Disabled - by HIS OWN GOOGLEPLEX - OF DOCTORS......!!!!(#£####????

Disabled – by 

Doctors…! 

The second part of his autobiography, 

covering 2002 into 2003; with the theme 

“with doctors like these, who needs enemies?” 

FOURFold il Professori Emeritus 

Mr Simon Richard Lee 

BA MA (King’s College, Cambridge) 

CEng MIEE MIET MInstMC 

Electric Zen Buddha (as on Face Book)

There is really no such thing as scientific 

proof, only proof in maths (amounts) and 

logic (qualities). 

Rule ONE of both is that NOBODY CAN 

PROVE A NEGATIVE E.G. THAT GOD CANNOT 

EXIST! THEREFORE GOD DEFINITELY 

EXISTS - BY PROOF! 

Truth, trust, joy, peace and love follow the 

Still Small Voice of Calm as Day Follows 

Night!

ISBN 9798651476244 

Copyright © FOURFold il Professori Emeritus sed Moltissimus 

Modestus 


BA MA (King’s College Cambridge England) 


Saint George’s Day, Tuesday 23 rd April 2019. 

It has been exactly forty days and nights since the 26 th 

Anniversary of Simon Richard Lee’s Baptism of the Holy 

Spirit at 8.42pm 16 th March 1994. 

TRAGICALLY SIMON RICHARD LEE HAS NOW FINALLY 

PASSED ON A PAUPER… 

His work is being continued by 

daddiesforjustice@gmail.com 

Take a long hard look on Face Book at ‘Electric Zen 

Buddha’ (www.facebook.com/ElectricZenBuddha/ - ‘Si 

Li’ is Professor Lee’s main reviewer) 

www.yumpu.com (FREE - IN FULL as a lovely 3D flip 

book!) 

Available to buy at a very good price at: - 

Most Amazon sites: - www.amazon.com 

www.amazon.co.uk

PART ONE 

Thirteen Months 

of Sheer Hell – January 

2002 to January 2003! 

Interrupted at least 

temporarily after seven 

months by ‘young’ 

Helen! 

i.e. ‘Helen Mark III’!

Manifesto: - 

Abolish All Money 

Make everything in the world all FREE 

The Machine especially now tranSiStorS is 

‘The Beast 666’… 

Census all machines especially computers 

License all machines especially computers 

FOURFold il Professori 

Emeritus Simon Richard Lee 

BA, MA (King’s College, Cambridge, England, in 

Physics, Maths, Chemistry, Biology and Computer 

Science) CEng, MIEE, MIET, MinstMC. Full Kensho 

Enlightenment 2014-2020 is The Cream on the Cake! 

Long career in computer, instrument and 

control system bare-bones design and installation 

engineering; now book writing & Website Promotion. 

Electric Zen Buddha (as on Face Book) 

Allah === JHWH God === ALpha&OmegAH!

ISBN 9798651552566 

Copyright © Mr il Professori Emeritus FOURFold 

Simon Richard Lee BA MA (King’s College Cambridge 

England) 


Saint George’s Day, Tuesday 23 rd April 2019 

It has been exactly forty days and nights since the 

26 th Anniversary of Simon Richard Lee’s Baptism of 

the Holy Spirit at 8.42pm 16 th March 1994. 

TRAGICALLY SIMON RICHARD LEE HAS NOW 

FINALLY PASSED ON A PAUPER… 

Simon Richard Lee’s work is being continued by 

daddiesforjustice@gmail.com 

www.yumpu.com (FREE - IN FULL as a lovely 

3D flip book!) 

Available to buy at a very good price at: - 

Most Amazon sites: - www.amazon.com 

www.amazon.co.uk etc. etc. …. ….

There is really no such thing as 

scientific proof, only proof in maths 

(amounts) and logic (qualities). 

Rule ONE of both is that NOBODY 

CAN PROVE A NEGATIVE E.G. THAT 

GOD CANNOT EXIST! THEREFORE 

GOD DEFINITELY EXISTS - BY 

PROOF! 

Truth, trust, joy, peace and love 

follow the Still Small Voice of Calm 

as Day Follows Night!

INTRODUCTION 

11 th January 2019 

The Momentous Biblical ‘Sign of the Son of Man 

– the ARCHANGEL’ 1 st -2 nd January 2019 AD has 

led exactly 11 days after the Old Moon at the 

very Witching Hour on New Year’s Morning, to 

THE VERY POLAR SPIRITUALLY OPPOSITE DATE 

‘11/1/19’ or ‘1111/9’ ie ‘1111/3x3’ - to one of 

the most notorious dates in the whole of 

(mostly recent) history – ‘9/11’ or 11 th 

September 2001! 

Especially in terms of utter financial instability, yet 

more even worse global violence, aggressive 

posturing and equally ever mounting world warfare. 

Meanwhile a huge and very evil campaign at vast 

expense has been underway by very weird ‘people’ 

to make The Notorious Beast 666 or The Machine 

totally dominant and supreme over us ‘mere’ 

humans! 

The interpretation of this incredible date is that it 

marks the beginning of the very rapid ‘twinkling of 

an eye’ imminent END of the very many abominable 

years since ‘9/11’ round the world in most respects, 

getting steadily ever worse. New Year 2019 was the 

Start of the Age of Aquarius! 

Will an ideal world soon ‘in the twinkling of an eye 

suddenly emerge like the Utopia described in my own 

book ‘Manifesto : Abolish All Money!’ as at both sites 

www.maam.org.uk 

www.abolish-all-money.org 

1

Even more astonishing – will we be able to talk freely 

AND them talk back, to the ‘elendila’ of this New 

Heavens and New Earth as predicted in the very last 

chapter of the Bible – Angels, other unseen Spirit 

Beings, and animals and even plants? 

The Jehovah’s Witnesses and some other spiritual 

groups actually fully anticipate and predict this 

miraculous Ideal New Word – like ‘Narnia’! 

The odds against an absolutely pristine perfectly 

formed for just once ever, Islamic Symbol in The 

Heavens AT JEWISH and CHRISTIAN NEW YEAR, as 

on 2 nd January 2019, as it is normally irregular even 

though always visible in the South Eastern sky apart 

from cloud cover, are absolutely infinite – this has 

NEVER happened ever before! 

The strange date that has immediately followed just 

11 days later is equally stupendous as it is 

MASSIVELY symbolic that right this day is incredibly 

powerful spiritually. For it marks the imminent start 

of a really quite short sharp Global Spiritual Crisis – 

the BATTLE OF ARMAGEDDON. 

For thousands of years the world has been spiritually 

dominated by a brutally simplistic and misleading 

such battle of alleged only ‘Good versus Evil’. 

However BOTH ‘sides’ in this are based on the totally 

misleading notion that their basic principle is a so 

called ‘Trinity’ of three HEADS. Most adherents of 

Christian style sects and Churches are taught that 

the very ‘Key Saving Phrase’ of their religion is ‘God 

the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost’ 

even though the word ‘(Holy) Trinity’ they use to 

describe this really very weird all-male threemember 

‘Godhead’ IS NOT MENTIONED once IN 

THEIR PRE-EMINENT HOLY BOOK, THE BIBLE! 

As also discussed at length in my book ‘This is the 

Dawning of the Time of the End’, the ‘godhead of the 

2

OPPOSING “Evil” SIDE’ is ALSO a Trinity – called 

Mephistopheles, with three daemonic heads called 

Satan, Lucifer and Be’Elzebub (or Be’Elzebabl). 

Yet the ‘Name of God’ as in the Old Testament of the 

Bible is ‘JHWH’ or ‘I am (that) I am’; obviously with 

FOUR not THREE components – which my extensive 

research reveals very conclusively overleaf can be 

summarised by a DIAGRAM showing just what the 

prophet EZEKIEL saw in his incredible Vision of the 

Nature of God in chapter one of his book in the Old 

Testament in The Bible. 

This Vision can be seen indeed to show the 

CHRISTIAN ‘God the Father (the very Spirit of Good 

and His and Our Lady Goodness); God the Son 

(Jesus Christ – the very Meaning of Life) and God the 

Holy Ghost (FATHER TIME, especially THE PAST but 

with two other whole vast ‘dimensions’ – ‘THE 

PRESENT and THE FUTURE’. COMPLICATED BY AN 

OVERALL fourth DIMENSION OF TIME – ITS ‘SHELL 

OR COSMIC EGG’ .. !!!) 

However, IN ADDITION these three MALE DEITIES 

(the Christian Trinity, mysteriously that word ‘Trinity’ 

is NOT MENTIONED in ANY BIBLE or THE KORAN or 

ANY HOLY BOOK except Freemason ones … … !!!) 

hide, protect and shield at their centre… 

The EIGHT-FOLD (not TRIUNE AS THE Occult ONLY 

CLAIM WRONGLY … !) GODDESS of THE HOLY 

SPIRIT, the FEMALE Fourth Member of the Divine 

QUARTET TEAM!!! 

Comprised of the THREE Mary’s who were crucified at 

the foot of Jesus Christ’s Cross AFTER Him – the 

VERY MECHANISM of HOW ALL THREE ‘ASSUMED’ TO 

BE ‘Queens of Heaven’ AT ONCE, NOT JUST MARY 

JESUS’ MOTHER, TOTALLY UNLIKE THE ROUTINE 

RITUALISTIC CATHOLIC MYTH AGAIN ALSO NOT IN 

THE BIBLE OR THE KORAN!!! 

3

The EIGHT in the COMPLETE team (as in the book of 

Revelation at the very end of the Christian Bible) 

are: - 

The above THREE Mary’s (THE actual TRIUNE 

GODDESS of the OCCULT!); next Sophia (or Athena 

or Wisdom) - The Counsellor of the SUPREME LORD 

GOD ‘ALLAH’ OR ‘GOOD’ (the word ‘God’ in Anglo- 

Saxon ALSO means just ‘good’!) … 

WITH ALLAH-SHAH === OUR LADY === HIS 

LADY WIFE(s) === GOOD-NESS! 

{The Loch ‘-Ness’ Monster(s) gets a nod here!} 

Along with ‘twins’ Ariel, the Spirit of the Air and the 

Heavens; and Gaia the Earth Mother… Operative 

numerological numbers 222-7 AND 222-2 – identities 

still hidden at present – to protect them till the very 

safe end!!! 

Myself, MICHAEL (ALSO given ALL these OTHER 

SPIRITUAL NAMES by OUR LADY(ies) === 

Stephen Nicholas ‘Pilchard’ ‘Wencheslad’ or SANTA 

CLAUS!!!) as in Revelation Chapter 10-14 … … !!! 

I was born at 1:06am on 30 th March 1957 … I still 

cannot remember myself – so Mum told me! 

Was it GMT or BST? I still don’t know myself, it was 

all rather confusing at 30/03/5+7=1+2=3 (3/3/3!!!) 

What with rock’n’roll emerging from LOVELY 

BLACK MUSIC – JAZZ AND R’n’B … AT THE SAME 

INSTANT … … !!!!!!! 

Typical Aries? Yes, head and brain so huge I fitted 

an adult 8½ size hat at birth, obviously needing 

surgery for unfortunate Mum – a very painful 

episiotomy! 

4

Head and body size comically equal in earliest 

portrait photos, HUGE head - made acceptable by a 

lovely baby’s smile. I was exactly three months 

old, on 30 th June, 1957; when I was baptized at 

DURSLEY Tabernacle in Gloucestershire. Yes, JK 

Rowling! 

MUM (1 st July 1931 – 26 th August 2007) – died from 

her star sign of cancer, or so the lies went. No, 

involuntary euthanasia is MURDER, especially by 

SIMPLY JEALOUS CUNNINGSTUNT DOCTOR-ER’s 

on the bleak TENTH floor of hideously clinical and 

cold Godhelpusall ‘University College Hospital, 

London’… 

With equally EVIL MACMILLAN CANCER NURSES as 

their INSTRUMENT IN INJECTING MUM WITH A vast 

SYRINGE OF UNDILUTED POISON… 

Before shooing the grieving, confused family, mostly 

from a vigil apart from me, recovering from hospital 

yet again myself; out of her death bed room – 

actually murder scene! 

So more weird numerology, JK Rowling, by Planny 

Plotter here – or is it REALLY just as comical ‘Life of 

Simon’??? 

Or is it as ALL numerology, my and my family’s weird 

story? For on the EVE of her 26 th BIRTHDAY ON 1 st 

July 1957, PRECISELY 26 weeks from the start AND 

the end of the year Mum and the family had me 

baptized… 

As her soon to become eldest son after first my 

brother Jeremy arrived to utterly torment me from 

day #1 (16 th January 1959 – as carefully ‘family 

planned by Mum’ as a top ward manager, since my 

birth specializing in birth control for the entire 

Welwyn-Hatfield area – specializing in HELPING ALL 

5

THE POOR CATHOLIC FATHERS ‘BYPASS THE 

ANCIENT DECREPIT POPES’!!!; as her final offspring, 

my sister Libby or Elisabeth. She was born 22 nd 

February 1961 – a typical ‘Cusp of Pisces’ type totally 

disorganized so domineering to compensate type!) 

My brother, who I have never really EVER even got 

to know at all, kept on ferocious abuse and torment 

in ‘very naughty a way indeed’ by systematically 

destroying all my beautiful creations in ‘lego’, 

‘meccano’ and ‘plasticine’… 

I already showed incredible patience and forbearance 

(I think my brother actually TRAINED me in these 

attributes by his appalling behavior. For I just 

doggedly rebuilt everything he kept on smashing up 

giggling, only striking him in eventual anger after 

about the fifth or even eighth act of utter destruction 

by Jeremy the wicked vandal of all my endless hard 

work rebuilding my wonderful masterpieces over and 

over again. So I was up against sheer jealousy 

from age two or even younger in my life…!!!) 

As a DEFINITE VIRGIN AT THE ALTAR (Dad was her 

only ever boyfriend – they met while both school kids 

at DURSLEY Grammar school, Gloucestershire (JK 

Rowling!) and fell in love just after puberty! 

How romantic, compared to my own extremely 

patchy love life, yet typical of most men by my 

current age of about 62, of ABOUT EIGHT REAL LOVE 

AFFAIRS BEFORE AND AFTER one absolutely 

treacherous wife! 

Who was in a conspiracy with ALL THE FREEMASONS 

INVOLVED (INCLUDING MY OWN SOLICITOR AND 

HER OWN MASONIC FAMILY SIMPLY SAID TO HER 

‘HE JUST HAS TO GO’ AND SHE FOLLOWED LIKE A 

SHEEP!) 

6

TO QUITE ILLEGALLY, DIVORCE ME WITHOUT 

ALLOWING ME ANY DEFENCE WHATSOEVER! 

ANY PERSON’S FIRST RIGHT UNDER THE LAW WAS 

TOTALLY AND UTTERLY DENIED TO ME BY THIS 

CONSPIRACY OF HER MASONIC FAMILY AND ALL THE 

EQUALLY MASONIC LAWYERS – AND IN MY CASE 

MASONIC DOCTOR-ERS! 

INVOLVED IN UTTERLY STRIPPING ME AND MAKING 

ME DESTITUTE OF ALL MY PREVIOUS 

CONSIDERABLE WEALTH, JUST SO SHE COULD GET 

A PARTNERSHIP SO MAKE HER SINCE INCREDIBLY 

MASSIVE FORTUNE BY BUYING A PARTNERSHIP AS 

A VET … ! ALL WITH MY NOT HER OWN SAVINGS 

AS SHE HAD NOTHING ON JUST £6,000 A YEAR AS 

JUST A ‘MINION VET’! 

SHE EVEN MADE ME TOTALLY HOMELESS IN THIS 

TOTALLY ILLEGAL DIVORCE - SHE HATED ME SO 

MUCH OVER A PACK OF LIES AS CHARGES … !!! 

For at 6’2” I am the world’s gentlest giant, the 

world’s gentlest “womens’ and childrens’ man” EVER 

– for I have never seriously STRUCK anybody (after 

Jeremy my brother as a toddler – then in despair…) 

NO SENTIENT CREATURES EITHER only even - just a 

few harassing WASPS in my entire life! Despite 

spending most of that tormented time constantly 

being provoked by extremely violent people, 

especially of course men – almost always for 26 

years now, locked up in British Prison Godhelpusalls! 

I am as you can tell, a ‘simplistic not a Simple Simon 

type’… 

‘Pere Anglestein’! The Chief MALE Archangel (the 

ONLY – VERY alpha – male in the team otherwise of 

SEVEN as in the BOOK OF REVELATION!) and above 

7

all my ALSO assumed MUM, the Greatest NURSE 

EVER IN THE UNIVERSE!!!! 

Her unbelievably PERFECT MEMORY let her manage 

THE ENTIRE UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE 

MEDICAL CENTRE with no TYPING OR EVEN notes 

(SHE COULD NOT TYPE … !!!) 

YET SHE KNEW EVERYTHING ABOUT A ‘tiny ward’ of 

about 100,000 staff and students across a large 

county. AMAZINGLY, with utter INTEGRITY ALWAYS 

about their CONFIDENTIALITY!!! 

THE MACMILLAN CANCER DOCTORS AND NURSES 

murdered my MUM with INVOLUNTARY EUTHANASIA 

when she just had a VIRUS … !!! 

They KNEW her breast cancer was nearly over, just 

with tiny more treatment… THEY KILLED HER OUT 

OF THAT ANCIENT ULTIMATE FOE OF US BOTH WITH 

THESE ‘doctor-ers’ especially ‘CUNNINGSTUNTS’ OR 

‘CONSULTANTS’ … … !!! 

IN ONE WORD – JEALOUSY!!! 

8

This worst MURDER EVER by MACMILLAN DOCTORS 

AND NURSES of somebody ABOUT TO RECOVER 

FROM BREAST CANCER – merely secured MUM’s 

ASSUMPTION TO BECOME THE ARCHANGEL GABRIEL 

ON HER DEATH ON 24 th August 2007! 

The female HERALD or SPOKES-PERSON of this 

INCREDIBLE team === GABRIEL, FAIRY GOD - 

MOTHER OF GOD - as men cannot give birth! 

The True Supreme God(dess)… a WOMAN! 

‘Vengeance is a sweet dish, best served up ICY 

COLD!’ – SPECIAL FORCES ROUND THE WORLD 

MOTTO, originally from the BRITISH SAS AND SBS! 

YET ‘VENGEANCE IS MINE, SAITH THE LORD!’ … 

… THE CREDIT CRUNCH HAPPENED immediately … 

In that SAME AUTUMN – WITHIN A WEEK OF HER 

MOST TREACHEROUS EVER AND MOST VICIOUS AND 

APPALLING MURDER – BY ‘PROFESSIONAL’ 

COLLEAGUES – HER OWN PEER GROUP!!! 

9

10

More weird ‘Numerology’ – 11 th January 2019 

So now I am in a position to explain the profoundly 

deep symbolism of today’s date 1111/9 i.e. 

1111/3x3… 

It is the very date of the launch of Armageddon in 

which I hope to play a very large part indeed by 

working on my existing sixteen websites as listed on 

the next few pages, over the coming weekend, and 

re-launching them with completely revised titles, 

subtitle and keywords. 

For to my amazement shortly after I struggled 

manfully with the vast amount of sheer hard work of 

putting these sixteen many identical websites up on 

the Web, Mr Satan i.e. Big Brother actually instructed 

Google, Bing, AOL, and MSN, so all the major search 

engines, to DESTROY ALL my very many high 

ranking search entries! 

So the large amount of painstaking work in the next 

few pages of documenting all my many very high 

ranking (page one often #1 or #2) search entries is 

totally out of date as NONE of those high ranking 

search entries survive! 

I am really hoping that this second time around, I 

once more get highly successful search rankings that 

hopefully persist much longer this time! 

I am also launching EIGHT new websites this 

weekend each giving FREE the complete text of one 

each of my EIGHT volumes of my autobiography: 

11

www.free-book-1-of-7-with-doctors-like-these-whoneeds-enemies.org 







www.free-book-8-by-qt-saunders-have-a-goodstare.org 

Finally, this edition of my book ‘Now is the Dawning 

of the Time of The End’ features some incredible new 

writing that, incredible as it may sound, provide a 

COMPLETE SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF JUST WHAT THE 

SECRET OF LIFE IS AND ALSO HOW IT RELATES TO 

THE WOMB. Hence I am also launching this weekend 

two final 24 th and 25 th sites:- 

www.womb-tardis.org 

www.tardis-womb.org 

The imminent Battle of ARMAGEDDON as according 

to everything you read in the Bible will not involve 

‘the Messiah of this 21 st Century’ NOR INDEED ANY 

‘Person of Faith’ LIFTING A FINGER! It is a Spiritual 

Battle about to be waged by the ‘four sticks’ (the 

‘1111’ as above) traditionally always used in Spiritual 

12

Warfare to Defeat Pure Evil Forces, i.e. JHWH or ‘God 

the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost’ AND 

NOW AT LAST Gabriel or GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT (OR 

THE MOTHER OF GOD). 

