Making movies, there is always one particular member of the cast/crew who is said to control the weather. If this one actor is unhappy, the set becomes unhappy. If he/she is in a good mood, the set is in a good mood. Now I am back in London, it is mentally ill people on buses who control my weather. The interesting thing is that their eruptions (all of our mental health eruptions, even those who consider themselves untouched by psychiatric ill health) tend to be activated by extreme heat. The other thing worth noting in this analogy is that people suffering a mental health collapse stereotypically believe someone is controlling the weather.
I’ll make this a broader church and expand to unsettling outbursts on all modes of public transport. Everyone knows train rides are ideally lovely, meditative things and that, conversely, no one relaxes on the compressed, airless pressure cookers of the tube. On buses, I am almost always looking forward to zoning out: listening to music, writing in my head, problem solving, day dreaming. If you’re not from London you might not grasp the soul expanding beauty of the upper deck of a red London bus- the tree branches slapping the windows like high fives, the in action modelling of a different point of view. I wrote about this in my last novel, ‘Royals’, and I find the top deck of the London bus is also present in the novel I’ve just handed in.
Before we get to the bus, let’s start with a different rectangle that has a permanent place in the running of my life: the mobile phone. My daughter not having one had driven her, late one night, to what appeared for a moment to be the brink of lunacy. I told my 86 year old Mother this and she soothed me by remembering that, when she was eleven and her favourite radio show wasn’t on that week, she got so distraught she hit herself in the head with a hammer. So that confused me enough that I headed off the next day to get my kid a phone, or transfer my data to a new one so she could inherit my old one, with all the apps deleted.
Already, this put me on high alert: this newsletter is called The Peaceful Transfer of Power and I think about Hunter Biden’s laptop all the time, and how it was passed to right wing activists by the repair shop he left it with. I live in the shadow of Hunter Biden’s laptop. All your greatest shame and pain and worst moments struggling to stay afloat revealed to people who mean you harm, and all because you have mental health issues and thus rely on others to help you work technology.
So I was already anxiously watching the transfer of all my data so I could wipe the old phone, when a visibly unwell woman came in, activated by the aforementioned extreme heat, for which no Brit is prepared. Her preamble to the crowded phone shop was that people had stolen £800 from her iPad and could they help and this sounded like when my Grandma, near the end of her life, said the home help had stolen a seventy pound note from her purse (non Brits: no such note exists). So I kept my eyes on the woman, willing my data to transfer faster. But instead of the transfer getting speedier, she suddenly did - shrieking awful sexual threats at various families and I said “I have to get out of here”, aborted the data transfer and we left.
You’d think, having once been mad, having written and been rewarded for a memoir of madness, I’d have more empathy than “normal” people, but with age I have less. I have been there, I did not like it there, I do not want it to infect me. I don’t want to see it or hear it, and the quickest way to fall out with me is displays of madness. Note that I have no issue with vulnerability, or with having to work your way through troubles, which are both different from extreme cognitive dissonance. Witnessing mental divergence - on a bus, or in a phone shop - sets off a panic in me that triggers fight or flight. I will say prayers for you that you find the right meds and are able to stay on them, I will donate to mental health initiatives, but I will also move away from the source the moment I see it.
So, because of this fight or flight, we left too early and both the old and new phone became disabled/ had data wipes, so we couldn’t get an uber to the birthday party we were due at, or call the hostess to say we were trying to get there on what ended up being three different buses and one tube ride. A proportion of the riders on each bus was “activated”, and we were trying not to join them. In attempting to hold everything in, I maybe triggered my period, which then began with a sudden and intense “Kick out the jams, muthafuckas!”, bleeding all the way through my thin summer trousers that seemed the best bet for such a terribly hot day.
When we arrived for the last minutes of the party, I saw the cake home baked by a woman I adore, was a square sponge lava’d with white icing in to which jelly babies had been tossed like Mayan sacrifices. It looked… it looked like the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, where prehistoric animals got stuck in tar as they waded into attack other stuck animals. It looked like a representation of insanity, like the person who baked it should be put on a 21 day hold. Any person who ate it should be instantly sectioned. I have gallows humour around this, having been through getting sectioned. But genuinely, the cake upset me, having come on the heels of the phone shop, and the woman, and the buses.
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