously unwell people as well as a sliding doors of men on the precipice of prison, waiting to be given the OK to leave and those headed the other way. I liked many of these, but geezers on their way inside who
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Super Bowl LVIII: An American Insight

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The Super Bowl is a well known American phenomenon which I’m willing to bet most people outside of America don’t really understand much about past that it is the biggest, most important game of American football (every year). Over the last five years I have become an increasingly big fan of the sport, so much so that I am now and have always been a Philadelphia Eagles supporter. This year I booked the day after the Super Bowl off work so I could stay up late eating hot dogs, nachos and drinking bourbon while watching the Kansas City Chiefs defend their title against the San Francisco 49ers. My friend who joined me and my girlfriend to watch the Super Bowl said in the buildup that America is a mad country; I happen to like America but he has a point and the Super Bowl proved to be pure confirmation of quite how bonkers the land of the free is. BEDSIT CINEMA DRAFT DAY REVIEW For a starter, there was an alternative live game commentary by two of the actors from Spongebob Squarepants- in c
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Triggers: One More Light not Last Resort

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“Should have stayed, are the signs I ignored.” Triggers. A “trigger warning”, normally a very short one if you’re listening to a podcast, is to let you know that what is about to be mentioned might upset you more than other people due to either your past traumas or a weak constitution. So I thought, and in a way I was right, but I'm wrong. Trigger warnings always seemed like pandering to pussies, to me. I have seen death, I’ve seen cancer, shootings and old age rip the life from people. I survived mentally, mostly, until I tried not to, but I lucked out and didn’t die. Grow up, make a joke about it and move on. It all goes away in the end, both meta and physically. Recently I had a friend kill herself and as someone who tried the same thing and apparently isn’t very good at it, it hit me much harder than I expected. People die, it should be a right but it shouldn't be one mistake. Anna’s death was a gut punch worse than any other and that includes my closest (although he was
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A Monkey Cannot Do My Job

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W hen I first wrote this I made a joke about Boris Johnson being Prime Minister and Jeremy Hunt forcing a doctors’ strike. That was 2014. Since then nothing has improved, it’s got worse, just the personnel still running ruining the NHS has changed. Although I desperately feel for them, the Doctors striking won’t help the NHS, it’ll only drive it the way the Government wants: privatisation. A Monkey Cannot Do My Job I work in a hospital, in admissions to operating theatres and surgery too. As part of an NHS “cost saving initiative” following the Covid 19 pandemic, I was given a monkey for the week to see if he could do my job. Needless to say I was not very happy about this, but it proved an interesting week. A week which I had to report back on, so what follows is what I didn't send my boss. The NHS is “paper free” but retains the other ways to waste your time, you just don’t have to print them out which is great because none of the printers work. Arrival A bad start for me. The
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A Eulogy

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“Hello lovely.” A fellow “mature” philosophy student, Anna adored alliteration. Even, dare I say, found it sexy. Sorry I could only manage three words my dear. Fiercely intelligent, a fellow philosophy graduate from my Uni and a person who would, I hope, have liked this reflection, recently had a full stop on breathing. Anna loved dogs, much like Hitler. She’d a sense of humour too and would appreciate me making that comparison. Anna was bloody funny. Brave yet wayward, my pal was always passionate: boasting a son she couldn’t love more, but struggled with the realities of. He was an excellent kid last time I saw him, despite her motherly complaints. Anna’s dog died recently. Her ex died recently. These things take their toll, and I know she loved them both deeply. Her dog was amazing, I never met her ex but her love was unconditional and everlasting. We tended to speak and meet between partners and/or mental health troubles. That was our bond and I now regret it wasn’t firmer. Posthum
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The Bastard Noose: Food, Family, Friends

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The Bastard Noose Mental Health Ward: Food, Family, Friends My Grandad O'Reilly, apart from being the reason I can never spell my mother’s maiden name, had an important saying: Faith, Family, Friends. It is a good mantra and one I hope to adhere to as closely as I am able. My problem is that I’m an atheist, but I’m just about grown up enough to appreciate how important faith is to a lot of my family. I wanted to replace the F of Faith, and I decided on food. No, I wasn’t going there, get your mind out the gutter. It’s probably pretty obvious if you’ve read the other The Bastard Noose entries that I love food. Eating and cooking (particularly cooking- I’ll happily make food and not eat it) are things I enjoy extremely. Obviously making meals, past lukewarm posh Pot-Noodles, was not an option on the ward. I’ve talked about the ubiquitous cabbage and even toast had to be prepared by someone who wouldn’t try to eat the toaster, or however you kill yourself with a toaster. Recently, a f
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The Bastard Noose: Car Alarms

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The Bastard Noose Mental Health Ward: Car Alarms My notes say “I was anxious on entry. I wasn't scared, I was suicidal, what were they going to do, kill me?” This is me lying to myself, I was a bit of both anxious and scared. Although I didn’t fear for my life, I feared the unknown. My anxiety was about settling in. It didn't take long to, and now I was more comfortable I was taking a lot more of my environment in. A nurse came into my room and forwardly asked “for a chat” to say they hadn’t checked my sexuality yet. Even in my confused state i t seemed an odd move given no other nurses barged into rooms, apropos of nothing. Is this the norm, hours after all the fucking checks and questioning about minutiae of one's being, to come into people’s rooms to ask them whether they prefer front hole or back hole? It was also his only question and therefore his opener and closer. There was no foreplay, so to speak. Even with my flat feet my sexuality is irrelevant and also the way
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