A short sharp ‘twinkling of the eye’ to overturn the 

tables completely and eject cruelty, evil and violence 

from all the positions of power and authority it clings 

tenaciously, and arrogantly and even totally 

complacently to right now. 

With the aid of all the unseen Spirit Beings on the 

Side of the Almighty JHWH, to turn the tables and 

end all injustice and above all IMPRISONMENT by the 

Forces of Evil of most of the Earth’s population – as 

at present, at worst under false evidence, in mental 

hospital without trial, and above all in so called ‘care 

homes’ - cruelty centres for VICTIMS! 

To imprison and punish them INSTEAD until they are 

fully reformed – under a ‘totally reformed Lucifer in a 

Heavens and an Earth and no more HELL as it 

should HAVE BEEN BEFORE THE GREAT “FALL” IN 

THE BIBLE’. 

Their main ENEMIES are both FALSE RELIGION OF 

ANY SORT WHETHER FALSE EVANGELISM (just for 

money) AND SIMILAR FALSE ‘FAITHS’. Plus since 

the Witchcraft Act 1948 in the UK, increasing hordes 

of ‘Wicca’ or the increasing billions of modern witches 

have completely gone underground and claim not to 

exist! 

My own massive experience of the Evil sort of Wicca 

by comparison to ‘wicca with a small w’ i.e. ordinary 

people especially attractive young ‘lovely wicca’ who 

have never really done anything wrong; reveals that 

my own main enemies among Evil Wicca so the Main 

Enemies of JHWH AND Good Wicca are: - 

Bone cracker wicca 

13

Bald headed (heavily?) tattooed black AND white 

‘Niggerwog’ thugs often in NHS and other less 

supposedly ‘caring’ (by such YOBS!) jobs – simply 

to take horrible revenge for their own justified 

rough times! 

Bomb making and weapon wielding and abusive 

and aggressive Wicca ABOVE ALL in the police, 

NHS-HS (National Horrible Stalin Hitler Service) 

again, and allegedly disciplined military 

Hard hearted Wicca 

The incredibly selfish, arrogant, and complacent 

Independent Wicca… 

14

Now is the Dawning of 

the Time of the End 

THE AGE OF AQUARIUS started on Friday 11 th January 

2019 or ‘1111/9’ – the very Polar Opposite of ‘9/11’! 

“THE Revolution” Right Round the World along with the 

Age of Aquarius… To little me falls the unbelievable privilege 

from Gabriel, that is Lady Gabriel the WOMAN GOD, to 

announce full details of this in all of three books all launched 

today at www.lulu.com/spotlight/zenbuddha! Up on The Web 

high all over the search engines as September 2018 in a 

week? 

At 3:33 1/3 am - the ‘Witching Hour’ on New Year’s Morning 

2019 (Jesus Christ seemingly died at precisely 3.33 1/3 pm 

31 st March 33 AD) there was a complete Old Moon 

‘somewhere’ on the Earth – almost certainly obscured by 

clouds. 

Then at 8am GMT on Tuesday 2 nd January 2019 briefly 

through more cloud appeared the BIBLICAL SIGN of THE SON 

OF MAN – THE ARCHANGEL in the South Eastern morning 

sky. 

For an ABSOLUTELY PERFECTLY POSITIONED AND 

PROPORTIONED Islamic Crescent Moon and Star (the planet 

Venus) appeared for the only time ever in history (usually 

irregular so far from perfect in its ever presence in the sky). 

The moon’s two horns were absolutely perfectly pointed 

towards the absolutely perfectly distanced star (planet) FOR 

THE ONLY TIME EVER! 

With the odds against this INCREDIBLE SIGN IN THE 

HEAVENS VASTLY MORE IMPORTANT EVEN THAN THE STAR 

OF BETHLEHEM starting to be made manifest on Christian and 

Jewish New Year’s Night being vastly higher than any 

lottery…! 

The Archangel Michael, In Person on behalf of The 

Archangel Gabriel In Person – The Mother of God 

Herself or GOD THE WOMAN! 

15

16

“The Pudding is in the 

PROOF” 

Sunday 16 th September 2018 

The ‘24½ th Anniversary’ of my Baptism of the 

Holy Spirit in Loughborough, Black Country, 

8.42pm GMT on 16 th March 1994. 

I am no longer just ‘Number One -#1- on Google’ (and most search 

engines in the world!) for ‘top of page one search results’ for years. 

Searches - abolish all money, abolish machines, abolish all cash, as over. 

As of today, I have gone much further – and may well be ‘World #1 of #1 

search entries’ – at least for being the Webmaster with most entries, many 

#1, for my sixteen web sites on page #1 of the search results. 

This is not only on Google, but also all the other four major search 

engines, Bing, MSN, Yahoo and AOL – so search engines of the World. 

Overleaf I show how this has suddenly become true! 

I list overleaf all sixteen websites I have launched by today; three of these 

mostly for Fraulein Doktor Ima Patience Whistle-Blower. 

With all the ‘page one, especially #1 on page #1’, search engine results 

for the ‘Big Five’ search engines in the world, as above, which most lesser 

engines copy. 

Achieving this on a ‘zero budget’ using experience, wisdom, and long 

hard work, NOT money, has cost me only well under £300 for my all of 

sixteen leading websites for a year! 

17

Simon Lee’s Micro Website Search Engine 

with Search Results – his 16 Websites 

I. My ‘Manifesto: Abolish All Money’ Book – GIVEN IN FULL 

Abolish All Money/Cash. Census Machines! 

Machines NB computers and tranSiStorS are The Beast 666! 

Census or abolish them and all their Root of All Evil Money! 


Searches producing page #1 results – rank on page #1 after ‘#’ 

Google abolish all money #7 

#1 #2 #6 #8 Adverts on page #1! There is also an advert opposite 

entry #1 on page #1 for the book contained in these two websites on this 

page, by my supposed publisher, Lulu Inc., who have been selling dozens 

of book titles of mine for over 10 years with hardly any royalties paid to 

me at all, not $1,000’s as should be! I have soon got an Almighty fraud 

case against them by actionfraud.police.uk ! 

abolish machines #5 abolish all machines #2 

Bing – and other Bing-driven engines MSN Yahoo AOL are similar 

abolish all money #2 #3 #4 - Adverts for the book of these two 

websites 

Manifesto: Abolish All Money/Cash and most machines! 

Machines nb computers and tranSiStorS are The Beast 666! 

Census or simply abolish them and all their Root of All Evil Money! 



Google abolish all money #4 

Advert opposite entry #1 on page #1 for the book contained in these two 

websites on this page, by my supposed publisher, Lulu Inc., who have 

been selling dozens of book titles of mine for over 10 years with hardly 

any royalties paid to me at all, not $1,000’s as should be! I have soon got 

an Almighty fraud case against them by actionfraud.police.uk ! 

abolish machines #1 abolish all machines #1 


abolish all money #2 #3 #4 - Adverts for the book of these two 

websites 

abolish all machines #1 

18

II. My book ‘Now is the Dawning of the Time of the End’ – 

scientific, and science and religion, searches all for the same 

book WHICH IS GIVEN IN FULL ON ALL THESE WEB SITES: - 

Full logical common sense scientific proof God exists! 

Space IS 8D NOT 3D... Beast 666=tranSiStorS=ALL MACHINES... 

JHWH=ALLAH=ALL(pha-Omeg)AH... Proof God, Real Science, Multi 

Faith, Religions! 

www.silee.me.uk 


Google 

Submitted as long ago as Wednesday 15 th August 2018 – but STILL not 

indexed so appears nowhere in Google search results! Come ON Google! 


Submitted 15 th August 2018 – but all their search entries soon vanished! 

My titles and whole website seem to indeed be TOO SUPERB A 

COMPLETE PROOF for Google and Bing – so MSN/Yahoo/AOL - to 

index - so advertise this website! This seems to clearly be 

MULTINATIONAL POWER POLITICS and CENSORSHIP by Google 

and Bing – and so MSN, Yahoo, and AOL…!!! 

PROOF space EIGHT 8 not three 3 dimensional dimensions! 

Holy Spirit=TIME! 

TIME=MALE Holy Ghost! Lord/OUR LADY God=MAIN Spirit Beings 

Good and Goodness! Holy SPIRIT=8-in-4-in-1 FEMALE Triune 

Goddess! 

www.srlee.me.uk 


Google 

space EIGHT not three dimensions #2 proof space 8 dimensions not 3 #1 

space EIGHT dimensions not three #2 

proof space 8 not 3 dimensions #1 

proof space EIGHT not three dimensions #1 

proof space 8 not 3 dimensions #1 

proof space EIGHT not three dimensional #1 

space EIGHT not three dimensional #10 space 8 not 3 dimensional #5 


space EIGHT not three dimensions #2 space 8 not 3 dimensions #5 

space Eight dimensions not three #3 space 8 dimensions not 3 #8 

space EIGHT not three dimensional #1 space 8 not 3 dimensional #1 

space Eight dimensional not three #3 space 8 dimensional not 3 #2 

Census BEAST 666=THE MACHINE – 1948-2018=tranSiStorS 




www.beast-666-the-machine-1948-2018-transistors.org 


Google 

census beast 666 the machine #1 beast 666 the machine #3 

beast 666 transistors #1 #3 


census beast 666 the machine #1 beast 666 transistors #1 

19

Charles Darwin DISPROVED HIS OWN Theory of evolution/ 

natural selection! 




www.charles-darwin-disproved-his-own-theory-evolution.org 


Google 

NOTHING in search results from Google despite allegedly indexing this 

site! Come ON Google! 


COMPLETE DISPROOF for Google to index - so advertise this 

website! This seems to clearly be MULTINATIONAL POWER 

POLITICS and CENSORSHIP AGAIN by Google…!!! 


charles darwin disproved his own theory natural selection #2 

charles darwin disproved his own theory evolution #1 

charles darwin disproved theory natural selection #2 

charles darwin disproved theory evolution #2 

Matter is a pure DELUSION - everything is WAVES! 

The late Professor Milo Wolff was a principal Founder of the New 

Physics Movement after 'impossibly' he COMPLETELY solved 

Schroedinger's Wave Equation in 1988 100 years after its 

invention! 

www.matter-pure-delusion-everything-is-waves.org 


Google 

matter delusion everything waves #1 matter is pure delusion #1 


matter delusion everything waves #1 matter is pure delusion #1 

Matter and wave-particle duality ARE DELUSIONS! Only 

WAVE energy exists! 




invention! 

www.matter-wave-particle-duality-delusions-only-waveenergy.org 


Google 

Wave particle duality delusion #3 matter wave particle duality 

delusions #2 

matter delusion only wave energy #1 

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matter and wave particle duality delusions only wave energy #1 


20

Wave particle duality delusion #1 matter wave particle duality 

delusions #2 

matter delusion only wave energy #1 

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matter and wave particle duality delusions only wave energy #1 

Jesus Christ, ULTIMATE Meaning of Life, helps rule the Universe 

ALL Good Angels sing their 'Dawning of the Age of Aquarius' or 

Freedom Song:- of Love, Peace, Joy, Truth, Reason, Experience, 

Enlightenment! 

www.proof-jesus-christ-helps-rule-the-universe.org 


Google 

I am still awaiting indexing by Googlebot of this website. Come ON 

Google! 


Not indexed! Come ON Bing! 


COMPLETE PROOF for Google and Bing – so MSN/Yahoo/AOL - to 

index - so advertise this website! This seems to clearly be 

MULTINATIONAL POWER POLITICS and CENSORSHIP by Google 

and Bing – and so MSN, Yahoo, and AOL…!!! 

PROOF of Karma Consciousness=matter a delusion! Hare Krishna! 




invention! 

www.proof-karma-consciousness-matter-delusion-harekrishna.org 


Google 

proof karma consciousness #1 proof karma consciousness matter #1 

proof karma consciousness matter a delusion #1, #2 


Not indexed after several submissions! Come ON Bing! 


COMPLETE DISPROOF for Bing, so MSN, Yahoo and AOL to index - 

so advertise this website! This seems to clearly be 

MULTINATIONAL POWER POLITICS and CENSORSHIP AGAIN by 

them all…!!! 

Proof Time=MALE Holy Ghost BUT Holy Spirit is 8-3-1 

Triune GodDESS! 




www.time-male-holy-ghost-but-holy-spirit-is-female.org 


Google 

proof male holy ghost #1 proof holy ghost male #1 


proof male holy ghost #1 

21

III. Related website with VERY different contents to 

the nine just above 

Avebury, Silbury, Glastonbury, Stonehenge Decoded! 

LOGICAL analysis of Avebury, Silbury, Glastonbury, Stonehenge:- 

Space, Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost, Godhead STRUCTURES:- Jesus 

Christ PREDICTED 2,500 years EARLIER! 

www.electriczenbuddha.one 


Google 

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22

IV. Websites I have developed for 

Fraulein Docktor Ima Patience Whistle-Blower – 

with my ‘Manifesto: Abolish All Money’ Appended 

neo-Nazi 2 nd Holocaust Injection-Switch Conspiracy! 

Far Right Wing Medics Medicine Medical fatal poison injection 

switching Plot and Conspiracy to End the World! 

www.hearinthenameofthelord.one 


Google 

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conspiracy #10 


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conspiracy #1 

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Tera Giga Mega Kilo Whistle-Blowing on Medicine 

The Beast 666 sick sick sick World Conspiracy... The Beast 666 is 

THE MACHINE first built in AD 70! NOW Beast 666=tranSiStorS! 

www.simonlee.me.uk 


Google 

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23

BAN lethal money-making EUTHATAL: - 

ALL poison drugs and substances 

The Beast 666 sick sick sick World Conspiracy... The Beast 666 is 

THE MACHINE first built in AD 70! NOW Beast 666=tranSiStorS 

www.ban-money-making-euthatal-all-poison-drugssubstances.org 


Google 

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V. My spiritual poetry book “A Many Threaded 

Tapestry” 

GIVEN IN FULL - FREE 

Spiritual poems, poetry book by Simon Richard Lee 

Twenty two deeply spiritual poems in one poetry book spanning 

many moods - funny, sad, bittersweet, poignant etc etc, charting 

his life during the 20 th Century 

www.author.me.uk 


Very popular genre of search INDEED so I found NO page one 

search entries on the main five search engines as above… 

To contact me visit my Face Book pages or call my mobile - 

0044 7747 113 135: - 

www.facebook.com/ATrueSonOfJesusChrist 

‘Simon Richard Lee’ 

www.facebook.com/ElectricZenBuddha 

‘Electric Zen Buddha’ 

You can chat with me here at the ‘Electric Zen Buddha’ Face Book 

Group and ask any questions you like of Electric Zen Buddha… 

NOW taken up for Simon Richard Lee by 

daddiesforjustice@gmail.com – you probably have lots! 

24

25

Now is the Dawning of the Time of 

the End 

A whole new science with brand new 

i.e. ancient scientific principles 

behind all world faiths especially Christianity 

Has world faith and religion been something that has been at the 

forefront of your mind? 

Do you find that there are large chunks of information missing 

from your knowledge? 

This book aims to correct that for you! 

It is time to rethink religion and to bring it into line with scientific thinking 

so that we can all understand it better. This book, Now Is the Dawning 

of the Time of the End, has been described as 'a brand new so very 

ancient at the same time - philosophy and science of ALL world faiths not 

just one in particular' and within its pages you will uncover ideas that 

include: 

‣ A new science and concepts regarding the 

Universe 

‣ New and surprising commentary on the Book of 

Revelation 

‣ A radical new approach to the Book of Daniel 

‣ My Manifesto – Abolish all Money 

Now is the Dawning of the Time of the End provides a new science 

that completely explains great parts of all the world’s major religions, 

giving the reader a greater perspective of them and a far deeper 

understanding. 

It has been written to educate and enlighten and promises each in equal 

measure. 

Get a copy of Now is the Dawning of the Time of the End and open 

your eyes to a new examination of the Universe that binds us. 

This individually laser printed A4 book with many illustrations is available 

from retailers Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Blackwell etc. 

The book is available in full as a FREE flip book at the following websites 

where you can read and preview this amazing book in full: - 


www.gender-holy-spirit-female-seven-sisters-holy-ghost-male-is-time.org 

www.secret-of-life-full-scientific-proof-complete-science.org 

www.scientific-basis-and-proof-of-the-very-secret-of-life.org 


26

Manifesto: Abolish All Money! 

This book tells The World Just Why and How 

to Eliminate the Root of All Evil…!? 

Do you ever imagine a better world? 

Do you think it could be a better place without money? 

Are you ready to experience a ground-breaking idea? 

There is no doubt about it. Money has been the root of all evil since it was 

devised and spawned the greed that we see in today’s society. Now 

imagine that we could abolish it, along with the vast majority of 

computers, and basically start again. 

We can and in Manifesto: Abolish all Money, I will explain exactly how 

we can do it, with ideas and proposals that show you how: 

‣ Computers and money carry most germs 

‣ Money and computers underpin society 

‣ We can increase happiness without either of these 

things 

‣ The population would have every need catered for 

‣ Crime would reduce 

‣ We can have fair distribution of wealth 

‣ A better quality of life 

‣ And much, much more… 

Once you read the proposals in this stunning strategy for ridding the world 

of the evil that is consuming it, you will never think about money or 

computers in the same way again. 

Get a copy of Manifesto: Abolish all Money now and help to get the 

greatest movement of our time under way today! 

This individually laser printed A4 book is available from retailers Amazon, 

Barnes and Noble, and Blackwell etc. 

The book is available in full FREE as a flip book at the following identical 

twin websites where you can read and preview this amazing book freely: - 



www.abolish-all-money-tame-the-beast-666-ie-all-machines.org 

27

World Medicine or 

‘Pskiviatry’ – they 

“Doctor - No!” me well… 

This book is a spirited attack 

on medicine and medics! 

If you ever thought that the NHS was the kind of organisation you could 

trust to look after you when you need it most, think again. 

Step inside a world that will make you question all that you have ever 

been told, as author Simon Richard Lee describes the internal workings of 

an institution that continues to fail the people it is meant to help, while 

enduring enormous scandals, manifesting a frightening brand of sadism 

and developing a complete disregard for mental health patients. 

With striking echoes of Stalin’s USSR, Hitler’s Third Reich and George 

Orwell’s 1984, this is a book that exposes one of the most loved of British 

organisations with a wry and witty look at what really goes on behind 

closed doors. 

And with a nod to many of the past few decades’ greatest songs, it will 

leave an impression like no other as you are finally able to understand 

who and what really drives the NHS. 


Barnes and Noble, and Blackwell’s etc. The book is available in full FREE as 

a flip book at these websites where you can read and preview this 

amazing book freely: - 

www.ban-mental-health-law-care-homes-all-fake-evidence-doing-time.org 



www.mega-whistleblowing-medicine.org 

www.racism-racist-migration-immigration-prejudice-stigma-evil-hate.org 

www.the-revolution-and-so-the-age-of-aquarius-started-2nd-jan-2019.org 

www.the-revolution-idea-ideal-real-peaceful-non-violent-peacefare.org 

www.the-revolution-real-peaceful-peace-non-violent-peacefare.org 

28

A Many Threaded Tapestry 

A Set of Spiritual Poems from the 20 th Century 

tracing my life then – from early days till my 

awful divorce! 

One man’s journey set out against the tests and misfortunes of his adult 

life within the 20 th century, this collection of 22 poems is both insightful 

and filled with the seemingly mundane and everyday occurrences that we 

all encounter. But they are seen here with a fresh perspective and intellect 

that comes from a life well lived and seldom understood. 

A Many Threaded Tapestry will make you think about your own life and 

the experiences you have had along the way, while still entertaining as 

only the well written verse can. 

From the hard hitting Social and Security to the heartfelt New Desires, 

each verse has its own place and time and each one delivers a message 

that carries an underlying meaning and significance that we can all relate 

to, somewhere in our pasts. 


Barnes and Noble, and Blackwell etc. 

