I owe my mental health to Barry Bucknell.

I owe my mental health to Barry Bucknell. He was the guy who did DIY programs on TV in the fifties. If you ever had a real wood door covered in sheets of hardboard that’s down to him. He would explain each project and have all the bits cut to size, shaped and pre-drilled so he could build a wardrobe in seconds. I was too young to do them back then but it’s how I’ve approach life to this day. Think, plan, draw, measure and bingo a futon base. I wonder where that went? But it’s not just projects. There’s something about his approach that seems to weld the ‘now’ firmly between the past and the future. The past is the one I made earlier, the future is the one I’m going to make, and the now is where I put it together. It pre dates Eckhart Tolle’s ‘Power of Now’ but is a practical example of it. It does two things to elevate one from the ravages of destructive emotions. One, it occupies the brain with practicalities and two it avoids mewling over one’s history or the imponderable anxieties of the future. The past wardrobe is evidence of my capacity to be successful and the future wardrobe is solely dependant on putting it together in the now. All that remains is to get on with it. If it goes to plan I can enjoy my positive emotions and if it doesn’t I’m not a failure it’s just something I overlooked in the planning stage. If after several attempts I prove it was just the wrong thing in the first place and I feel sad there’s always a set of Ikea Snorku shelving units to get me going again. I don’t get depressed because there’s always something to achieve and always the now to achieve it in. And if all that fails I can get pissed. What could be simpler? OK so I might have mild asperger’s but hell nobody’s perfect.

Crimea River.

The Crimea to Ukraine is not unlike the Isle of White to the UK, almost an island off its southern coast. Its land connection with Ukraine is less than five miles wide and its eastern tip is the same distance from Russia by sea. Khrushchev gave it as a present to Ukraine from Russia when the USSR was a happy family. Ukraine itself is larger than Germany, Switzerland and Belgium put together and on the west borders six Eurovision contestants. Whilst currently its history is changing daily the run of it is classic. There seems an inevitability to the escalating conflict. At one level presidential rhetoric lays claim to their country’s interests in the guise of what’s best for Ukraine. At another their paid unnamed forces flex their muscles. At yet another powerful Ukrainian individuals thrust forward to represent partisan factions. And at the lowest level voiceless citizens wait to endure their fate. Polarisation occurs and some form of attrition begins, be it counted in lives, limbs, cost or social welfare. After sufficient loss it will end. Such is the lesson of history, yet the game is played again. In this primeval primate dance the stressed zeitgeist factionalises into multiple animosities. The alpha male’s whoops direct their secondaries into mindless action as the females and their young cower in a dance of genes, the alphas to proliferate, the secondaries to emulate and the females to protect. It’s as if genes power a persona that is at odds with personhood in a role-play as much aggrandisement as it is fictional. There currently seems to be three world epidemics, poverty, poor mental health and countries in conflict. It’s easy to see the link between poverty and mental health in the poor but not so easy when it comes to the rich and powerful. Is there a corollary between being frightened by too little and empowered by too much? How might we evaluate and identify the mental health issues of this elite? It’s for sure not on anyone’s clinical agenda. And imagine how difficult it would be to implement its findings in the face of the alpha genes. No it’s probably best we stay as primates and have a war. It’ll settle things like it always has.