I have been writing about Catalunya and about my latest trip to Ukraine. And life is just so very strange. I spent three wonderful days with Marta, mostly in Lviv, and yet it feels like a dream. I have the photos so I know it was real. How is it possible for a guy of 74 to enjoy a weekend with a young Ukrainian girl of 30 as total equals almost like partners, with not a moment's thought about the age difference. But then, why should it matter? I felt the same with Marina but I have visited her so many times now that I am used to it. Other times in my life, I can hardly believe some of the things I did - some of the products that I designed. I am staggered at the complexity of some of them, a modem for example. An extremely complicated chip at the centre of it. The 093 card which changed the way in which large buildings were monitored. Writing software for the new 6800 microprocessor in 1978. I am writing my story as an autobiography because, when I look at my life, some amazing things happened which I can hardly believe (the following is an extract from the book).
And now, I am having so much fun and part of the reason is that I have known highs and lows. And so I see each day as a gift from God. But it wasn't always fun, at one stage in my life I felt it was all over. I remember being in a yard (with high walls!) of a psychiatric ward watching Ryanair planes coming in to land at Girona Airport nearby and thinking that I would never again be flying... anywhere. And now I am off to Thailand and the Philippines in 2 week's time. I wanted to include the story here to illustrate that, even if things are very black, there is a way out. One has to believe that. And it makes an interesting story! Let me tell you about it......
It was by far the worse crisis in my life. After about 3 years in the original flat which I bought here - by then it would have been around 2008 -
I started looking for a “local”, meaning a commercial unit to use as a studio
because by this time I had swapped my soldering iron for a paint brush. This
was a totally crazy idea because the rent would have been almost as much as a
flat. Josep, who I was talking to was the rep for Promontjuic which also built
the flats where I was living. “Why don’t you buy a house? We have just the
thing for you!” He offered me a part exchange on my flat and like a total fool
I bought the house they offered me which at the time was occupied by one of the
sons of the boss. I bought it at the height of the housing boom in Spain and by
the time I finally managed to sell it, I had lost 200k euros. I quickly
realised my error. The house was on 3 floors, far too big for me. Noisy
neighbours, thin walls, heating, aircon not working. Underfloor heating which
never really worked and had a huge time-lag anyway. Concrete garden. I plunged into despair, how
could I have done such a stupid thing?
Far worse was to come.
About three months after moving in, I responded to a phishing email (you know
the kind… “click here for something”). I clicked and my computer hard drive
started whirring and never really stopped. I had been fed a virus. I plunged
down from depression into paranoia. I imagined that I would lose all my money
online, I imagined that the same people came to visit me so I changed the lock
on the front door I don’t know how many time. I sat in a chair, eyes closed for
days on end. But, but….. You know the saying “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t
mean they’re not out to get me”? What it is saying that sometimes, among all
the fear, something real actually happened. To this day, there are things that
happened in that house that I cannot explain, things that changed.
Twice, four days apart, I
woke up in the morning with the kind of mild internal bleeding in my thigh one
gets if a blood sample from the arm doesn’t puncture the vein accurately. How
could that happen? I became convinced that these people were coming into my
room at night. It happened a second time about 3 days later. In fact I came to
accept it. My doctor even gave me a HIV test.
On another occasion, at
about midnight, I heard a car driving away and was aware of a very strange
smell in the whole house – it was sort of organic. I was convinced that I was
being poisoned. I got dressed, got into my car and drove to Hotel Girona Nord
in Sarría de
Ter and checked in. Then I remembered something in the house, some documents I
had left out on a table. I went back out to the car park and drove rapidly back
home because I felt sure that these people would be in the house by now. I
drove back to the hotel. My parking space had been taken by another car and I
thought that I recognised it. I imagined it was one of this group of people
following me. In my room, I heard movement on the floor above me. This I
assumed was the owner of the car.
Next morning, I felt very
foggy in my head, almost falling asleep, and hardly dared drive my car back
home. I considered leaving it in the car park but decided that, if I did that,
it would be there for ever and taken away as abandoned. I drove back home
feeling very ill and not connected with the road ahead. That was a huge risk.
I used to throw a lot of
food away in the evenings because I felt that it was poisoned. Similarly wine.
What a waste! I would cook the food and it would have a very strange smell and it would make me very sleepy.
At the height of my
paranoia, I was imagining the group of criminals which hacked into my computer
were getting into the house. I thought maybe they were occupying a flat nearby
overlooking the house to spy on me. So I parked my car away from the house next
to a restaurant in the ground floor of a block of flats. I ordered a pizza and
walked home. Unfortunately I had parked right across the exit to the
underground parking for the flats. And they had no way of contacting me. There
were some very angry people wanting to go out for the night. I only realised
what I had done next morning when a neighbour spoke to me in my local bar.
There were key scratches down the side of the car and the aerial was bent.