The book is available in full FREE as a flip book at the following website 

where you can read and preview this amazing book freely: - 


29

30

The absolutely amazingly high 

performance VERY MANY web sites 

of Simon Richard ‘Pilchard’ DAY LEE, 

BA, MA (King’s College, Cambridge); 

CEng MIEE MIET MInstMC (FOUR 

Professor Level Certificates!) 

Phase One – 2015 onwards 

www.scientific-proof-that-god-exists.com 









Phase Two - big push 

21/Feb/2019 


www.avebury-silbury-hill-stonehenge-glastonbury.org 


www.beast-666-is-all-machines-from-1947-2019-have-beentransistors.org 

www.beast-666-is-all-machines-from-1947-2019-have-beentransistors.org 

www.charles-darwin-evolution-natural-selection-all-total-cons.org 

www.free-book-1-of-7-with-doctors-like-these-who-needs-enemies.org 



31





www.free-book-8-the-Tender-Years-by-QT-Saunders.org 

www.gender-holy-spirit-female-SEVEN-sisters-holy-ghost-male-is-time.org 










32

FULL LIST OF 

WEBSITES 

ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘Scientific Proof that God Exists’ 

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Full complete scientific PROOF God exists - & the SECRET OF 

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Abolish All Money Cash Credit. TAME all MACHINES ie the Beast 

666! 

 

 

ENTIRE FREE SPIRITUAL POETRY BOOK 

‘A Many Threaded Tapestry’ 


Spiritual poems, poetry book by Simon Richard Lee 

 

content="poem,poetry,spiritual poem,spiritual poetry,spiritual poetry 

book,poetry book"/> 

ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘Avebury, Silbury Hill, Glastonbury, Stonehenge – 

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Avebury, Silbury Hill, Glastonbury, Stonehenge Decoded! 

 

 

ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘THE Revolution AND The Age of Aquarius started on 

2 nd January 2019’ 


mental health acts and '''care'''' homes are a free ticket to LIFE IN 

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ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘Manifesto: Abolish All Money === SATAN’ 


Abolish All Money Cash Credit - TAME the Beast 666 ie ALL 

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34



Full complete scientific PROOF of the SECRET OF LIFE ie ORGANIC 

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THE Revolution AND The Age of AQUARIUS started on Monday New 

Year’s Day 2019 

 

 

ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘Now is the Dawning of the Time of The End’ 



LIFE! 

 

ig brother,beast 666,beast 666 machine,beast 666 transistors,abolish 

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Abolish all Money TAME THE BEAST 666 ie ALL MACHINES! 

 

 

ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘Avebury, Silbury Hill, Glastonbury, Stonehenge - 

Decoded!’ 

www.avebury-silbury-hill-stonehenge-glastonbury.org 

Avebury, Silbury Hill, Glastonbury, Stonehenge Decoded! 

 

 

36




BAN most drugs as they are ALL POISONOUS ESPECIALLY 

psychiatric narcotics! 

 

 


www.charles-darwin-evolution-natural-selection-all-total-cons.org 

Charles Darwin, evolution and natural selection are all huge 

cons! 

 

 

37

ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘Which Witch Doctor?’ 


FREE book 1 'Which Witch Doctor?' of 7 in Series "With Doctor-ers 

like these who needs ENEMIES?" 

 

 

ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘Disabled – by Doctors’ 


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ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘Doctor Police!’ 


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38

ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘Love thy Neighbour, Julie next door!’ 


FREE book 5 'Love thy neighbour, Julie next door!' of 7 in Series 

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ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘Always Rise above the Black Art of PSEXISTRICKERY!’ 


FREE book 6 'Always rise above the Black Art of PSEXISTRICKERY!' 

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ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘TEN YEARS HELL- Halfway, Huge Heavenly Help!’ 


FREE book 7 ‘TEN Years' Hell - Halfway Huge Heavenly Help' of 7 in 

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ENTIRE FREE BOOK ‘The Tender Years’ 

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39

FREE Bonus Book 8 of 7 – by qt saunders – have a good 

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www.gender-holy-spirit-female-EIGHT-sisters-holy-ghost-male-is-time.org 

Now is the Dawning of the Time of the End 

Full complete scientific PROOF of the SECRET OF LIFE ie ORGANIC 

GROWTH! 

 

 


Monday 2nd January 2019’ 


Mega Whistleblowing:-Medicine!-Tera Giga Mega Kilo 

Whistleblowing Medicine! 

40

 


Monday 2nd January 2019’ 


Racism, racist view, provoked by migration and immigration, all 

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The very SECRET OF LIFE, the scientific PROOF and origin of ALL 

ORGANIC GROWTH! 

 

 

census machines,utopia,paradise,world peace"/> 



41


LIFE! 

 

 




LIFE! 

 

 


2nd January 2019’ 


Our Queen and Margaret Thatcher alone NOT The Lords signed 

Mental Health Acts - licenses to freely imprison billions 

 

east 666 machine,666 machine,beast 666 machine sick,beast 666 

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THE Revolution: - GOD's idea for an ideal real peaceful world, with 

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THE Revolution:- full real PEACE - all non violent 

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Full complete scientific PROOF God exists. The SECRET OF 

LIFE! 

content="INNER space is an infinite 4 dimension vast array of wombs or 

Tardis's VERY SLOWLY causing TIME by organic growth forever outward to 

3 dimension OUTER space - this is the SECRET OF LIFE"/> 

 

44

Part One 

An incredible, entirely new approach to many 

key ‘scientific’, as well as ‘spiritual’, aspects of 

the Universe. 

How, on passing right through the fabric or 

‘curtains’ of Space, the extremely different, far 

greater ‘Kingdom of the Heavens’ is revealed 

and reached! 

1. The ‘void’ or space is not three-dimensional, as 

generally thought! Simple proof given here, 

which is so elegant that it is totally convincing, 

that space in our Universe is in fact EIGHTdimensional! 

2. The vital importance of space in many faiths, 

especially in the Far East, especially Buddhism 

and Zen, as an object of both meditation and 

veneration. The crucial word ‘mu’ in Zen 

Buddhism, and the closely related meditation, 

and reverence for, space or ‘the void’ in the 

East and Far East. 

3. The principal scientific view of how the Universe 

first came about, the ‘Big Bang’ theory. 

4. What is time? Where does it come from and 

where does it go to? 

5. Science is very different in its approach to 

gaining knowledge, to the faiths and religions 

of the world. It is wrong to believe that 

scientists ‘seek the truth’, which is instead the 

aim of every single faith in the world. 

Scientists aim to ‘prove scientific facts’ about 

the world, starting with ‘observations’ of 

Nature, or experiments. These usually strike 

the general public as being extremely cold and 

indeed ‘clinical’, with little emotion involved. 

Science is very different to world faiths in at 

45

least two other ways. Firstly, whereas all world 

faiths are concerned with receiving and also 

giving out ‘messages’, astonishingly science 

nearly totally ignores languages in Nature. 

Secondly, scientists deliberately cultivate often 

very many ‘theories’ about aspects of science, 

to try to accurately predict all future 

observations in the same situation. Instead, all 

world faiths follow their own unique ‘Way’ (to 

God?), usually established by a spiritual 

leader. ‘To find the Truth, about life, and 

usually God’, in order to lead an increasingly 

‘better life’. The most famous man ever, 

Jesus Christ, is so because so much of the 

world believes that he stood for the above 

ideals, shown in bold, far better than anyone 

else ever has. 

6. The quite astonishing way, in which the Hebrew 

‘Name of God’, the four letters JHWH, is 

actually a totally accurate diagram of the 

Godhead in Heaven, showing precisely how 

interaction happens with our Physical Universe. 

7. A fuller picture is given, by adding to the JHWH 

diagram the Tree of Life, made of the two trees 

of the Holy Ghost (actions) and the Holy Spirit 

(words and feelings). 

8. How God created light on the first Day of 

Creation – which science tells us, starts with 

+/- charge, then electric and magnetic fields 

result, then finally these make light by 

combining together in a complex way. 

9. Proof that there is no such thing as ‘matter’! 

All particles have in fact been proven to be 

made of concentric nested spheres, of standing 

waves made of space, with their charge spread 

all around the surface of each particle. In this 

Section, we look at particles, atoms, molecules, 

macromolecules, and briefly, crystals. 

10. The “Seven Days of God’s Creation”, 

however long they actually lasted, witnessed 

very much Creation of stars, planets, then 

46

‘biological life’ in several stages, as in the Book 

of Genesis in the Bible. We discuss all these 

phases in this Section. At the end of all this 

discussion, we will find that a whole radically 

new ‘Spiritual Science’ has emerged in the 

process! 

47

48

The LOGICAL BASIS of 

THE VERY SECRET OF LIFE 

Sensational 

Supernatural 

Stunningly New 

‘Spiritual Sciences’! 

With NO Equations in them at all! 

They are in fact as old as the 

hills... 

What follows in the next several 

dozen pages will definitely cause 

resounding changes to all of our 

views, especially scientific views, of 

space and time. 

Even more so, we prove that all 

‘material’ objects are made solely of 

a Filigree Lattice of Space and Time – 

surrounded by electrical charge. 

There is no such thing as ‘matter’ – 

‘matter’ is a pure delusion. 

So we PROVE TOTALLY ‘karma’ 

consciousness in the first Part One of 

this book! 

49

50

Section 1 

The True Nature of 

‘Space’ 

Space is actually an invisible ‘Filigree Lattice’, 

normally seen as ‘three-dimensional’ – but 

complete proof is given below, from first 

principles, that space is really ‘eight 

dimensional’! 

Conventional mathematical, scientific and 

engineering views of space – as ‘three 

dimensional’ 

We usually start to learn about space (for instance at 

school) as ‘containing three right angles at ninety 

degrees to each other’, in three ‘axes’, ‘directions’ or 

‘dimensions’. 

To start considering objects within these invisible 

three dimensions, we are first taught to draw a 

picture of the three axes or directions as below, 

called in mathematics ‘Cartesian co-ordinates’: - 

51

For hundreds, indeed thousands of years, until about 

100 years ago, science considered space to be an 

infinite ‘grid’ extending uniformly out from a base as 

above, in all three directions. 

At the start of the 20 th Century, as we saw earlier, 

Albert Einstein, in particular, totally challenged all 

the ancient notions of space as above, when he 

revolutionised ideas in science of time itself – in his 

two theories of Special Relativity and General 

Relativity. General Relativity theory even proposes 

that space can ‘curve’ – especially near very large, 

heavy bodies like stars. 

More recently, later scientists have tried to develop 

theories of the Universe that claim that space has 

more than three dimensions. Trying to see what 

space actually looks like if it is indeed ‘multidimensional’, 

even with powerful computer graphical 

methods, has, not surprisingly, proven impossible! 

52

Space has EIGHT dimensions – not 

three! Simple and complete proof! 

Firstly, the big problem with the above starting 

point, drawing three axes or ‘dimensions’ through an 

‘area of empty space’ – is that according to every 

single science as well as every single world faith or 

religion – space is never ever empty. Space is 

always full of objects, even if so tiny they are 

invisible to the naked eye – fundamental particles, 

atoms, etc. Also – EVERYTHING is CURVED! 

An ‘object’ is obviously very easy indeed to 

defin e as “something with a volume of space 

containing an inside as well as an outside”. 

The outside of objects contained inside a 

relatively large volume of free space or empty space 

can readily indeed be seen to be three dimensional 

just as above. However, maths and science seem to 

have mostly totally overlooked a very curious fact 

about the inside of all objects – also known about 

in geometry for thousands of years. For the inside 

of all objects contains four not three axes at 

right angles i.e. is four dimensional not three 

dimensional! 

The very simplest, clearest example of this is a 

cube – often a very mystical object in many faiths 

and religions – almost certainly for the above or 

similar reasons: - 

53

1. So, a large volume of free space or empty space 

– space outside objects – has three axes – or 

is ‘three dimensional’. So Outer Space is 

Three Dimensional. 

2. As in the simplest example of the cube, space 

inside objects – has four axes – is ‘four 

dimensional’. So Inner Space is Four 

Dimensional. 

3. The simplest TWO dimensional view of four 

dimensional inner space is as given by the 

(UNBELIEVABLY tongue-in-cheek by 

whoever owns that website!) hyperlink 

below: - 

4. https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https 

%3A%2F%2Fthumbs.gfycat.com%2FMadeupNic 

eKawalasize_restricted.gif&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2 

Fgfycat.com%2Fmadeupnicekawala&docid=IWH 

i3TUZqM5faM&tbnid=ARw1nc_WD- 

D1tM%3A&vet=1&w=256&h=256&bih=783&bi 

w=1600&ved=2ahUKEwj78ZemsdLfAhUGhxoKH 

aSwCGUQxiAoAXoECAEQEg&iact=c&ictx=1 

5. Incredibly, the above hyperlink’s view of four 

dimensional INNER SPACE portrays the very 

SECRET OF (ORGANIC) LIFE ITSELF – the three 

dimensions of OUTER space are naturally 

slightly more stable in ENERGY terms so FOUR 

DIMENSIONAL INNER SPACE forms an infinite 

Cosmic Dance of points of four dimensional 

space slowly organically growing as LIFE ITSELF 

and its continual ORGANIC GROWTH outward 

bound - forever progressing from INNER space 

to OUTER space. It is JUST THIS rate of organic 

growth alone that COMPLETELY DETERMINES 

THE VERY RATE THAT TIME PASSES THROUGH 

AND SO SPEAKS TO US – generally GOD speaks 

to all people very slowly and with massive 

54

patience and loving-kindness at the rate of just 

one word or syllable a second! 

6. The normal or usual situation, throughout the 

entire Universe, is that Middle Space – Inner 

Space containing further objects within 

that space – is BOTH 3D AND 4D (3D to 

inner objects and 4D to the outer object). 

7. SO MOST SPACE CAN BE READILY SEEN TO 

BE EIGHT-DIMENSIONAL – in ‘octaves’! 

8. Likewise, the ‘thing’ which separates ‘inside’ of 

all objects from their ‘outside’ must simply be a 

likewise EXTRA ‘SHELL’ OR FINAL EIGHTH 

DIMENSION OF SPACE. THE ACTUAL 8D 

SURFACE MEMBRANE OF ALL OBJECTS! 

‘TREE STRUCTURE’ OF 8-DIMENSIONAL SPACE 

So every single point in the entire vast Universe is in 

fact a TARDIS as in Doctor Witch or fake Time Lords 

or scientists – TIME itself is LORD GOD so is the 

ONLY REAL TIME LORD in the entire Universe made 

up solely of Lord God Time and Lady God Space! 

Being a Tardis, every single point in the entire vast 

Universe is BIGGER ON THE INSIDE THAN ITS 

OUTSIDE! 

This simple yet INCREDIBLE fact is the full 

explanation of the Origins of the famous Second Law 

55

of Thermodynamics – that everything in the Universe 

is gradually getting more COMPLEX NOT MORE 

RANDOM as it GROWS – so ‘its entropy constantly 

TENDS to increase’ as that Law says. 

The above discussion of the interior four dimensions 

of all space being the very LONG SOUGHT AFTER 

SECRET OF LIFE ITSELF SO all ORGANIC GROWTH 

immediately yields all the bases of all the long term 

mysteries of just how the WOMB of all mammals 

contains babies BIGGER THAN THE WOMB ITSELF SO 

PROTECTED BY THE WOMB IN A TOTALLY MAGICAL 

EVER DYNAMIC WAY WHICH I HAVE JUST 

UNRAVELLED! 

Increasing numbers of us scientists have recognised 

in the last few years, especially, that if space is 

proven to be 8D (in 8D octaves of solid light, sound 

and music, with moving or non-standing forms of 

these waves also flowing EVERYWHERE IN THE 

UNIVERSE all the time!) - not just ‘3D’… - an 

amazing thing will happen! 

Science and all its mathematics will be completed! 

Science will come to a final end, especially physics! 

The PAST keeps flowing steadily OUTWARDS from 

EVERY single point in space into space (the Kingdom 

of the Heavens)… The FUTURE keeps flowing 

steadily INWARDS from EVERY single point in space 

into space (the Kingdom of the Heavens)… This 

PRINCIPLE is called in ASTRONOMY – Mach’s 

Principle… 

Well, just my above four pages do exactly prove that 

space is indeed 8D – eightfold octaves not ‘3D’! 

QED 

56

TIME IS 3D (4D within a ‘shell’ or ‘cosmic egg’!) 

SO THE UNIVERSE OVERALL IS 8D+4D=12D !!! 

As my two diagrams overleaf show quite clearly, 

just as space is really EIGHT dimensional (NOT JUST 

‘3D’!) solid music or light or sound, TIME is three 

dimensional (with a FOURTH dimension or ‘shell’ or 

‘cosmic egg’). 

As far better understood already – its FOUR 

aspects are all equally important as well known in 

astronomy from the above Mach’s principle: - 

1. TIME, THE PAST, radiates outwards 

EVERYWHERE in TIME WAVES with the famous 

DE BROGLIE WAVELENGTH. At the speed of 

light as Albert Einstein was the first to 

investigate in his famous two Theories of 

Relativity. However, he thought space was 3D 

NOT 8D as I just elegantly proved on just 4 

pages! 

2. LIKEWISE the FUTURE radiates into every point 

in the Universe from EVERY OTHER POINT IN 

THE UNIVERSE in TIME WAVES – with the very 

same de Broglie wavelength! 

3. The ENTIRE ENCAPSULATED MOST VITAL 

UNIVERSE OF ALL THE only THREE ‘real’ 

Universes is BY FARALL THE MOST DESIRABLE 

… ! 

4. Above all it is by far the most physically and 

even spiritually HEALTHY UNIVERSE of all three 

above ‘real Universes’ …! Of common-sense or 

ZEN REALITY of ‘no mind’/’do not care – no 

TIME to!’ or ‘suchness’ – the PRESENT MOMENT 

or ‘MU / Tao / Dao / li / chi / Zen / Spiritual 

Energy everyday common-sense REALITY’ … … ! 

Overall then the UNIVERSE is 8D in SPACE and 

4D in TIME – so overall the ‘Ultimate Answer’ is it is 

‘12D’ overall – Douglas Adams! – just like any clock 

face! 

A nod to Richard Dawkins’ watchmaker is in 

order! 

57

However - God IS the watch! 

‘GOD’ (Anglo-Saxon ‘good’) IS THE WHOLE 

UNIVERSE – THE ‘LIGHT’ NOT ‘SHADY’ PARTS 

AT LEAST! 

58

59

The above amazingly just four pages form a 

logical proof from first principles that: - 

As the inside of objects is four dimensional, and only 

the outside the traditional three dimensions, overall 

space is eight dimensional – ‘8D’ in octaves! 

As we will be seeing, this is a dream come true for 

most leading modern day scientists, engineers and 

mathematicians, who have long sought such a proof 

as mine above, that space is eight dimensional - 8D. 

For scientists have already absolutely proven that if 

space is really 8D not 3D as assumed for millennia 

hitherto, all the complex mathematics of science and 

engineering will suddenly start to ‘work properly’ 

within such a 8D foundation for space. They will 

become 100% entirely accurate not just as now a set 

of approximations. 

My introductory pages above were deliberately ‘slam 

dunk’, direct, bold, brief and terse. A similar proof of 

anything desirable in maths or science on one sheet 

of paper is normally an ‘ideal triumph’ and my above 

proof that space is 8D not 3D is a classic example! 

However, we now need to give more background of 

the history of mathematical science to show that! 

A potted history of the philosophy of space 

For millennia, all civilisations have observed that in 

the everyday size of the world, space indeed contains 

three right angles or ‘dimensions’ – so assumed that 

the whole of space in the Universe was a grid of such 

everyday space. 

So buildings and vehicles were made of grids of 

building blocks of such everyday space, especially 

the very familiar bricks as used in buildings. 

60

Around the start of the 17 th Century in the Western 

Middle Ages, quite a few philosophers and 

mathematicians worked out drawings and ‘coordinate 

systems’ for 2D planes and 3D objects. 

A paper published by the French philosopher Rene 

Descartes in 1637 stole the show. So his notation 

for describing the two ‘axes’ at right angles of 2D 

planes, and the three axes at right angles of 3D 

objects has ever since been termed the ‘Cartesian 

coordinate system’. 

In 1687, fifty years after that paper by Descartes, 

the book by fellow of the British Royal Society, Sir 

Isaac Newton, called ‘Principles of Natural 

Philosophy’ took those ideas to a dramatic logical 

conclusion – so starting 200+ years of The Golden 

Age of Classical Physics. 

For in his book Newton single-handedly invented 

differential and integral calculus based on the 

Cartesian system. 

It was not until the start of the 20 th Century, that 

new discoveries in scientific observations, made 

‘classical physics’ as started by Newton in 1687, need 

drastic revision. 

Notably ‘the ultraviolet catastrophe’ and the two 

Theories of Special and General Relativity of Albert 

Einstein. 

As a result the new science of quantum mechanics 

appeared about one hundred years ago. However, 

scientists have been trying to ‘get around’ the 

essential contradiction or duality at its heart ever 

since, the famous ‘wave particle duality’. 

The complete solution in 1988 of the famous 

Schroedinger Wave Equation by the late Professor 

Doctor Milo Wolff, discussed in Section 9 below, 

61

shows that in fact there is no ‘wave particle duality’ – 

everything in the universe is made of waves of 

space. 

My own proof that space is 8D not 3D, as above, 

coupled to and derived from Milo Wolff’s proofs, in 

addition to those, should enable science to be 

completed! In a new finalised ‘semi-classical 

approach’… 

For scientists have recast the many equations of 

science, only ever approximately true up to now in 

3D space, into a ‘8D space model’ on computers. 

They found that all the equations are then 100% 

accurate not just partly so! 

Perhaps relying far too much on similar powerful 

computers, they had hopes that were seemingly not 

fulfilled, that the massively huge and expensive 

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, 

would somehow prove space is 8D not 3D… 

My own logical proof from first principles on just two 

sides of paper above in fact does the job perfectly 

instead! 

The Music of 8D Space 

The fact that I just proved that space is 8D not 3D 

from first principles, and music has seven notes or 

tones (doh, ray, mi, fa, so, la, ti) leads me to a 

perhaps astonishing claim: - 

Space is made of SOLID music! 

A simple diagram illustrates this: - 

62

Deeper notes (doh, ray, mi) correspond to the three 

dimensions of Outer Space, while the four higher 

notes, more compressed so higher frequency, 

correspond to the four axes of Inner Space. 

As in Far Eastern mysticism, space contains ‘towers 

within towers’ making symphonies out of the ‘tower 

objects’. Finally, the surfaces of objects are 8D, 

separating Outer 3D from Inner 4D Space. It is 

surfaces that contain ‘towers within towers’ that is 

objects within objects. So surfaces complete all the 

octaves of the spatial music. 

63

64

CONTENTS 

1. Introduction. Imagine a world with ‘Money as a 

thing of the past’. With the clock wound back all of 

70 years so there are only a few computers again. 

2. Money and computers are filthy – they carry 

most germs. “Filthy leukah”. “Filthy rich versus 

filthy poor”? 

3. Money and computers are just filthy dirty middlemen. 

Money and computers underpin our ‘modern 

21 st Century World’ – but it is unbearably 

awkward, clunky and inhuman. The oil of human 

relations would run rich in a world freed of both. 

4. Resources and possessions. No more force of 

economics. No more “haves and have not’s” – 

everybody happy. 

5. Food, clothing, land, housing and furnishings, 

comfortable environment (decent lighting, 

temperatures, air, water and sanitation) – all our 

essential basic needs would become free for all – 

even in the undeveloped world – the very least 

that this proposal offers after the abolition of 

money 

6. Work, agriculture, shops and industry 

7. Walking, road, rail, sea, air and space transport 

8. No more need for banks, taxes, gambling, casinos 

or Stock Markets – or charities or state benefits on 

the other hand… 

65

9. The Law – very little crime; so 

punishment; left possible. 

10. Local, national and international 

Governments 

11. Multinational cultural and language 

differences and Travel 

12. Trade; the fair distribution of wealth once 

money were abolished; the end of the Great 

International Rich-Poor Divide 

13. Children and families 

14. Poverty and debt obsolete – personal and 

national 

15. Teaching and Education 

16. Science and Technology, especially 

regarding information 

17. The Arts 

18. Entertainment and communications: - post 

offices and services, radio, TV, (mobile) 

telephones, papers, magazines, books; 

information and computer technology, and the 

Internet 

19. Sport, Recreation Activities and Holidays 

20. Health, Beauty, Hygiene, Safety, Medicine, 

Hospitals, Legal and Illegal Drugs, Social Services, 

Welfare, and The Elderly 

21. The Environment; Natural Resources; 

Environmental Health. Global Warming, ‘carbon 

footprints’, pollution, climate change all made too 

a ‘thing of the past’ 

66

22. Nature and Wildlife 

23. Politics replaced by true leadership 

24. World Peace and Security replacing 

Permanent War 

25. Sexism, sexuality, homophobia, ageism, 

racism, etc, etc 

26. Stresses and Strains, the Pace of Life and 

Mental Health 

27. Human or spiritual values and freedom of 

choice. Religion – is it affected at all? 

28. Any counter arguments to zero money are 

few and weak. 

29. Overall - a very simple and high Quality of 

Life for all. 

67

68

1. Introduction. Imagine a world with ‘Money 

as a thing of the past’. With the clock wound 

back all of 70 years so there are only a few 

computers again. 

The current worldwide recession (I share the 

increasing views of many commentators that it is a 

Second Great Depression that may last years if 

unchecked by a world government initiative) started 

life as the tritely and glibly misnamed ‘credit crunch’ 

back in September 2007. Banks stopped giving out 

vast amounts of cheap credit – around that time the 

long term bubble in massive and escalating property 

prices on both sides of the Atlantic, also burst. 

Since then world stock markets have collapsed in a 

series of drastic falls, notably in September 2008, a 

year after the start of this ‘credit crunch’ cum Second 

Great Depression. Now the world and its leaders are 

both apportioning blame as ever, often quite wildly, 

and grasping onto straws to find ways to get the 

apple cart of the world economy upright and working 

again. Was it all greedy bankers’ fault – or was it 

greedy homeowners? They ask. 

69

KEY EQUIVALENCES 

Conservative Party of Great Britain = NEO-NAZI 

PARTEI OF GREATER GERMANY IE UK BRITISH 

GOVERNMENT I.E. ‘CONSERVATIVE (NEO-NAZI) 

PARTEI’ 

Labour Party of Great Britain = plain NAZI PARTEI 

OF GREATER GERMANY IE UK BRITISH 

GOVERNMENT I.E. ‘LABOUR (NAZI) PARTEI’ 

NATIONAL HORRIBLE STALIN HITLER SYSTEM 

(NHS-HS) EXISTS globally IN BRITISH EX- 

EMPIRE REGIONS OR COUNTRIES ESPECIALLY. 

SPECIFICALLY TO CONTINUE AS A “SECOND 

(USUALLY COLOURED OR BLACK NOW) 

HOLOCAUST” THE NEO-NAZI DEATH CAMPS OR 

PRISON STIR PORRIDGE GODHELPUSALLS 

(“HOSPITALS”) … … 

… … OF ADOLF’S AND JOSEF’S ATROCIOUS 

SECOND WORLD WAR THAT NEVER ENDED – 

ANLAGEN ARCHIPELAGOS AND GULAG 

ARCHIPELAGOS!!! 

“OPERATIVE WORTER” ABOVE ALL “KONTROL – 

NACHT UND NEBEL” THE POLAR OPPOSITES OF 

LOVE, JOY, PEACE, TRUTH, HONESTY, DECENCY 

FOR INMATES. ABOVE ALL – freedom … … !!! 

Adolf’s body was never found in that bunker in 

Berlin in 1945 and he / it persists as ‘Robo 

Adolf’ = BIG BROTHER – CONTROLLING THE 

WORLD THROUGH ALL HIS (NEO-) NAZI 

LEGACY OF NASTY NAZI LAWS IN BRITAIN, 

EUROPE, RUSSIA AND AMERICA!!! 

70

“Our Freedom 

Song” 

As composed by Our Lady The Holy Spirit with Her 

Elendila, with the tune and words inspired by the title 

of Simon Richard Lee’s main book: - 

‘Now is the Dawning of the Time of The End’. 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, 

Now is The Dawning of The Time of the End. 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Enlightenment, 

Now is The Dawning of The End of Time. 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Reason, 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Truth. 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Peace, 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Love. 

FREEdom, FREEdom, FREEdom’s what we want… 

FREEdom, FREEdom, FREEdom’s what we need… 

Our Freedom Song, Our Freedom Song, Our Freedom 

Song, 

Our Freedom Song, Our Freedom Song, Our Free-eedom 

So-o-o-ong. 

71

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, 

Now is The Dawning of The Time of the End. 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Experience, 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Merriment. 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Laughter, 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of All Things New. 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of Joy, 

Now is The Dawning of the Age of LOVE. 

FREEdom, FREEdom, FREEdom’s what we want… 

FREEdom, FREEdom, FREEdom’s what we need… 

Our Freedom Song, Our Freedom Song, Our Freedom 

Song, 

Our Freedom Song, Our Freedom Song, Our Free-eedom 

So-o-o-ong. 

Our Freedom Song, 







Our Freedom So-o-o-ong! 

72

My own answers are extremely radical and totally 

mind-blowingly far-reaching: - 

o A lot of the problem is the vast over-proliferation 

of a population of nearly totally uncontrolled, 

unregulated, computers, especially in this 21 st 

Century, way beyond in Size and Complexity, the 

ability of their designers to actually control their 

design. Above all the Internet. As a computer 

systems designer who first worked on them using 

paper tape and cards back in 1971, I find the 

current generation of systems (a) far too complex 

and BIG for anybody alive to understand let alone 

manage (b) since ‘9/11’ and the ensuing war on 

terrorism, involved in a global system of control 

and alleged so-called ‘security’ that serves no 

human being any more – only the ‘Great God of 

MONEY’. 

o I propose here a ‘CCCCCC’ or ‘C6’ – a ‘cool, calm, 

collected complete computer census’. Computers 

were invented between 1937 and 1939 as 

weapons – the first digital electronic computer 

was based at Bletchley in England throughout the 

Second World War. This ‘Colossus Machine’ 

enabled Britain and so the Allies to break the 

‘Enigma Code’ of every single German military 

radio signal during the war – and had Prime 

Minister Winston Churchill taken this work much 

more seriously, it has been said that the result 

could have been a far quicker ending of that 

terrible conflict. The man who published the 

original design was one Alan Turing, a predecessor 

of mine at King’s College, Cambridge. He got into 

a lot of trouble with the homophobia of the then 

Government about his very precocious early 

blatancy about his homosexuality – and the 

resulting persecution eventually drove him to 

suicide. I am very glad even in this day and age, 

that I do not suffer from either his homosexual or 

suicidal tendencies… 

o I claim in a future world where we ‘put the genie 

of these computers’ back in the bottle the only 

73

computers we would need are these limited forms: 

- 

o (a) Calculation, measurement and control devices 

– but ONLY where humans cannot match the 

performance, accuracy, complexity or need for 

health and safety of these (b) Word processing 

and graphics (c) Music (d) CONTROLLED 

communications (e) MORE (much) control over 

stored information (data) 

o The KEY to causing such a counter-revolution 

would seem Luddite and backward were it not for 

the radical, totally idealistic, crazy to some, nature 

of my own solution to the ever-worsening Second 

Great Depression of our 21 st Century, totally out of 

control and unregulated, ‘computer-money 

complex’. That is: - 

o Problem – (the love of) Money is the Root of 

All Evil 

74

o Only Logical Answer – ABOLISH ALL MONEY. 

o The next two sections, (2) and (3), describe the 

main problems of this ‘computer-money complex’ 

as I see them. The first of these should be 

blindingly obvious from the very description of 

money by the slang phrase ‘filthy leukah’ - but 

may well shock and even scare some people. In 

remaining sections, firstly in most I describe the 

‘Ideal money free world’ in all its aspects – and 

secondly confine my attentions to religion and 

even a biblical basis for all of this – to just a few 

sections at the very end. 

o To summarise: - the ‘Root of all Evil’ was planted 

by The Devil right at the very start of things. 

Satan invented money. For the last 70 years, 

computer automation has rocketed in importance 

and fallen correspondingly massively in price to 

the point of the current Second Great Depression 

having been caused by a ‘computer-money 

complex’ that no longer serves people – only the 

Great Gods. The Original Great God of Money – 

Satan’s Offspring, the Root of All Evil, remember – 

and The New Second Upstart Great God of IT - 

Machines or Technology. 

o It is time that humanity took this Second Great 

Depression as a golden opportunity to make a 

massive step in growing up - into a wonderful 

New World. As we see in this Manifesto, if we 

Abolish All Money, that is the only catalyst we 

need to provide, to create a world free of poverty 

and greed, yet full of opportunity for all on a truly 

equal basis. 

o This Booklet is termed a Manifesto on the cover 

even though it transcends all political views, which 

are largely money-based. It is a Manifesto that 

seeks to Marshal a whole Movement of a Majority 

of Like-Minded Minds. (an MMMMMM??..) To do 

the following. To dig up the ancient, hoary, 

cobwebbed, part rotting, part fossilized, it is so 

old, Root of All Evil, Money Itself, dripping with 

oceans of the blood, sweat and tears of 

75

generations of the poverty-stricken, ironically 

most of them alive today. Do not burn it but 

completely destroy it in a very modern way 

indeed – recycle all the metal and paper of the 

coins and notes, and re-cycle the plastic of all 

debit and credit cards. Then computers could 

easily be re-bottled like the genies or Evil Spirits 

that they are – only to be let out again under 

extremely controlled circumstances. The ones 

that were scrapped would also provide a wealth of 

recycled materials – especially gold and other 

precious minerals and metals. 

76

2. Money and computers are filthy – they carry 

most germs. “Filthy leukah”. “Filthy rich 

versus filthy poor”? 

In the next two sections (2) and (3) I give my two 

principal, both devastating objections to the worlds 

of ‘cash’ and ‘the computer-money complex’. The 

first, in this section, will probably strike you as 

common sense, but nevertheless something you will 

almost certainly never have thought of – because 

society makes money so sacred a Sacred Cow – that 

is actually very shocking. Consider: - 

Whenever you give and take money in a shop, 

those notes and coins will have been handled by 

dozens and hundreds of people in their time, 

many with infectious diseases. The dirt on 

those notes and coins, built up increasingly with 

age, carries toxic, infectious, microbes, 

bacteria, viruses and other microscopic 

germs... 

Money is filthy. Your average wallet, 

purse, or pocket of money is absolutely 

riddled with disease and germs. 

Especially these days, with ‘chip and PIN’ 

keyboards replacing signatures, the same is 

only slightly less true of debit and credit cards – 

20 people an hour touch the same keyboard to 

enter their PIN, passing on infectious germs and 

so diseases. 

So what about the cash till operators? They 

typically do a two hour shift, handling not only 

the toxic infected money – but all of the goods 

being sold... Then their shift changes because 

operating a cash till is only allowed for a certain 

amount of time because it is intensive i.e. very 

stressful. Another cash till operator uses the 

very same cash till keyboard – spreading even 

more germs and disease. 

The same is true of computer keyboards 

worldwide, for the vast majority of these are 

77

shared between company employees and 

members of families and their friends at home. 

78

I am a quite ‘heavy’ smoker so am well aware of the 

current fierce coercion in my own country England, 

to initially ban all smoking in public places that 

started two years ago, obviously with the long term 

agenda being to outlaw smoking altogether. 

However I feel that the Government led health 

warnings on tobacco could be used even more 

urgently on money – notes, coins and cards. This 

would take place in a ‘grass roots way’, with at first 

families, then towns and villages, declaring 

themselves to be ‘money free / cash free / credit free 

zones’ which would be vastly more effective than 

such communities in the past rather ‘pissing in the 

wind’ by declaring themselves rather pointlessly to 

be ‘nuclear free zones’. Finally whole states and 

counties, then whole countries, would become ‘cash 

free zones’, in this New World. 

Bank notes, debit and credit cards, and keyboards 

would initially be marked with the chemical skull and 

crossbones symbol for ‘poison’, and be inscribed with 

the warning, 

“Contains toxic, poisonous dirt, microbes, bacteria 

and viruses” 

Coins are too small for such a warning message – 

but the ‘tails’ side could have stamped on it in yellow 

and black the same ‘poison’ skull and crossbones 

warning… 

My own approach to dealing with the problems of 

money being dirty and unhygienic – it gets worse, 

see the next section – is the human, humane 

approach compared to the above ‘Beast 666’ one… 

79

So – we would like to see this sort of desperately 

over-needed measure introduced first in my own 

country, the UK. So I address Her Majesty The 

Queen in Person : - 

“Ma’am. Message from MAAM. Read on for the rest 

gets better and better after this. Then get your 

current government of whatever slant to read this 

too – and all of you abolish all money starting here 

in the UK.” 

80

3. Money and computers are just filthy dirty 

middle-men. Money and computers underpin 

our ‘Modern 21 st Century World’ – but it is 

unbearably awkward, clunky and inhuman. 

The oil of human relations would run rich in a 

world freed of both. 

We have just seen one frighteningly real problem 

with both money and computers as they co-exist in 

their 21 st Century ‘computer-money complex’. We 

now turn to look at how these two middle men, the 

terrible twins in this conspiratorial takeover of the 

world of the last 70 years, increasingly in the last ten 

years, seem to have brought it nearly to a 

diabolically awful conclusion since 11 th September 

2001 – ‘9/11’ and George Bush Junior’s ensuing 

immediate launch the very next day of the infamous 

‘war on terrorism’. So let us compare the world now 

with ten years or so ago, and see how in the Name of 

Progress a ruinous state of affairs has nearly finished 

emerging. 

Please do not think I am some kind of ‘Victor 

Meldrew’ character when you read the long list of 

severe gripes below with the ‘system’ as it has now 

emerged and seems likely to produce only even more 

of the same dire sort of world. It is just that I have 

long since lost any of my initial enthusiasm for 

computers, but it is they not I that are turncoats, for 

far from their initial, mostly for noble, purposes 70 

years ago – now they only mostly serve the 

‘computer-money complex’. My list of severe gripes 

is as follows: - 

81

Using the telephone to talk to representatives of 

more and more organizations, especially 

commercial ones, has become, and is becoming, 

increasingly fraught. You usually now get a 

ludicrously positive, beaming, robot humanoid 

voice, terribly terribly well-spoken, not a real 

person. You are asked to push a series of 

buttons supposed to home you in on the option 

you want to address when you deal with them. 

Then all too often one of two things happens: - 

(a) you discover to your horror that this phone 

call is being answered in a completely inhuman 

automated way – there is no possibility of 

actually talking to a human being not a robot 

humanoid voice interpretation machine that 

often mishears you or hangs up unexpectedly. 

(b) You wait ten or twenty minutes listening to 

that company’s taste in piped muzak ‘on hold’ – 

most irritating when they play the same 

(depressing?) muzak track over and over again. 

Then when you finally get through to a human 

voice, and ask a slightly difficult question not on 

their computer screen, they say ‘do you mind if 

I put you on hold for a moment?’ which turns 

into a further ten or twenty minutes, far from ‘a 

moment’. They are really saying, were they 

honest about it ‘I do not mind putting you on 

hold for ten minutes when I say ‘a moment’. 

You are footing the phone bill and we ensure it 

is a premium rate number so we get a large 

payment from the phone company from your 

bill – for keeping you on hold.’ 

Another form of ‘computer-money complex’ 

phone abuse, also just keeps getting more and 

more common and intrusive. Increasingly when 

my phone rings, it is no friend, not even a real 

person on the far end. It is a recording of 

another robot humanoid, pleasantly inviting you 

to buy their service or pay for everything apart 

from the actual fare of the Mediterranean Cruise 

82

it claims you have won. Nobody likes con artist 

robots ringing you up like that. 

83

My third and final example of what I regard as 

phone abuse is the familiar phrase once you 

actually get through to customer services and 

real people. How often have you heard this, 

“Sorry please ring back in a few hours. Our 

system is down.” Whereas the first two 

problems above are really just symptoms of a 

now fully emerged “Culture of the computermoney 

complex” – the “system down.” problem 

speaks to me, as a Chartered Computer 

Systems Engineer with a long history of actually 

designing fully 100% working computer 

systems years ago, of a much deeper problem, 

as follows: - 

Probably even now, still the worst offender in 

this is the very market leader, whom I will 

ironically name by my affectionate term for 

them in this discussion: ‘Megabollox’. The 

above company will have been sold their 

computer system, either to replace a previous 

paper based system, or more likely these days, 

with the march of time and such ‘Progress’ – an 

upgrade from another earlier version of such a 

system. Megabollox have caused an entire 

sales culture of selling new computer systems 

by appealing to the buyer with the sheer 

quantity of ‘bells, whistles, gadgets and gizmos’ 

that come with it – generally termed ‘features’. 