I don’t tell many people
this but I spent three weeks in a psychiatric ward in Hospital Santa Caterina in
Girona. So now I am telling everyone! But it is nothing to be ashamed of - some people have physical illnesses and recover, I had a mental illness and recovered.This really bad patch in my life, in the
house, lasted about three years; it is a bit of a haze now. But early in this
period my doctor sent me to a psychiatrist in Girona after I became very
anxious one day in the health centre. Firstly it was with a Catalan
psychiatrist, later a kind English woman who I still see from time to time in
Girona – she is retired now. Maybe I hastened that.
One day, the Catalan woman
said to me, “How about spending a few days somewhere where you can be
tranquil?” I look back at myself now and cannot believe the human wreck in
front of her. I agreed. She made a phone call. A few minutes later I was taken
out to an ambulance which had arrived outside. I sat inside with a nurse and
gave him my details. We drove with siren and maybe blue light to the hospital. I like to think so but I can't remember.
I was taken into a small office and told to wait. I started to wake up to my
situation. No one knew I was here; I had come directly from home to the clinic
in Girona and to the hospital. A nurse brought in a small dish with a pill
which I thought, in a twisted way, was rather funny. At a discotheque, one
receives a welcome glass of what is called “fizzy” in the UK (pretending to be
champagne). Here, it was a little tranquiliser to welcome me.
The doctor came in, a
large man with a beard. I got up and said that I had changed my mind and that I
wanted to go home. He said words to the effect that, “You are mine now”. I got
up again. His hand strayed under the desk and a few moments later a couple of
nurses came in. They restrained me with a strait jacket – I was by now very
scared. I was completely incapacitated with my arms folded around my chest.
They marched me up a corridor and, at one stage, one of the nurses jabbed a
syringe into my bottom as I was walking. They took me into a small room which they called, “The
Box”. The strait jacket was clipped to the bed and I was left there for one,
maybe two hours. No water, nothing.
The ward where I was
finally taken comprised a long corridor with sad figures in dressing gowns
shuffling up and down. I was soon to join them. No one wore day clothes. The food was truly awful. They fed me medication every day, checking my mouth
to make sure I had swallowed the drug. There was an exercise yard outside with
a high wall so as to prevent escape. Maybe I should have tried tunnelling. The doors to the rest of the hospital were
locked. I knew then for sure that my life out in the world had come to an end – I
saw no way back to a normal life. I was dead, effectively. Every day, the
doctor who had welcomed me to Paradise Resort came to the ward and it was clear
that he enjoyed his moments of grandeur, surrounded by his obedient nurses and
other acolytes. I came to depend on this guy because it would be he who decided
if it was safe to let me back out into the world.
I was in that awful place
for three weeks. And no one knew that I was there. My friends, especially in
the UK were very worried because I had no way to communicate with the outside
world.
When I finally got back
home from the hospital I used to spend so long sitting in the chair that I gave
myself thrombosis and had to spend a week in hospital, a real hospital this
time. I would often spend whole days in the chair with eyes closed. If that
isn’t “dead”, it’s not far off. I saw the blue sky outside, it was like another
world.
But in a strange way,
after that week, things very slightly got better. I could not sell the house
within 3 years of buying it because then I would have had to pay tax on my
profit on the original flat and no one was interested anyway. But I did sell it and this
whole awful period when I was quite literally mentally ill lasted 3 years. And
I was very fortunate to sell it, a number of lucky chances, someone chatting
with my hairdresser who knew I was desperate to sell. The woman, Emy, happened to
work for an estate agent. And she found a young couple who actually liked the
place, strange as it may seem. I often see them in Celrà, now with two young children.
Emy also found me a flat
to rent when the house was sold but I soon discovered that the owner wanted to
sell it and I really liked the flat. So I very quickly bought it and I am very
happy there. It has a huge lounge which I used as a studio and it had lots more
light than the original flat.
And do I look back and
feel that I lost three years out of my life? Not a bit of it! I got out alive, my life could effectively have ended there. I dread to think what would have happened if I had not sold the house.
In the last year in The
House, I gave my car away. I couldn’t drive it because my head was foggy with
stress. But this is with me most of the time anyway. So the car sat in the
garage in the house and little by little the battery would go flat, also the
tyres. At one point the tyres were at risk of coming away from the rims. It was
a nightmare to keep the battery charged and the tyres full of air and the space
around the car was very cramped. So I rang the Ford dealer in La Bisbal which
used to service the car and asked them to take it away which is what they duly
did. It was right-hand drive of course so I saw little possibility of selling
it. But you can see that I got it registered in Spain. So with a little puff of blue smoke from the twin exhausts, I waved goodbye
to my beautiful blue Probe. I drove several times between the UK and Spain in that car, its cruised down the autoroutes effortlessly, so I was very sad. Daft name, though. (My butcher in Weybridge used to ask me, how was my
penis!)
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