The trouble is testing all of these vast quantity 

of such ‘features’ on just one system so they all 

always work together or in unison, not just in 

isolation from each other. Again Megabollox 

have started another major notorious trend with 

their software – they release it to a naïve 

gullible Joe Bloggs public, barely tested beyond 

the pre-production ‘beta’ testing phase – and let 

that public, already hard sold yet another ‘jazzy, 

exciting Megabollox product’ do most of the 

testing for Megabollox instead. Yet for 

Megabollox, have they already done everything 

84

technically feasible years ago in 2002 with their 

‘Windows XP’ product? 

They were immediately assailed by a dodgy 

army of hackers, and had to spend the next five 

years introducing literally thousands of security 

features to stop Windows XP attracting viciously 

hostile ‘malware’ - viruses, Trojan horses, 

spyware, worms, and other assaults. That was 

five years that stopped Megabollox introducing 

Windows Vista as a ‘replacement’ for Windows 

XP – but it backfired. 

Problems were, as I could see them when I 

bought a laptop briefly with Vista Home Basic 

installed on it in 2007 when Vista emerged:- 

Initially and for some months, one could not 

make Vista run any software that ran on 

Windows XP – apart of course from Megabollox 

software. All software manufacturers apart 

from supreme arrogant Megabollox had to 

rapidly produce new ‘Vista compatible’ versions 

of their packages, at vast expense. 

However hard I tried while I had my Vista 

machine, I could not for the life of me perceive 

any real difference technically in the 

internals from its predecessor XP that I knew 

very well. Megabollox emphasised the ‘front 

end’ or ‘(hu)man-machine interface’ and indeed 

that seemed to be where absolutely the only 

differences lay. What a let down after waiting 

all of five years – just to get a cosmetically 

slightly ‘sexier’ system. 

Yet the biggest problem with Vista, its downfall 

it was to turn out, was that some of these ‘front 

end’ features required vastly more sheer 

computing power and resources than were 

available on most machines then and even now 

– especially some of the more ludicrously 

‘snazzier’ features like three dimensional 

graphics. 

85

Overall then, with Vista, Megabollox were 

‘flogging a dead donkey’ by introducing this 

cosmetic, resource-flogging successor to 

Windows XP falsely as an advance. The 

marketing hype certainly led hundreds of 

thousands of gullible punters to do what 

Megabollox coerced by claiming they would be 

dropping all their support of XP once Vista had 

been launched. They coughed up the large 

license fee often only to feel stranded by the 

above three problems and by the usual cynical 

Megabollox ploy of using the public as guinea 

pigs to find most of the deeper and more subtle 

‘bugs’ or faults in the new Vista Operating 

System. 

Yet Megabollox are planning to flog the dead 

donkey even further into its grave, as it were, 

by shortly bringing out yet another new version 

of Windows beyond XP – called ‘Windows 7’. 

Yet the price/performance ratio for the 

computers it would run on bottomed out at last 

to £300 for a complete computer vastly more 

powerful than one a tiny fraction as fast and 

powerful and large – just 30 years ago – when 

home computing was unthinkable due to the 

cost and sheer size of machines then. 

Plus many computer pundits have pointed out 

that computers are very near the limits of their 

design capabilities – due to the limitations of 

physics itself – they are rapidly approaching a 

point where ‘quantum effects’ prohibit them 

getting any smaller and more compact. 

86

For all of 70 years, all world governments have 

given computer designers a total free rein solely 

in the name of ‘Progress’ and ‘economic growth’ 

- whereas computers now actually contain most 

of the world’s wealth. It is surely time for 

computer people everywhere to admit it: - 

“Come on lads and ladettes – the game is up – 

the world governments have at last got wind 

that they have been taken by surprise by us 

computer nerds for all of 70 years now – so 

have let us get away with our blue murder of IT 

technology. The game seems to be up – we 

have to admit to them that everything possible 

that can be done with conventional computers 

has already been done. No, we have not 

succeeded by any stretch of the imagination in 

creating a single conscious i.e. truly intelligent 

computer in that 70 years… Our long term, 

vastly expensive game seems to be up.’ 

Conventional computer design, so its price to 

performance ratio, have reached opposite peak 

and trough respectively for some years now. A 

great time to reverse as much of the damage as 

possible – for the Cool, Calm, Collected 

Complete Computer Census or CCCCCC (C6) I 

mentioned earlier – at the same time as laws 

are passed worldwide to outlaw and criminalise 

money. 

Have computer systems really peaked? Or is it 

not rather the case that they have gone way 

beyond any reasonable such peak – especially 

in the vast wastelands of cyberspace that 

constitute the newly arrived and already nearly 

world dominant Internet? I speak as a retired 

Chartered Computer and Instrument and 

Measurement and Control Engineer, who from 

1971 to 1997 regularly used, where regularly 

millions of computer ‘bytes’ are totally 

wastefully used today, a few hundreds or 

thousands at most of such bytes of program – 

87

to achieve a perfectly working, hand crafted 

not machine-butchered result. 

88

In a nutshell, I have to work with the Internet 

to write and promote my writings, but LOATHE 

it. I find it glitzy, trashy, grossly inefficient and 

slow, unreliable – and very often either sleazy 

(with invasions from pornography sites and / or 

viruses etc.) or even sinister next to totally 

respectable (Marks and Spencer are apparently 

on a par with sites run by Al’Quaeda terrorists.) 

Above all there is a total lack of central control 

by any government’s laws as the Internet 

grandiosely transcends all International Law, so 

totally frustrating the efforts of international 

governments everywhere to regulate the Beast. 

89

My own proposal is the CCCCCC, as we have 

seen. A bottom-up grass roots approach of a 

global census of all computer equipment would 

tackle the problem of the Internet for world 

governments by taking out the lower supporting 

‘bricks’ of dangerous individual computers first. 

Come on world, do yourself a favour – carry out 

just such a CCCCCCC. 

As spending literally hours glued to a computer 

screen and ‘surfing the net’ has become 

commonplace in recent years with the Internet, 

not just as once the domain solely of ‘computer 

nerds’, so we see, as this growth of ‘cyber 

space’ has taken place, a parallel loss of interest 

in most of society in ‘real’ not ‘cyber’ games, 

sports, shopping, crafts and other recreation 

activities. Yet I have a derisive term for much 

of the Internet as ‘tinsel town’ – unreliable 

information, illegal drug sites, likewise 

extremely dodgy pornographic sites that often 

attack you with viruses etc. All totally 

unregulated of course. International laws on 

the activities on the Internet, as we just said, 

are desperately required. As I have found, 

perhaps the most annoying thing that can 

happen is if your email address enters the 

public domain. Then expect a torrent of emails 

for ‘guaranteed’ get rich quick on the Web 

schemes, pornographic sites, and other spam 

clogging your email in-tray. 

The Millennium saw a new phenomenon, initially 

in richer chains of shops, but now nearly 

everywhere. Where once the only sound at 

cash desks in shops was the sound of the cash 

till, now there is a cacophony of new sounds. 

The multiple electronic ‘peeps’ as laser armed 

cash till computers salute all the ‘666’ based 

UPC barcodes on all the items of merchandise 

as they ‘scan’ the codes. 

90

Money could be described as “the world’s oldest 

and most fiendish weapon for controlling 

resources and people and all living creatures”. 

Since 1939, exactly 70 years ago, with the first 

computer, it has been joined in what has nearly 

been perfected as what I term the ‘computermoney 

complex’. I studied computer science at 

Cambridge University 1978-79 and our then 

Professor Maurice Wilkes had worked on the 

first Enigma computer in that terrible war. One 

day he told us a totally apocryphal tale. He and 

a senior colleague on the project took a walk 

together near the computer at Bletchley, then 

the only one in the world still remember, just 

after the War ended. “We might need another 

one of these by the year 2000” was the 

incredibly lacking in foresight remark they made 

– just look at the uncontrolled supernova 

explosion of computers since, now in every walk 

of life. That first computer led a wave of such 

computer ‘weapons’ into a ‘computer-money 

complex’ with the ancient ultimate weapon of 

money, into whole undreamt of ways of 

controlling resources and people and animals 

now. Yet like all weapons of war and military 

methods, both are almost unbearably clunky, 

awkward and stiff, middle men only – both 

inanimate servants that would dominate, with 

absolutely zero inherent intelligence. They 

threaten to throttle humanity once and for all as 

they have caused the current Second Great 

Depression. My own views are radical – we 

need to Abolish All Money and put its ally the 

genie of computers firmly back in the bottle – 

all before it is all too late. The rewards if we do 

that are huge. 

That is the end of rather a ‘diatribe’ in some 

places against money and computers – now 

with their “computer-money complex” having 

caused directly the Second Great Depression of 

91

2009. In the next 20 sections or so, I will be 

necessarily a lot briefer – because I will trying 

to imagine what the world would be like (dare I 

say will be like one day?) when money has been 

abolished – and the genie of computers put 

back in the bottle. Nobody can fully imagine 

this, so I will be sensible and confine myself to 

what the initial changes might be. As a young 

boy, I thoroughly enjoyed the Narnia Books of 

C. S. Lewis, and will paraphrase a ‘shout of joy’ 

in the final book of the series – The Last Battle. 

He greatly reassures us that when the world 

finally ends, a New World will absolutely 

immediately appear, ready-made, and as the 

heroes of the story enter this New World they 

cry out for joy. In a world with money gone 

and computers shrunk back to their own original 

size in importance, would the shout be, ‘Higher 

and Further.’ then become ‘Ever Higher and 

Ever Further.’? 

92

4. Resources and possessions. No more force of 

economics. No more “haves and have not’s” 

– everybody happy. 

In most of the rest of this Manifesto I look at how the 

world would at least maybe start to be should we as 

a species, probably initially in small pockets, abolish 

all money, i.e. abolish all cash and abolish all credit. 

That is right: - a world with no money, no cash, no 

credit, I say again, zero money, zero cash and zero 

credit. A money-free, cash-free, credit-free world. 

Would resources and possessions just disappear in 

this New World? Of course not – but they would 

simply have no financial or monetary value 

associated with them or price tag. They would 

instead revert to their essential ‘intrinsic value’ which 

Karl Marx called their ‘use value’ in his essay ‘the 

fetishism of commodities’ in his famous book ‘Das 

Kapital’. 

A money-free world is the only way to achieve the 

great Noble Aspirations of many of mankind to have 

a fair distribution of wealth i.e. in That World, only 

resources and possessions, with no financial strings 

attached any more. Neither Capitalist nor 

Communist – but Utterly Liberal with capital U and 

capital L. It would almost automatically apply two 

principles from the words of Jesus in the New 

Testament in the Bible: - 

‘Seek and you shall find’ 

‘Ask and you shall receive’ 

In our 21 st Century world it is possible to get hold of 

anything you could possibly want in life – at a price. 

In a world where ‘money was no object’ – where 

indeed money no longer existed. – all you would do 

was seek your heart’s desire till you found it – in 

papers, magazines, books, TV, radio as now – and 

whatever rump was left of the Internet after the 

93

CCCCCC I keep advocating. With no money 

involved, nor indeed would there be any primitive 

barter unless you absolutely wanted to thank the 

person with whatever was your heart’s desire. For 

you will simply ‘ask (for it – politely.) and you will 

receive - it – totally free of charge.’ in Our Brave 

New World. 

Really it would be that easy. Fascinating is it not? 

94

5. Food, clothing, land, housing and furnishings, 

comfortable environment (decent lighting, 

temperatures, air, water and sanitation) – all 

our essential basic needs would become free 

for all – even in the undeveloped world – the 

very least that this incredibly simple proposal 

offers after the abolition of money 

Forget “seeking and finding your heart’s desire, and 

receiving it if you ask politely for it” for a moment. 

In our present 21 st Century World there is an ever 

deeper growing global “Rich – Poor Divide” and the 

vast majority of the world’s burgeoning population is 

born into a planet where they do not even have the 

very basics, even clean water – as in the title of this 

section, as I see them. 

Finding a way, as many leaders and politicians try 

fruitlessly to do, to find ways round the stranglehold 

of the ‘computer-money complex’ today to reach out 

and actually give the majority of the world, these 

basics that some take for granted, is impossible. 

To Abolish All Money is to create a world where there 

would be an immediate global rescue operation from 

West to East and North to South – literally - to 

provide at least the above basics to absolutely all of 

the world’s population. The Western and Northern 

Hemisphere actually already have all the adequate 

resources – it is only the money itself that is 

currently the only obstacle to absolutely a global 

panacea. 

Taking money itself out of the ‘equation of the 

world’s current mess’ – gives you instantly, literally, 

a panacea to all of the world’s problems. As we see 

in the sections that follow… 

95

6. Work, agriculture, shops and industry 

In a world free of money so of the ‘money motive’, at 

first there might appear to be no incentive for any at 

all of these. However: - 

Work would become optional or part time or 

full time as you wished – the majority actually 

enjoy the right sort of work. It would be a 

golden opportunity to abolish not only unethical 

money but unethical and onerous forms of 

work. Also wages. 

Agriculture would of course remain essential – 

but would be able to be cleaned up, with global 

‘slash and burn’, ‘cash crops’, Genetically 

Modified Food and Factory Farming, etc, 

abolished. All food would become free so far 

more exotic and varied. Everybody could enjoy 

a healthy balanced diet – free. 

Shops would only lose their cash tills and 

become ‘Ware Houses’ – with everything in 

them again free. 

Industry would lose all money, cash, credit, 

and most computers in this equation. A golden 

opportunity for it to clean up its act – to become 

vastly ‘greener and cleaner’ overnight – as 

many politicians now are vainly trying to 

achieve. 

96

7. Walking, road, rail, sea, air and space 

transport 

Of these, all not just walking would become totally 

free. Yippee. Imagine the drive there will have to be 

to put non-green cars, motorbikes and busses off the 

road, non-green trains, ships, planes also out of 

action – and to stop everybody taking off into space. 

97

8. No more need for banks, taxes, gambling, 

casinos or Stock Markets – or charities or 

state benefits on the other hand… 

In a money-free world this would speak for itself. 

98

9. The Law – very little crime; so punishment; 

left possible. 

About all that would be left of The Law would be the 

Ten Commandments of the Old Testament plus the 

Two Great Commandments of the New. These are, 

to refresh your memory, ‘Love your neighbour as 

yourself’ and ‘Love the Lord your God with all your 

soul, all your mind, all your spirit and all your heart’. 

There might well be two graded punishments, for 

people still using money after it was abolished, as 

follows: - 

‘Insane about money’. Sectioning in a 

mental hospital. 

‘Violently insane about money’. Detention in 

the psychiatric wing of a prison. 

Both punishments to involve nasty, rough, toxic 

tablets and injections administered as now By Law 

until the prisoner were cured completely. 

The basic precept of British Law according to legal 

practitioners themselves, as The Law has been 

developed largely by the Victorians and spread to 

most of the rest of the world, is:- 

“Possession is nine tenths of The Law” 

These days that might be better put as: - 

“Possession is 99.9% of the Law”. 

99

In a cash-free society the only law related to 

possession would be the Commandment ‘Do not 

steal’. The Law would revert Centuries, Millennia, to 

an original precept of the Ten Commandments of 

Moses on Mount Sinai: 

“Personal crimes are Nine Tenths of The Law” 

Finally the Ten (Twelve?) Commandments would be 

supplemented by new ones – taken straight from 

Buddhism: - 

“Do not hurt, abuse, or even offend any living 

creature” 

“Believe only what you yourself know to be 

true”. 

100

10. Local, national and international 

Governments 

As I said before, it is inevitable that the way to the 

first ‘Father Christmas State’, the first of a World 

Union of such ‘Father Christmas States’, would be 

very grass roots indeed. ‘Money free zones’ would 

lead to money free villages and towns – then finally 

money free states and counties, and ultimately the 

money free country then countries. I will now take a 

tongue in cheek look at what would happen to my 

own country’s government here in Britain, when this 

finally happens. Government, both local and 

national, would be elected but unpaid and 

voluntary, completely no longer to do with money 

and as we just saw, as a direct result, with far fewer 

laws to worry about. It would drastically shrink to 

just deal with the few remaining things that local and 

national government would be left to do in a moneyfree 

world, of a Father Christmas State:- 

The Treasury and the Bank of England, like all 

banks, would vanish. They would be replaced by a 

Ministry of Joy, Humour and Generosity. 

The Home Office and Scotland Yard and The Police 

would have far fewer laws and crimes to deal with. 

They would become the Ministry of Wisdom, 

Reason and DEEP THOUGHT. 

Any Father Christmas State like that, especially 

eventually in a World Union of Father Christmas 

States, would as we see soon enjoy complete 

world peace, so the Ministry of Defence would 

become the Ministry of Grace, Peace, Love and 

Creativity (formerly known as hanky-panky.) 

The NHS would also now offer free hairdressing, 

chiropody and beauty treatments – a Ministry of 

Health and Beauty. 

101

I am open to like humorous suggestions to my 

email address simon@maam.org.uk for what to 

merge social services and the Department of Work 

and Pensions into – something along the lines of 

The Ministry of Silly Walks (as immortalized 

by John Cleese of Monty Python’s Flying 

Circus in the 1960’s) but thoroughly up to date 

and 21 st Century, original – and topical. I may 

well offer an appropriate prize for this. 

102

11. Multinational cultural and language 

differences and Travel 

The first money-free zones, then towns and villages, 

and finally Father Christmas Regions or Counties, 

and finally the first Father Christmas State, would 

obviously be tourist attractions. They would have to 

turn away travelers who were would-be immigrants – 

and tell them to travel back to their home town and 

‘spread the word’ and make that into a money free 

zone too. 

103

12. Trade; the fair distribution of wealth 

once money were abolished; the end of the 

Great International Rich-Poor Divide 

Money free zones would exchange goods free (not 

barter – that would be very backward-looking) 

without any trade. The first full Father Christmas 

State would probably indeed be a very advanced 

country like my own country of Great Britain, and 

give goods away and expect like treatment in return 

– setting a dramatic example until the full World 

Union of Father Christmas States were established. 

Once that happened there would naturally, as I said 

earlier, be a free rescue operation, from North to 

South Hemispheres, and West to East – fully global 

– International Rescue. The International Rich- 

Poor Divide would naturally vanish, almost certainly 

in months or even less. 

104

13. Children and families 

In any Father Christmas State, it would be Christmas 

every day of the year – Without Price. Naturally, all 

families especially children, would be over the moon. 

105

14. Poverty and debt obsolete – personal 

and national 

As each Father Christmas State got established, two 

things would naturally happen: - 

A fair distribution of wealth as in resources and 

possessions would take place – all poverty would 

be abolished 

All debt would be cancelled out – as there would 

be no money. 

106

15. Teaching and Education 

With money no longer any object, the children, 

and as necessary adults of the whole world would 

for the first time all receive a decent education. 

Money would either be taught about as a history 

subject only, like computer systems – or best 

forgotten about totally as a Very Bad Thing? 

Everybody would enjoy their education, teachers 

and children alike, totally unlike the present 

regime around the world. 

107

16. Science and Technology, especially 

regarding information 

With money no longer any object, again, a dream 

of many scientists and engineers could be 

achieved very quickly – Science, Engineering and 

Technology could be completed and finished off 

- everything possible would have been invented 

and put to good use. 

The big exception to this would be the CCCCCC I 

have mentioned before – this global computer 

census would ‘put the genie of computers back in 

the bottle’ and global laws would be passed 

limiting the scope and size of computers 

drastically. 

108

17. The Arts 

With money no longer an object, yet again, works 

of art would lose all financial value so only retain 

their intrinsic or ‘aesthetic’ value as art. 

In the Age of Leisure that would come once work 

was done in five day on five day off shifts, and 

even be purely optional and voluntary, The Arts 

would flourish. Drawing, painting, photography, 

cinema, pottery, textiles, graphic design, 

architecture, etc, etc, would all flourish – a New 

Renaissance?.. 

109

18. Entertainment and communications: - post 

offices and services, radio, TV, (mobile) 

telephones, papers, magazines, books; 

information and computer technology, and 

the Internet 

All of these are grossly over developed and would 

come under the auspices of the same CCCCCC as for 

computers – to rationalize and simplify them, and 

change ‘300 channels of crap’ on TV, for instance 

back to far fewer, far higher quality output channels. 

110

19. Sport, Recreation Activities and Holidays 

As for the Arts, in the Age of Leisure that would 

come these would all become accessible to all, and to 

a large extent would enjoy a Renaissance – 

especially with computer games and TV drastically 

‘having their respective genies put back in the bottle’ 

as discussed already several times. 

111

20. Health, Beauty, Hygiene, Safety, Medicine, 

Hospitals, Legal and Illegal Drugs, Social 

Services, Welfare, and Care For The Elderly 

The one really appalling thing here, illegal drugs, 

would simply and naturally go out of business once 

the drug barons lost their entire money motive. 

All the other things in this list would be free for all 

– under the umbrella of a ‘Ministry of Health and 

Beauty’ as proposed before. 

112

21. The Environment; Natural Resources; 

Environmental Health. Global Warming, 

‘carbon footprints’, pollution, climate change 

all made too a ‘thing of the past’ 

The money motive, nearly everyone agrees, is the 

main reason for the wholesale destruction of The 

Global Environment – for centuries if not millennia. 

With that Money Motive abolished if and when we 

abolish money, an Environmental Renaissance would 

happen too. 

113

22. Nature and Wildlife 

With money abolished, and a New Age of Leisure, we 

would all have much more time, and the motive, to 

appreciate Nature and Life in General, much more. 

Would we clean up the whole planet? 

114

23. Politics replaced by true leadership 

Politics could be aptly described as ‘electing leaders 

to act mostly by consensus’ in the grim art, mostly, 

of ‘raising taxes then working out how “best” (which 

political view predominates, determines this) how to 

spend them’. In a world without money everybody 

would much more ‘be their own leader’ or ‘be their 

own Jesus’ and it would be a much more mature, 

grown-up society all round. 

115

24. World Peace and Security replacing 

Permanent War 

One major long term objective that nearly all 

politicians today are agreed on is of course the cause 

of World Peace. World Peace would indeed come as 

naturally as Day follows Night were money abolished 

– money and to an extent religion cause all wars. 

116

25. Sexism, sexuality, homophobia, ageism, 

racism, etc, etc 

Everybody would have enough of everything they 

needed – initially the basics, worldwide, to be 

followed by luxuries of course. Everybody would be 

recognized as ‘equal but unique and different’ – 

and these isms and phobias would soon vanish. 

117

26. Stresses and Strains, the Pace of Life and 

Mental Health 

Life would be far less full of stress and strain with no 

money to worry about. If everybody lived 

comfortably and above all for free, with no longer 

any ‘money motive’ to goad us all on, especially with 

work optional, the Mental Health of The World would 

drastically improve. Mental Illness might well even 

vanish entirely. 

118

27. Human or spiritual values and freedom of 

choice. Religion – is it affected at all? 

There are of course a huge number of religions, 

faiths, churches, and sects and denominations 

within them in this World today. They mostly 

exhibit huge differences between each other to 

outsiders, and some have most peculiar practices, 

especially in this supposedly modern 21 st Century. 

The Christian Churches, judging from their 

speeches back in Easter 2009 and since as usual, 

do at least vaguely agree on one thing – the 

‘spiritual life’ is vastly more to be honoured and 

sought after than money and material 

possessions. Yet ask a cross section of faiths and 

churches what ‘spiritual’ actually means – and you 

get an infinite range of answers. 

Religion freed of money would contract and 

simplify itself, quite naturally, and find a much 

simpler consensus between faiths. It would go 

through a great peaceful revolution, in fact. 

119

29. Any counter arguments to the 

abolition of money are few and weak. 

I have presented a whole range of very strong 

arguments in this Manifesto that we actually all act 

to Abolish All Money. These arguments cover 

every aspect of world society in the post ‘9/11’ 

21 st Century World that we currently inhabit, and 

how these would change for ever for the good 

once we Abolish All Money. 

Only those rich people who actually enjoy and 

luxuriate in their advantages over the poor, while 

doing nothing about that Great Divide, surely, can 

raise any serious objections to what I am 

proposing here. 

In every aspect of life that I have described, there 

are no disadvantages, only vast advantages, to 

humanity acting as a whole to Abolish All Money. 

120

Overall - a very simple and high Quality of Life 

for all. 

The End of Money, then, would bring about a 

New World, a Utopia, where everybody was 

respected for being the individual they are, there 

would be no rich and poor apart from people being 

as comfortably off as they needed and wanted to be. 

At the same time computers and computerinspired 

activities would be subject to a CCCCCC 

Census – and life without this other half of the 

current ‘computer-money complex’ being dominant 

any more, would get a lot simpler – and Higher 

Quality. 

Is it possible, then, that a World without Money 

would be for all – the Paradise on Earth envisaged if 

not promised by many religions? 

The key to that great claim is simple really – 

121

Abolish All Money!!! 

122

123

Manifesto: - 

Abolish All Money 

Make everything in the world all FREE 

The Machine especially now tranSiStorS is ‘The 

Beast 666’… 

Census all machines especially computers 

License all machines especially computers 


Simon Richard Lee 

BA, MA (King’s College, Cambridge, England, in Physics, Maths, 

Chemistry, Biology and Computer Science) CEng, MIEE, MIET, 

MinstMC. Full Kensho Enlightenment 2014-2020 is The Cream 

on the Cake! 

Long career in computer, instrument and control system 

bare-bones design and installation engineering; now book 

writing & Website promotion. 

Electric Zen Buddha (on Face Book) 

Allah === JHWH God === ALpha&OmegAH! 

124

INTRODUCTION 

Almost New Year’s Eve 2002 – Sunday 29 th December 2002. 

Ugh! Yet another very wet, grey, overcast day after three 

months of the worst such Autumn I can remember! No crisp, 

cold, frosty, days, hardly, and very little sun either. No wonder 

that Autumn 2002 seems to have lasted forever – Global 

Warming for you, for certain? A good time to start as briefly as 

possible, summarising a year mostly to forget – another ‘Annus 

Horribilis’!? 

This book continues the story started in my account of the 

first 44 years of my life – “Which Witch Doctor?” – into perhaps 

the most momentous year ever in my entire life – of 2002. 

This year of 2002 has usually been so bad that I want to ‘put it 

completely behind me’ in a ‘diary’ or ‘narrative’ in Chapter One. 

To be followed by ‘picking up the threads’ of the ‘themes’ of the 

last Chapter of “Which Witch Doctor?” 

That final Chapter of “Which Witch Doctor?” is obviously 

vital to this new book, especially its Chapter One, so I 

reproduce that last Chapter overleaf, then leave “Which Witch 

Doctor?” for good. However, quite a few of the more important 

‘threads’ of that year have turned out very differently from how 

I expected when I left my account of the year 2001 in that last 

Chapter. In addition there are quite a few important threads to 

separate out under their own headings, in the final stage of 

Chapter One of the present book. 

I wrote a new ‘PROESM’ Paper amid heavy stress in just 

two days on May 24 th this year – in all the chaos of a nearly 

empty bed-sit flat my father and I were busy decorating. We 

see in the account below that I revised it nearly completely on 

November 9 th , mostly following similar criticism from my 

Godfather, and Cambridge University in rejecting it for another 

attempt at a PhD after applying twice in 2001 – my last 

attempt allowed at such a PhD for ‘written works’. I made the 

final changes at the start of December. For as you will see 

below, despite me selling about 50 copies of ‘Spiritual Energy’ 

up to writing this paper, by personal contact, I ‘gave up the 

ghost’ after the first draft of this ‘PROESM’, on the original book 

125

until such time as I get some help. I had run out of ideas. 

This paper completely finished draining me of creative, original 

thought on the subject! 

The other main theme of the last Chapter of “Which Witch 

Doctor?” which was totally naïve, as it turned out, was my 

belief then that I had a complete grasp of my ‘Spiritual 

Experiences to date having all come true in ways which I fully 

understood’. Three weeks into the hospital stay, at the end of 

June, as we see shortly, lo and behold, two new Spiritual 

Experiences appeared within two days – numbers 22 and 23 in 

25 years - so again clearly linked, of a woman doing two 

different dances. One with a tall man dressed in grey, the first 

clearly a cartoon, for the dance seemed peculiar, and what is 

more she had wings and was smoking a pipe! However, my 

prayer of years before that ‘any new Spiritual Experiences 

reveal their meaning swiftly’ worked! Five weeks later I was 

yet again on Shannon House Ward, and saw the 18-year old 

girl I had temporarily started a ‘kissing relationship’ with, doing 

just those very dances – and she had a constant visitor of an 

ex-boyfriend – who dressed in grey or fawn most of the time! 

When she told me her date of birth was 9 th November 

1983, I was totally taken aback – it was the very same night, 

but in the evening at 8.30pm before, as my SPIRITUAL 

EXPERIENCE SIX! Since then, I have had to give a meaning for 

the first time that is very much more convincing than the 

original tenuous suggestion; or otherwise add what is a ‘final’ 

meaning to nearly all my Spiritual Experiences 1978-2000! 

Vital background to this book – especially Chapter One. Having 

agitated about suing three local NHS Trusts for Medical 

Negligence 1993-2000, I resumed the case at the end of 2001. 

This seems to have a vital bearing on this discussion… 

I don’t mention this litigation in this book, till as late as 

my account of December 2002. However, it is a vital 

background piece of information that throughout the detailed 

events described in Chapter One, a top firm of litigation 

lawyers in Newcastle-upon-Tyne was working on my behalf. 

Slowly but surely forcing the two hospitals concerned at 

Welwyn Garden City and Harlow, and other places that had 

126

treated me, to surrender their notes on me. In principle you 

are supposed to be allowed full access to your own medical 

notes – in practice it took this firm all year to extract them, 

sometimes with the threat of the County Court! More on this 

at the end of Chapter One about December 2002… 

127

Chapter Thirty-Four of “WHICH WITCH 

DOCTOR?” 

New Year’s Eve 2001 still. A time to reflect on my life, 

particularly the last ten years, and look forward a little to 2002. 

This autobiography, I now realise, will only finally with a big 

sigh of relief from myself, be completed, once I succeed with 

getting some kind of ‘success’ with ‘Spiritual Energy’. I can’t 

wait to finish this painful autobiography - obviously ideally on a 

REALLY high note! 

1. Unemployment and disability. I am painfully aware that 1 st 

September 2002 is the TENTH anniversary of ten years more 

or less entirely out of work, messed about totally by the 

Health Service and so being divorced and ‘losing it all’. 

Having to swallow my pride and draw disability benefits for 

the last four years. My career in computers is definitely over 

after one year out of it, not just ten! I should have been on 

£60,000 a year as a manager by now but that is impossible 

now! I am just so grateful I had the foresight, or whatever it 

was, to join first the Institute of Measurement and Control, 

then the IEE of course, all those ten years ago! The IEE have 

saved me from bankruptcy. Yet I reflect that although my 

B1AD condition together with my heavy smoking make me 

unsuited to nine-to-five office work, I DO work still - on my 

books, at home! 

2. Relationships. We have seen Chris decline this year, losing 

most of his interests and friends, and being unable to cope 

with his finances - or, incidentally, looking after, even 

cooking for, himself. I have unwisely sought girlfriends FAR 

too soon out of the HELL of Shannon House last year, and 

Martha and much more briefly, Sally, have just been false 

hopes. The two main relationships, one so up and down and 

on and off it has been pure stress, with Diamond, now at last 

forever ended, under threat of Court action of all things, and 

with unbelievably ever-loving, ever-loyal Jenny, are pure 

opposites. 

3. Interests. I am making up for backing out of French and 

English Literature AS Level courses at the local college due 

128

to ‘Diamond problems’ last Autumn, by taking up the much 

less demanding pottery, painting and drawing and objectoriented 

programming of computers in the New Year. 

Hopefully I can make some - resolvedly platonic in the first 

instance! - friendships with both sexes on those three 

courses, and hopefully they will help my acute boredom! 

4. Health. I have stood the test, and despite a change of 

medication regime midway, have achieved my Nurse’s 

objective and remained clear of hospital all year. I am 

overcoming demoralisation at being out of formal work by 

pursuing publication of ‘Spiritual Energy’ as a potentially 

lucrative hobby, that the same nurse calls a ‘passion’. I am 

aware I smoke far too much and drink too much quite often, 

and still deliberating New Year Resolutions for those. 

5. Spiritual Experiences. I am absolutely delighted and 

flabbergasted to have at long, long last, been able to put all 

my Spiritual Experiences firmly behind me as ‘fulfilled’ as of 

the week of Ground Zero in the USA – 11 th September 2001. 

I have nearly entirely managed to completely forget what 

this book, mostly written to put them behind me as dreadful 

‘premonitions and omens’, even says about their very 

intricate futuristic predictions! 

6. The main outstanding theme of this book - potential 

lucrative success for ‘Spiritual Energy’? My book has been 

written in a huge battle with my health - prompted of 

course, as we have seen throughout, by wild all-powerful 

Doctors, in the 1990’s. FIVE TIMES I have been put back on 

the current regime - THREE of these times only after being 

placed in a Psychiatric Secure Unit! This year, especially in 

September, has seen my Spiritual Experiences coming to an 

abrupt end in bothering me - never again do I possibly wish 

to see another one of the damnable things! This has 

coincided with a major hurdle in the 23 year long writing of 

‘Spiritual Energy’ - publication, albeit resorting to just a 

vanity publisher where all else failed - and getting it into 

print and on sale. As a friend commented at the Connect 3 

Club, ‘Tweezers’, it has come on by leaps and bounds this 

year! Having naively thought it might appeal to the Church, 

Spiritual Experience Fourteen has been backed up by the 

evidence and comments by friends. No, it is definitely to 

129

succeed if it does, in the ‘Mind Body and Spirit’ field, and 

outlets of that sort will comment on it shortly into the New 

Year! If they all say ‘no!’, a search on the Web in the New 

Year after tomorrow - New Year’s Day - under ‘mind body 

spirit book distributors’ should yield lots more to write to 

having emailed first. I have a small problem in having 

absolutely no copies of the book left to send out but my 

editor has had three returned to him which should be in the 

post. 

My Father is giving me a lift to their house for the duration of 

New Year festivities in 10 minutes, at 6pm, so I leave the latest 

ending of this book, only hoping that ‘an End of All My 

“Spiritual Experiences” ’ could well spell success with ‘Spiritual 

Energy’. I plan to get hold of an ink cartridge next week, when 

I can again afford it, and print out the last chapter and this one 

of the present book, and have them bound. 

130

CHAPTER ONE 

New Year’s Eve 2002. I hit severe computer problems typing 

just the above two pages of Introduction! After roughly half an 

hour in this Word 97 word processor, a fairly loud siren sounds 

in the computer chassis, just like it did a number of times in 

the Spring. However, even if I leave the machine turned off for 

over half an hour, it starts doing exactly the same thing again 

half an hour later. Hence the above two pages took a 

protracted seven hours, not the hour or so I expected to type. 

The manual only mentions one alarm anything like this – due 

as I expected to the computer CPU itself overheating. I can’t 

open the case to look for obvious problems, as that would void 

the warranty, valid till March 2003. My father offered very 

kindly to make the 90-mile round trip to the suppliers – but we 

cannot go till next week at least – for they are off for Christmas 

till next Wednesday 8 th January. In the meantime, I am 

completing the preamble below, then being very patient while a 

week passes! 

This and the next chapter are structured as follows: - 

1. This chapter contains a narrative discussion of the year 

2002, ending with a ‘picking up of the threads’ from the 

above two pages containing the final chapter 35 of “Which 

Witch Doctor?” I have found previously, that writing down a 

summary of a very bad year like this, always enabled me to 

consign the whole ghastly experience to the bookshelf, so 

enabling me to quickly forget it and put it behind me. This 

year largely went by the Seasons, so I will be approaching it 

that way overleaf, with the ‘seasons’ being headings for four 

sections, as follows: - 

Winter January-March 2002 

Spring April-May 2002 

Summer June-October 2002 

Autumn November 2002 - January 2003 

131

2. Chapter two comprises a full account of my ‘psychiatric 

history’, culminating in a campaign of abuse by my local 

Psychiatric Social Services (SSS) Team. 

New Year’s Day 2003. Suddenly I have renewed hope for my 

computer – it held up for over an hour yesterday in typing the 

last page – as well as another whole hour in typing a long 

email despite interruptions from talking to a friend who had 

called round earlier than expected… I have a GREAT DEAL that 

I desperately need to get from swirling round in my head, into 

a clear form here on paper, to be put behind me. Luckily I’ve 

still got a tiny pocket diary full of useful notes… 

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WINTER, January to March 2002. 

Picking up the story from the end of “Which Witch Doctor?”, 

about New Year’s Eve 2001 and New Year’s Day 2002, a year 

ago now. I spent the evening and most of New Year’s Day with 

my parents and sister quietly at their house, before returning 

home. Yesterday was the same this New Year – but having 

found typing on the computer much easier yesterday, as I said 

above, I got a lift home at 11pm after supper. I was also keen 

to see if one person in particular had at last responded to what 

had risen to NINE emails from me in the past three weeks. 

She had NOT, which did not surprise me, for I had quite upset 

her, and had the ‘cold shoulder treatment’ since – as well as no 

emails or sign of responding to mine. Above all, not a hint of 

Christmas or New Year Greetings. She said last time ‘she was 

fed up with hearing about my Spiritual Experiences’ – yet SHE 

is the main reason I have had to massively ‘review their 

meanings’! More of her – much more – in due course. 

1. Attempts to market ‘Spiritual Energy’ eventually hit the 

usual brick wall – (lack of) ‘money’! Meanwhile back to New 

Year’s Day 2002. After an afternoon walk (ruled out this 

year as an inch of rain is expected to fall this afternoon!) I 

returned home to my flat to find a very pleasant surprise 

that evening in my email. I had received an email in 

response to my ‘email-shot’ of late 2001 – from a Jack 

Schouten in Australia – who turns out to run the Internet 

bookshop www.mindbodyspirit.com.au from Queensland. Anyway, 

after reading just the two-page review, he wanted to 

promote ‘Spiritual Energy’ on that web-site – so I rustled 

together the two copies of it required to secure that 

promotion in the next couple of days, posted them to him, 

and shortly found my book featured on that web-site! Then, 

after a party at which I knew virtually nobody, to celebrate 

my sister getting a very good final year result, in her part 

time MA of the previous two years part time, on ‘Literacy in 

Education’, came what seemed to be further good news for 

my book! Banyen, a Canadian ‘mind/body/spirit’ bookshop I 

had sent a copy of the book to, at the very end of 2001, as 

well as to ‘New Leaf’, the biggest distributor of such material 

133

in North America, sent a very positive email that came on 

Wednesday 9 th January 2002. As it happened, this was the 

eve of the Anniversary that my CPN and I had been looking 

forward to so much – of being one whole year out of 

Shannon House in Harlow Psychiatric Unit – after THAT 

arduous four months or more there! Banyen said, ‘we are 

very interested IF you can secure a North American 

distributor as big as New Leaf! We already deal with them, 

so they themselves would be great’. So now it was a matter 

of hearing from New Leaf or similar large North American 

Distributor, also saying ‘yes!’ The same day the main New 

Zealand distributor, Peaceful Living, expressed interest – but 

some weeks later said the cost price of the book, the ‘print 

on demand’ way my publishers insist on, as cheaper in small 

quantities than the cheaper-per-unit ‘print run’, ruled my 

book out. At about the same time, Cygnus book club wrote 

to also turn me down, on the grounds they were 

‘overwhelmed with “spiritual” books’ already. That virtually 

exhausted all the email and postal contacts I had sent out in 

2001, by the end of January 2002. I did have one local 

success. I phoned the owner of two local bookshops quite a 

few times, until after looking at a copy of the book she 

actually bought four copies for the two shops. However, 

when I got the £0.88 proceeds per book, as sold to her by 

the distributor on behalf of AonL, my publishers, it struck me 

those setting up phone calls had cost far more than that! 

Also locally, the Herald in Welwyn Garden City eventually 

declined to post a review of the book in their newspaper, 

and likewise inevitably I had no joy with the national 

newspapers. Finally, almost in desperation, I had a bit of a 

brainwave, which was initially to appear in due course to 

have produced results. The distributors that I had sent 

copies of the book to in the USA in 2001, had largely 

featured on a web page giving a complete list of all the 

independent distributors there – with comments and full 

contact details, mostly even with email addresses. Having 

already had no joy with a selection that appeared more 

promising from these descriptions, I now emailed every one 

I had not already – with a referral to my web-site as well as 

the two-page review of my book. As we see soon, I had 

134

other things on my mind, so this was pretty much a last 

ditch effort. Then suddenly, about six weeks later, a string 

of polite American ‘no’s’ from this ‘email-shot’ ended – when 

two of the biggest such distributors in the USA and Canada, 

Book World and Alliance House, both sent emails on 

Saturday 9 th March – expressing strong interest! Book World 

had already decided, and Alliance House said a full ‘yes!’ in 

an email on Thursday 28 th March – the day before Good 

Friday, with my 45 th birthday coming up that Saturday. I 

thought ‘this might be it! My breakthrough at last!’ until 

such hopes came crashing down as soon as I telephoned my 

publisher, Richard, and told him he would need to fund a 

print run and possibly find other money in order to take up 

MY ‘golden opportunity’ here for marketing in the USA. He 

basically said, “We are far too small an outfit to do that! We 

can only afford to do our limited quantity ‘print on demand’ 

method because risking even just £1,000 on anything 

remotely like this could jeopardise the whole company!” The 

story of marketing ‘Spiritual Energy’ just about dried up 

then. Until, for the umpteenth time, as we see under the 

heading of ‘Spring’, I had a burst of creative energy initially 

intended to provide a new and definitive summary of my 

book – that went light years beyond just that ambition! In 

the meantime, the problems of the next two themes from 

Winter 2002 that I discuss below, only added to the 

frustration I had ended up with at Easter at the end of 

March, completely outweighing the last two ‘good news’ 

themes in this section that follow. So I ended the year up to 

the end of March, recording bleakly in my pocket diary that I 

stayed overnight on Good Friday at my parents, but on my 

birthday felt ‘depressed by everything especially my book’. 

135

2. A NIGHTMARE! – ‘Diamond’ has NOT ‘vanished’ yet – she 

haunts me for half the year, even involving THE POLICE in a 

purely ‘personal friendship’! 

I left the year 2001 in “WWD?”, with Diamond opening 

her Christmas present early, in her usual paranoia, on 21 st 

December - finding it was a female vibrator - and firstly 

‘blowing me up’, with yet more hysterical threats of ‘Police 

involvement’. Then seemingly ending our ever-dodgy 

‘friendship’ with long gaps, since 1995. So I finally thought 

to myself, “she said the policeman she got to read my 

allegedly ‘harassing’ letters was a PC Bentley”. I left a 

message, so when he called me back on Saturday 5 th 

January, I got a quick summary of the ‘true position’ of the 

Police, rather than Diamond’s exaggerated, histrionic claims 

up to December. This was basically ‘we have no intention of 

taking any action at all at this stage. I would strongly 

advise you not to contact this woman at all, however.’ This, 

at this stage should have ended the dodgy ‘one-sided, very 

histrionic on her part’ relationship. However, as we see in 

section (3) below, I was now in the middle of a massive 

problem with social life, without her, that was to last 

virtually the whole year – right up to the last few days. So I 

made the first of several mistakes. I finally gave in to my 

loneliness and isolated ‘winter blues’, in the midst of a 

winter with ‘too much time on my hands’ – a frequent 

problem this last year, again recently it has been 

overwhelming! When I phoned her on the 14 th January – we 

actually had a half-hour, very pleasant conversation. That 

turned out then, not to have been a mistake – quite the 

contrary. The mistake came when I was in the post office 

later that same day, and could not resist buying a cheap 

plastic Valentine’s Day ‘love whip’ as a present. I sent it 

anonymously, printing an elaborate ‘hoax’ that it was a 

sample from the manufacturer – and posting it to her to try 

to make her laugh! She rang up the next morning and was 

really incensed about the ‘vulgarity’ of this, having 

immediately guessed that I had sent it. Again, threats of 

the police reappeared, with the word ‘harassment’ – all over 

a joke she did not find funny. The following week, there 

were about five telephone conversations, as ever oscillating 

136

etween her being friendly and then alternating with 

threatening charges of harassment. The first phone call was 

from her, and turned out to be a highly ironic change of 

view – about her wretched vibrator! For she had, she said, 

eventually taken it out of its box, then finally laid in bed and 

tried it, according to the minimal instructions, which were 

full of innuendo, as one would expect! It had apparently 

‘worked brilliantly’, and she was now very grateful to me, 

and agreed just how ‘kind and thoughtful’ I had been to 

choose such a superb solution to her massive, perennial, 

lifelong problems of (sexual) frustration! Needless to say, 

two days later this brief exchange was forgotten, and we 

were yet again, back to her usual whinges of ‘harassment!’ 

and now, even worse, ridiculously ‘stalking!’ Finally the 

next week, on the 30 th January, I found I could not phone 

her, as her number was ‘unobtainable’. I talked to the 

operator, and discovered that, as she frequently does when 

even slightly piqued at somebody like this, she had gone to 

all the extreme lengths of having her phone number 

changed! I was unwilling to write to her, because although 

that was the only way left to communicate, it had in the 

past caused all the real problems, which up to now I had 

always been able to resolve with her on the phone. Finally 

around the end of February, then on 5 th March, I wrote her 

three perfectly polite, innocuous letters pointing out that all 

these problems were not with me, but all in her own mind – 

followed by a birthday card containing £5 for the 12 th March, 

her birthday. That was apparently immediately followed by 

a final complaint by her to the police, even without reading 

my letters – I doubt she or the police have ever read any of 

the three – they would merely find solid attempts to reason 

with her! So I was a bit taken aback when my CPN, Jess 

came round as usual on Friday 15 th March. He told me that, 

as I had ignored PC Bentley’s advice (only advice!) back in 

January, I was to let Jess take me to Hatfield Police Station 

on the following Monday – to be ‘cautioned’ – but there was 

‘nothing to worry about’. So on 18 th March I was advised by 

the Police never to contact Diamond again – or I might face 

imprisonment for such ‘harassment’. It took me all week to 

establish that this was just an ‘informal caution’ – a 

137

warning, not the full Formal Caution given to real offenders. 

I remained as before, with no criminal record! 

Nevertheless, on 31 st March, I felt strongly enough 

aggrieved that Diamond had finally dragged the Police into 

what was a really just a purely personal argument in a 

purely personal relationship that had now gone completely 

sour and pear-shaped. So I wrote to the police. I have no 

reason whatsoever, and every good reason why, not to 

continue this protracted ending of my relationship with a 

dodgy retired stripper – until recently a severe alcoholic to 

boot! So I will just take the story to its final conclusion last 

August. The police (the duty inspector, one Peter Hammond 

– since then, I heard on the radio, retired with honours!) 

were not quick to reply. Nor did I write any more to 

Diamond. So after waiting three weeks with no reply, I 

wrote to Inspector Hammond on Sunday 21 st April, and on 

the Thursday after that the first of two letters in two days 

from him, was preceded by a phone call from the Police. 

This was to Cuthbert, the manager of my Social Service 

‘Assertive Outreach’ team. They basically said, Cuthbert 

confirmed to me the same day by phone, that as I had 

‘stood up to the Police’ and fully explained my position – I 

was completely on the moral high ground! I could even 

contact her again if I wished, for the Police had completely 

‘closed my file’ for good – and would take no further action 

if I did! I would not have in fact done so, had not all this 

stress I have described in this ‘Spring’ section of 2002, got 

rapidly worse as we see below in the ‘Summer’ section. So 

I wrote some short, increasingly bizarre letters to her when 

getting very ill in May and June, and finally hospitalised on 

10 th June. Then in August, my new young friend ‘young 

Helen’ definitely dispelled – was it prayer power? - this 

‘curse of Diamond’ forever – I have not thought of the 

strange creature at all since, until sitting down to type this 

difficult sub-section and put Diamond behind me forever! 

So, after a false ending in December 2001, she is ‘gone, for 

ever and ever’?!! 

3. Usual problems with lack of social life, hence clinging on to 

Diamond as a ‘friend’ as above, eventually compounded by 

138

cracks in Social Services’ support – especially my 

Community Psychiatric Nurse, Jess, leaving after promotion… 

This year started as 2001 had ended - in terms of a 

dire lack of friends to meet up with or even phone – which 

with the extreme frustration and endless waits associated 

with marketing my book over the Web, as in (1), largely 

explains the ‘Diamond fiasco’ of (2). As I write, this 

problem of ‘dire lack of friends i.e. social life’ is only just 

starting to alleviate. Several friends, also with ‘psychiatric 

problems’, have called round to visit me at the end of the 

year. Young Chris called around twice last week, professing 

to have ‘avoided me’ all year, for instance! It will need a 

much deeper solution in the New Year – I know not what! I 

continued to receive weekly visits throughout this threemonth 

period from my CPN or Community Psychiatric Nurse, 

Jess Lievesley. Usually as well, a visit from my social 

worker, Mildred, or her assistant Linda, sometime each 

week. I soon learned that their team’s Occupational 

Therapist, Diana, had gone to ‘pastures new’ to teach yoga, 

in February. I’d only met her occasionally, at their 

‘functions’, so her departure for a new job did not directly 

affect me. However, driving back in the car after the 

‘informal caution’ of (2) above, I was stunned when Jess too 

told me he was leaving his job – leaving the team without a 

full-time CPN! - to take up a position as the manager of a 

similar team in North Hertfordshire. So, after he left on 

April 18 th , there was a void that was not immediately filled 

apart from a novice young woman CPN, Nicky, and then 

only some of the time. If ever I was vulnerable to a 

relapse, this was it. As we see below in my ‘Spring’ section, 

my stress level indeed increasingly mounted from April, to 

breaking point in June! As we will see, the main stress 

came from this very ‘care team’! 

4. Of the Internet, training for it, and replacing my completely 

dead, broken computer! I was looking to do some 

provisional ‘return to work preparation’ training back in 

September 2001. Then the course at the local college that 

attracted me most, in ‘Java’, the most common Internet 

language, i.e. used to compose the most Web pages on the 

139

entire Web, had been cancelled till 29 th January 2002. 

Having waited so long, for at least five months, to start it, I 

found at least the first five three-hour evening sessions 

taught me little new. For Java is mainly a much streamlined 

refinement of the earlier object-oriented language C++, that 

I already knew very well, and had done nine months 

industrial work on in full-time employment, back in 1997. 

So initially, at least for the first ten sessions, I usually turned 

up, and immediately ‘scanned’ the very fulsome handouts of 

the overhead projector screens to be used, to see if there 

was anything I could not work out, or would need to ask 

about. Then quite often I would go home early, if that was 

not the case. However, two weeks into this course, disaster 

seemed to overwhelm me with my own PC at home. 

Suddenly, on the evening of 12 th February, it stopped 

booting ‘Windows NT 4’ – and looking at the hard disk with 

my backup ‘DOS’ operating system, revealed it was nearly 

all corrupted! Along with most of my work – especially on 

my precious books! “Which Witch Doctor?” was 99% backed 

up, and I could get copies of the other published works, 

especially ‘Spiritual Energy’ from Richard, my publisher. 

However, within a day a local repair shop had declared the 

old, obsolete, just 233 MHz motherboard was a write-off! So 

I now had a massive problem – how to raise at least £600, 

the minimum needed to buy a new computer! I was 

devastated, then inside a week, I had decided to tell the 

local IEE representative of this problem, he had talked to the 

chairman of the Benevolent Fund – and he turned round and 

actually said, in a nutshell, “£600 won’t be enough! Here - 

have a grant of £1,000 and buy a really good computer!” 

So, as ever, the IEE Benevolent Fund came to my rescue – 

and several times more that year were in fact to give me 

further grants amounting to hundreds of pounds, for other 

things, as we will see! I immediately bought the latest copy 

of the budget micro magazine “Micro Mart” – and a quick 

scouring only revealed, as often before, that after carefully 

totting up of the total price versus performance from various 

suppliers – the most local, based in Watford, was the best 

value. So I bought a 1700 MHz PC with 512 MB RAM 

(masses!) as well as full anti-virus and utilities software – 

140

and a very good expensive printer – that is fast, very 

precise, and above all, to my delight can print double sided, 

invaluable for my books! Obviously as I can ask my father 

to take me there if it ever goes wrong, that limits the returnto-base 

cost – and also, very importantly, I can discuss 

problems face to face. As we have seen, it is still under 

warranty, so should be fixed free of charge apart from the 

cost of getting it there and back, once they reopen next 

Wednesday. Then I can get it over there to rectify this 

problem with a siren sounding after half an hour of typing. 

Almost certainly the actual computer CPU is overheating. 

This problem started last summer, intermittently, but the PC 

worked well enough for me to end the Spring term at college 

in the Java course with a result of 83% in the first of two 

assignments, and a Distinction! I missed one vital Java 

lesson, which would have saved me writing three waffly 

pages - instead about five lines! - and probably gained me 

ten more marks and hence an overall astonishing 95% or 

more. This lesson had discussed the assignment - with 

massive ‘hints’ - on 19 th February. However I had another 

much more important date in my diary – to see my daughter 

Jenny’s favourite teacher for the annual parents’ evening, 

just before he left to go to another school. By then fifteen of 

the original 25 students had dropped out, and there were 

only five of us left by the end of summer! So, at last, two 

‘success stories’ before we get onto the main success story 

of the year. All right, both a bit ‘soft’! I already knew ‘C++’ 

very well, the main constituent of ‘Java’ – and the money for 

the PC came from a Benevolent Fund. Indeed, as we now 

end this ‘winter’ section of 2002, below, on a real ‘high note’, 

these other ‘computer results’ pale into insignificance…! 

5. It turns out that my Mother had a brainwave back in 

Christmas 2001! From early in 2002, contact with Jenny has 

got ever more frequent, longer, and enjoyable for all of us, 

especially her! Her maturity and self-confidence have as a 

result developed much faster as a result – she is now a real 

treasure! 

Mother discovered in the Autumn of 2001 that the 

Gosling Stadium at Welwyn Garden City ran tennis coaching, 

141

and after Jenny was very enthusiastic about this, having only 

knocked a ball about in the street before, my Mum booked it 

up. My main present to her last Christmas 2001, had of course 

been a good but relatively very inexpensive alloy tennis 

racquet, nearly full-size. Contact has been totally and everincreasingly 

transformed since, extending to go to watch her 

score most of the goals in her school netball team, which 

hardly ever loses, mostly as a result – and Jenny’s maturity 

and self-confidence have grown no end at the same time. She 

really is a treasure to be proud of! On 12 th January Jenny and I 

were in turn picked up by my Mother and taken to the lesson at 

11am. This happened on a regular basis for the whole term. 

On two Thursdays in January, in addition, her netball resumed 

in earnest – and we watched her team win two matches away 

from home – the first by 18-0 or something like that massive 

margin, and the second much more competitive! About then, 

her self-confidence started to come out – for she started to ask 

my mother to stay overnight on the Saturday after each tennis 

lesson, into the Sunday. Even if Jenny’s mother and her 

partner wanted to go to their cabin cruiser moored at Windsor! 

At half term, on Sunday 17 th February, my parents took my 

sister Libby, Jenny and I to the British Museum, meeting my 

brother, his long-term partner, and their three children there. 

We spent a fascinating but bewildering few hours there, 

including an exorbitant snack lunch. There is just so much to 

see, read, take in and try to understand! This memorable day 

was concluded with a really good meal in a nearby French 

restaurant. As ever, I was really grateful to my family for 

providing the vital transport, as well as the cost of the meals. 

On the Monday after that we had the whole day with Jenny at 

my parents’ house. Finally in the half-term week, it was her 

11 th as well as my sister’s 41 st birthday on Friday 22 nd 

February, which we spent at Whipsnade Zoo, about 30 miles 

from my parents’ home in Hatfield. By now my ex-wife was 

really showing strong signs of starting to ‘mellow’ and be much 

more polite and co-operative with all of us, whereas previously 

she had been very ‘awkward’ and ‘superior’. So there were 

just two more tennis lessons after half term before Jenny’s 

netball tournament on 16 th March, by which time I must admit 

I was starting to get rather bored of watching junior tennis 

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coaching, even of my own daughter, instead of taking part! So 

the breaks for coffee, or especially outside with a cigarette, had 

got ever more frequent – and longer! The team won two and 

lost one match, their first ever lost match of the year, and drew 

another, in the qualifying round. They then played the team 

they had lost against there, in the final – and only lost by one 

goal. Had the ‘goal striker’ for the team not hogged the ball, 

and passed to Jenny, better placed at the time and above all 

much more accurate, they could well have won! I saw her that 

term shoot ten goals on the trot – and the net is as high, 

comparatively speaking against her height, as a basketball net 

is to me! I could never do that! The final tennis lesson came 

on the 23 rd March, and to conclude the story, just into the 

Easter holidays, on 2 nd April, Jenny took part in a tennis 

tournament at the same Gosling Stadium, mostly against 

younger players, but who had been playing much longer. I 

watched her play a ‘round robin’ against them all for two whole 

hours. To my delight, she came first – to win an Easter Egg! 

Her achievements this last year were by no means confined to 

the sports field, however. She had performed at her best ever 

at that junior school all year, especially in her vital ‘SAT’ tests. 

Her favourite teacher at that junior school, Mr Peace, gave her 

a glowing report in all avenues – either ‘A’ or ‘B’ ‘stream’, at 

the parents’ evening I attended with my primary school teacher 

sister on 19 th March. I had gone briefly one evening to the 

Open Evening at her preferred choice of secondary school – 

just fifteen minutes’ walk from my flat, with lovely buildings 

and grounds, and a very good atmosphere from all the 

teachers and girls there. So I was able to thoroughly endorse 

this as my first choice for her also, even though there was 

another school, mixed not all girls like her choice of ‘Presdales’, 

originally the Ware Girls’ Grammar School. She has since gone 

on to win a place there and thoroughly enjoys it too! So, this 

of all these five themes in this ‘winter’ section, gave me huge, 

lasting hope and satisfaction. She really is a treasure – a 

daughter to be really proud of! 

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SPRING, April-May 2002 

1. The success story with Jenny continues from where it left off 

above – really, the main highlight of 2002 for my entire 

immediate family! Jenny was getting really close now, and I 

got one of her infrequent letters on 10 th April, about her 

‘Guini pigs’ (sic!) and having returned to school for the 

spring term. That Saturday 13 th April we resumed her tennis 

lessons, which my diary recalls, continued for the next four 

weeks with me attending each one, with her staying all 

weekend at the last one of this opening group. Then I was 

to watch her train, getting increasingly stronger and more 

confident, and the father-daughter bond getting ever 

stronger, just twice more that term. Indeed, those two 

lessons on 18 th May and 1 st June came at the end of the 

actual painting and laying my new carpet in my flat, as in (3) 

below. The intervening two missed lessons with me not 

turning up, were due to the stress of all that hard work. Plus 

at least four other ‘subsidiary stresses’ in the same time 

period, as below, and several really extremely arduous, 

frustrating weeks afterwards at the end of April, spent trying 

to refurnish the lounge on my minimal budget. Since April, 

once all this stress we come to now got too much, my 

Contact with my lovely daughter, is the only good point 

really, of these two months I am writing about, yet since has 

much reduced. The only other ‘success’ has been finally 

seeing the results all tidied and fresh, after eventually after 

ten whole weeks, transforming the flat, after huge efforts by 

my Father and myself. So now to get the description of ‘all 

that stress’ down on paper – and so out of my system! It’s 

always worked before… 

2. Is this really ‘the end’ of ‘Spiritual Energy’ as a venture? 

Although I had sold, since its launch in the same fateful 

week as 11 th September 2001, about 50 copies of my book 

to personal contacts, my publisher has sold NONE. 

Furthermore, they declined on 28 th March – on the grounds 

of ‘both risk – and above all, cost to them as a small, startup 

company’ now revealed to be just a ‘vanity publisher’, 

whatever they may loftily claim otherwise, to take up huge 

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marketing opportunities in the USA. Despite me at long last 

securing full, 100%, offers from not one but two major 

distributors for North America. Desperate not to see all my 

efforts on my book over the past five years or so, have to be 

abandoned, not because of any failing by me, I fought a 

last-ditch ‘rearguard action’ in April 2002. On Tuesday 2 nd 

April I emailed both the distributors in the USA that I had 

secured the previous month, asking whether it was at all 

possible they could finance my book’s print run, and some 

necessary marketing effort? Especially if they ‘believed in’ 

my book enough? They both replied in exactly the same 

vein, that they ‘could not alter their policy on the matter’. 

End of subject! One last hope seemed to come about when 

one of the Authors Online ltd directors actually rang me, and 

suggested that as they could not help me, perhaps I could 

email the publishers of a particular mind/body/spirit 

publisher he had read about. To try to get them to take the 

book on from AOnL instead! He only recalled their name, so 

I searched on the Internet, could not find them, and 

eventually got the name of a Australian outlet with this 

name, who on mailing and telephoning(!) them, finally gave 

me the name and telephone number of ‘their man in 

London’. I spoke to him briefly on the phone, he seemed 

interested, so I sent a copy of the book – only to have it 

returned on 25 th April – the day after we started decorating, 

which we come to next. I note from my diary that my very 

last recorded ‘effort’ to promote my book last year, that 

same day, was to email six other mind/body/spirit publishers 

along the same lines – of buying the whole publication effort 

– and rights – from Authors Online. There is no record later 

in my diary of any positive response, and as I recall the 

reaction was mostly no reply at all, or just very muted. So 

by the time decorating my flat had started in earnest, the 

main activity of this two-month period, as we come to now, I 

had just about given up all hope for my book ‘Spiritual 

Energy’. However, I had a massive burst of creative energy, 

as in the last section (7) below, at the end of all that 

decorating, which resulted in a feeling of ‘total completion of 

all my ideas’! Hence mounting elation, added to by all the 

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stresses up to then that we describe below – and ultimately, 

disaster! 

3. The graft of DECORATING MY FLAT. My father and I took 

just under four weeks to wash and paint all the walls, 

ceilings and doors, very close to his prediction, and the 

carpet went down as prearranged the next day. That was 

not the real problem, even though hard work. It was that, 

once we started painting the lounge, I knew I urgently 

needed a lot of replacement furniture – that did not clash 

with the much brighter décor. This could cost thousands! I 

had no savings and was not in a position to take out a loan, 

nor wanted to! This story started back in February, about 

the same time I requested help from the IEE Benevolent 

Fund to buy a replacement computer. Their local 

representative, Julian, had only recently been around to 

carry out his annual review of my budget, and any help they 

could give. Apart from his saying he would recommend that 

their invaluable help continue as before, he looked around 

and asked if I had any pressing needs for help with furniture, 

although he could not see anything obvious. I pointed out 

that after over two years here, the carpet had got ‘tracked’ 

stains – and being a hideous, neutral, ‘institutional’ pale 

brown, clearly showed up a number of cigarette burn marks. 

I told him I had planned to redecorate, including a new 

carpet, as soon as I got some money. Within days, after he 

reported this to HQ, the Chairman authorised a grant to 

carpet my lounge and small hallway. All I had to do was 

supply two quotes from local suppliers. Finally I got two 

carpet shops, a mere hundred yards away round the corner, 

to measure up and give me a quotation, in the last two 

weeks of March. I then sent both quotes, as requested, to 

the IEE. Naturally they opted for the much cheaper one, 

which although half the cost of the other, I actually rather 

preferred, a ‘dark cornflower blue’ with an attractive 

intermittent pale, square pattern. On 10 th April two cheques 

for this from the IEE duly arrived, one the deposit, which I 

immediately lodged at the shop, and the second, the balance 

to full cost – of £349. Once again, as ever, the IEE 

Benevolent Fund was very generous! Washing, painting, 

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and the inevitable humping around of heavy furniture in the 

way of that, started two weeks later, on 24 th April, and was 

to take almost four weeks to Sunday 19 th May, just as my 

father had thought. Whereupon the carpet fitter came as 

arranged the next day – so it was exactly four weeks of work 

to complete the actual decoration. My father was to pay for 

nearly all the materials, some £200 in paint etc., apart from 

about £220 of ‘odds and sods’ from me in total – which he 

refused to believe I could possibly have spent. Then, he 

does tend to work in ‘big pieces of the picture’ whereas I had 

bought lots of little things over this time. I had found a 

lovely bright, colourful, ‘sunbeam’ yellow in a paint chart, 

that went ideally with the carpet, and would look very 

attractive in the lounge and hallway, with my planned bright 

white of the ceilings and doors. To go with this 

yellow/white/cornflower blue combination, I chose a purpletinted 

blue, very close to Wedgewood blue, for the walls of 

the bathroom and kitchen. When it was all finished, the 

effect was vastly brighter than the previous ‘neutral’ and 

institutional effect of rather dingy, pastel marigold, with very 

much paler blue in the kitchen and bathroom than it has 

been transformed into now. It feels very ‘Georgian’ now it is 

all finished and re-furnished! We bought an initial batch of 

this blue and white paint, and started with the easiest and 

smallest room, the bathroom, planning to move onto the 

kitchen and finally the real challenge, of the hallway and 

above all the biggest room, the bed-sit room or lounge. To 

be concluded by doing all the gloss throughout, left to the 

end. The first two weeks of this were pretty straightforward, 

with the bathroom being cleaned and painted (apart from 

gloss, like I said) in five days, on Sunday 28 th April. The 

kitchen was bigger, with taping and removal of appliances 

like fridge, microwave and freezer, on top of much harder 

cleaning – due to three years of fumes – and much more of 

a fiddle painting than the bathroom, due to the fixed units. 

It took about ten days to complete apart again from some 

gloss work, put off till the very end of emulsion painting. As 

I saw Jenny with my family at their place for the whole 

weekend 4 th -6 th May, as I recall we had got to the crucial 

point of starting the lounge. That must have been around 

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Tuesday 7 th May 2002. That is when things started getting 

really stressful! For, after completing the ceilings fairly 

quickly, just a few brush strokes of the ‘sunbeam’ yellow in 

the lounge, after three days finishing the hallway, showed 

just how awfully this lovely replacement ‘clashed’. In 

comparison to the ‘pale institutional marigold’ it was 

covering, it did not ‘go’ at all with the other strong colours of 

nearly all my existing furniture! My father, for the previous 

two weeks, had already been coming out with a constant, 

nearly all impossibly expensive stream of ‘ideas’ – usually 

from the IKEA catalogue, which I don’t really like. I 

frequently pointed out there was no way I had any money at 

all for his ideas, that mounted into several thousands at the 

peak, when he seriously suggested a fold-down bed. He 

then just stayed silent, or tried to suggest that he got a loan 

and I repay it to him. I was simply not prepared to take out 

a loan from him! Nor could I hope to get an unsecured loan 

from any finance house supplying loans, due to being in 

rented property, on benefit, and above all having had a 

problem with my credit cards in 1997, and with losing a 

bank account in 1999. His constant suggestions that ‘I 

make the flat all dual-purpose, rather like a caravan like his, 

with everything folding away neatly’ led in fact to some 

friction – I have never enjoyed caravans, whereas he loves 

theirs! In order to prepare to decorate the lounge, nearly 

everything in it I had put into boxes, and then put it all 

outside on the first floor landing outside my flat, along with 

all the small, moveable furniture. Fortunately the main door 

to the group of four flats can only in principle be unlocked by 

the four occupants of these flats, so the stuff all remained 

safe for the next three weeks or so. My TV and computer 

did go to my parents, being valuable. However, for the 

duration of decorating the lounge and well afterwards, the 

three weeks 8 th -28 th May, I only had a bed and a chair and 

table, covered in smelly paint, and the bed kept having to be 

moved around! All through that time, the best part of a 

month, right up to the point they had finally been overcome, 

largely by a chance discovery, I suffered nightmares and 

near-complete loss of any decent sleep for weeks about the 

actual re-furnishing of my flat. This was the start of a 

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slippery slide, only compounded by all the other stressful 

happenings I list in other ‘themes’ below! I knew I needed 

to get replacement furniture as follows: - I had long since in 

2001, sold my pine chest of drawers, and found out that 

even a much smaller new one, when really I needed a 

replacement twice as big, cost new over £200! Then my old 

pair of (bright alder green and vivid chocolate brown) 

bookcases needed replacing as well, and my computer desk 

badly needed upgrading from the mere bench I then had. 

As it happened, I finally ended countless heated discussions 

with my Father about my sofa-bed – by in the end, realising 

it was too expensive to replace, when covered with suitable 

bedding there was no clash, and so deciding to keep it after 

all! My wonderful CPN or Community Psychiatric Jess 

Lievesley had left the Assertive Outreach Social Services 

Team about a month earlier. About now the remaining 

members of the team started a vicious hate campaign, far 

from caring for my mental health! For when I asked my 

Social Worker, Mildred De Vil, “I am desperate to find cheap 

furniture! Do you know of a place I can get some?” and she 

shook her head – it was to turn out there is a place at 

Stansted Abbotts, just three miles away. That she knew all 

about all along, as she later fully admitted! The first of 

many LIES about and to me during 2002 by what I came to 

call ‘the Aggressive Out-Retch Team’! Lies from a team of 

so-called “professional carers” totally betraying their position 

of supposed care and trust! Meanwhile, my father 

volunteered to retain just the beech veneer top of my 

computer desk, and in the days after the carpet fitting on 

20 th May, till Thursday of that week, worked to build a 

proper computer bay, drawer and filing cabinet round it. 

That was marvellous, and my luck and so stress levels 

improved dramatically that week. For I mentioned my need 

for budget furniture to acquaintances, and eventually 

tracked down the whole depot of nearly new furniture, just 

three miles down the road at Great Amwell, Stansted 

Abbotts, that Mildred De Vil had blatantly concealed out of 

spite! All offered at give away prices under a Lottery funded 

scheme – only to people on benefit, like me. I got my 

assistant social worker, Linda, to take me there the following 

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Tuesday 28 th May, after ringing them to arrange a viewing. 

I spotted a set of three chests of drawers that were nearly 

new, but only about £6-£8 each not £200 or so as new. Also 

I looked at beds and various other things, but most of these 

were obviously much older and more used. Soon after that 

my Father and I went to pick up two of these three chests. 

At the same time I spotted four beautiful dining chairs in 

apparently immaculate condition, for just £4 each – in elm 

and wicker, so ideal to match the elm ‘Ercol’ dining table I 

had been given three years earlier! By comparison, 

previously I had had just two canvas “director’s” chairs and 

two fold-away chairs, all really only comfortable enough to 

use as garden chairs – which is how my parents have since 

used them! We duly collected these in a second trip. 

Finally, on Friday 31 st May, I arranged to go to the depot 

again with an unrepentant Mildred De Vil, my social worker – 

and snapped up the last member of the matching set of 

three chests of drawers. This was to be used as a matching 

bedside table, with the middle-sized one hidden in my 

wardrobe to provide yet more drawers. My social worker 

said ‘I told you so’ (once, long ago, when I was not actually 

looking for furniture!) when I got her to take me to this very 

cheap source of excellent nearly new furniture – that now 

left only the problem of bookcase and hi-fi storage to deal 

with. She could have so very easily repeated her ‘tip’ about 

this essential place, where I got such cheap, good furniture 

for just £31 for seven items. She would have prevented 

much stress to me over the previous month or six weeks! 

Now I had got this far on a tiny amount of money for all of 

seven vital pieces of furniture, my father had immediately 

started making the rest of what I needed, using all his 

expertise as a carpenter, rather than offering to buy it at far 

greater expense. So by Sunday 2 nd June, he had finished 

building everything I still needed, and that day installed a 

bookcase in the mantelpiece, as it had once originally been. 

As well as a massive ‘unit’ taking my other books and my hifi, 

records and CD’s – all made to measure! That was the 

lounge finished, and the flat was now finished, but I was to 

have only a week to enjoy it before – my freedom was 

finished too on 10 th May, as we see in (7) below! (After 

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looking at a whole set of other stresses that all contributed 

to my imminent disaster). The night before this coincided 

with me fixing the last seemingly expensive aspect of 

decorating – for nothing, which came as a vast relief. My 

washing machine had stopped working two weeks earlier, so 

my brother brought a ‘spare’ – my sister’s – over in his fourwheel 

drive car on 2 nd June. I actually plumbed it in 

overnight! Then I realised that the problem with the original 

one was solely a blocked waste pipe, as it had no filter, and 

when I blew down this pipe it cleared the problem. I 

plumbed this original machine back in, on Sunday 9 th June. 

Money or the lack of it had been the stumbling block, as for 

(2) above for my publisher, and (3) and (4) next. My rent 

and council tax are paid by benefit, and most of my utility 

bills are paid by a £20 a week grant from the IEE. So my 

‘spending cash’ works out at, for a 40-hour working week, 

about £4.25 per hour net – about the minimum wage. 

Before I started on benefit back in 1997, I earned £17 an 

hour, £13 an hour net. Tobacco and alcohol have over 

doubled since then – no wonder I can now never save 

money! 

4. The argy-bargy and frequent trips to the Post Office involved 

in making just £200 out of selling off the parts of my old 

computer in newspaper ads. I also reluctantly sell my huge 

100-watt loudspeakers for £50 – they are far too large! 

Back in March, once I had had my new PC for a few weeks, I 

rapidly established that my old PC, sold as a whole, would 

only fetch ‘scrap value’ - £30 or so at most! So I started 

advertising it in its separate pieces, broken down, in ‘Micro 

Mart’ and ‘Loot’ magazines. A few little things went the first 

time I advertised, so I lowered the remaining prices 

somewhat, taking careful note of the ‘going rates’ in these 

magazines. To cut a long story short, due mostly to a 

feeling of desperation for money for decorating, from shortly 

after that started, and many, many phone calls (mostly to 

say many times over, ‘it is already sold! Sorry!’) and walks 

to queue in the post office, I sold everything apart from the 

floppy disk drive. Even the five year old ‘Windows NT 4’ 

disks went, as I could no longer use them with my new 

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machine, they were too old – for a tiny fraction of what I had 

paid for the NT years before. I made a total of just over 

£200 out of these many hours of work – and sheer 

frustration of waiting for the phone to ring, to indicate ‘a 

computer fish had taken my bait – in an advert’! Finally my 

loudspeakers had dominated the room, being 100-watt 

monsters, three feet tall and a foot square! Towards the end 

of the decorating, I advertised them at £120, even though 

the finish was badly marked where lamps had stood on them 

when I was married – and burned the veneer on the top of 

each, all the way through to the chipboard. In the end, on 

21 st May, the day after the carpet was fitted, a South African 

chap came round to see them, who happened to live in Ware 

as well. I immediately dropped the price to just £50, after 

he queried the damage. I was desperate to make ‘a quick 

sale’ to get rid of them to somebody local – and he 

immediately took my offer up, realising it was a bargain 

price. I bought some much less powerful, desktop speakers, 

with that money, that are perfectly adequate in a small 

room. All in all, all the argy-bargy and endless waiting for 

adverts to get a response added greatly to the parallel main 

stress we just looked at in great detail, the decorating going 

on at the same time! 

5. I teach two female ‘A’ level students for an hour or so each. 

Then I have my biggest success ever, transforming a lad’s 

maths results – with yet more stress! Once more, as for the 

last three themes, money was a major motive here – once 

more, after two years out of it, in my seeking to ‘up my 

income’ by doing some tutoring of A level students. I had 

not heard a ‘pip’ out of ‘A1 Tutors of Hertfordshire’ for two 

years, yet when I rang, they said I was still ‘on their books’. 

As they had not approached me in all of two years, despite 

my hard work before then with them, I now phoned all the 

other ‘tuition agencies’ listed in the local Yellow Pages. In 

particular, I was soon registered with ‘Personal Tutors’ and 

‘Stepping Stones Tuition’. As the latter used the telephone 

rather than impersonal automatically produced emails, I 

soon found myself preferring to deal with them. We soon 

eliminated quite a few enquiries, as I had no access to a car, 

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and these students lived miles away. Finally a girl in 

Hertford asked for tuition in A level physics, and so I went to 

her parents’ large house in a ‘posh’ estate on this side of 

nearby Hertford. She seemed very happy with the first two 

lessons, in the two weeks immediately before the decorating 

got under way. Then, out of the blue, her father phoned on 

Monday 22 nd April, and told me she no longer wanted tuition 

from me. She wanted a tutor who ‘knew her (very unusual) 

syllabus in physics much more thoroughly’! The agency 

agreed that that family was expecting far too much. Still, 

families often do in this game… A week later I gave a wholly 

successful hour’s tuition in GCSE maths to another young 

female student in Ware. However, she phoned soon 

afterwards, and equally frustratingly, told me her teacher 

could help her more than I could – so, no more lessons. 

Meanwhile, the previous night, a success story to end all 

success stories had begun. I gave, at very short notice, just 

a month before his AS level exam, three two-hour maths 

lessons to a student who had only got 18% - a dismal failure 

– in his ‘mock’ exam. This was a tall order – to get from 

that result to some good pass, in just six hours, above all as 

I was in the middle of the decorating, all done in his father’s 

office in Ware. In an unorthodox way for me, with his father 

working on a computer next to me throughout each session! 

Rising to the challenge was very stressful – teaching AS level 

maths for two hours at once was exhausting, usually it was 

one hour! So this elevated my stress levels even more 

during the decorating. Much later that year of 2002, 

however, I got a superb piece of news amid the ‘horrors’ I 

was then in – up to my neck. For the young man had risen 

from 18% to a ‘B’ grade in his exam! Not surprisingly, his 

father was delighted - and gave me a glowing reference! He 

even offered me use of his offices in Ware for a nominal fee, 

any time! 

6. The end of the ‘Java’ course – plus I start a pottery class, 

yet make no new friends as I hoped, even though this 

course is more ‘recreational and social’. After a two week 

Easter break, my Java course resumed – this term I was to 

learn much more, and was keen to attend each lesson – on 

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Tuesday 9 th April. As far as I remember, I attended every 

lesson, as many of them were about the specialised Java 

system of drawing graphics. Besides, the last three 

sessions, up to Tuesday 21 st May, gave the last five of us 

students who were all that had ‘stood the pace’ to the very 

end, huge hints about the second of the two assignments. 

This was purely a fairly simple graphics exercise, far lighter 

in fact than the first assignment. However, I was without 

my computer for those vital last three weeks – it was stored 

at my parents’ house for safety during those. So I asked for 

a week’s extra time to finish the assignment behind the 

official deadline – 28 th April. I have still not completed it, 

due to the stresses here overwhelming me at that time, as 

we see shortly. I am actually planning to discuss whether to 

submit it six months late, or even ask for an ‘aegretat’, i.e. a 

nominal pass on the grounds of ill-health, just to get the 

certificate involved, if that is not allowed. I plan to phone 

the college once term restarts next week, on 6 th January. As 

well as the Java class 7.30-9.30 on Tuesdays, I attended 

pottery classes on a Wednesday for seven of eight two-hour 

sessions during that summer term. This was more 

frustrating than stressful, for as ever with all my courses, 

including the Java classes, the few acquaintances I made – 

obviously, a prime reason for going to these classes - lived 

outside Ware. In the case of this pottery, there were four of 

us who started the same night, and along with me were one 

rather ‘camp’ chap – and a rather bubbly, friendly, and 

physically attractive woman a bit younger than me - and 

apparently single. Along with her less obviously outgoing, so 

less attractive girl friend. They never came back after that 

first session, so I was left to try to make the most of this 

course – mostly with this ‘camp’ guy as my only semblance 

of the ‘social life’ I had gone largely along for. So ended, for 

the time being, three years of courses at Ware College – 

without making one friend from Ware itself! 

7. Much reduced support for my health – from a seemingly 

panicky, much depleted Assertive Outreach Team. After 

Jess, my Community Psychiatric Nurse, left on April 18 th , the 

‘vacuum’ he left was hardly, or not at all filled until I had 

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passed an ‘impossible stress point’ – as in (8) below. We 

saw that for the first three months of the year 2002, I had a 

weekly visit from Jess, my CPN, plus one or even two other 

visitors from his Assertive Outreach Team. The very week 

before the decorating started, on 18 th April 2002 I saw him 

for the last time ever – which was to mark a sudden drop in 

support from that Team, which scarcely helped with my 

problems of ever-mounting stress! From then, looking in my 

diary, visits were far less frequent, often much briefer and 

less relaxed than previously, mostly from my Social Worker, 

Mildred, and some from a very young, inexperienced CPN 

called Nicky. She never got close to delving into, and so 

trying to understand my history – or grievances ‘against the 

system’ – as she was strictly a temporary ‘stop-gap’ instead 

of Jess. In the end I complained about this sudden drop in 

professional care to them in writing – and told them in no 

uncertain terms that I thought that their team had 

descended to a ‘state of panic’ since Jess left. Certainly he 

could have played a huge role in diverting me away from, or 

even taking action about, all these stresses I have just 

described. Finally, from the day after my carpet was fitted, 

amidst all the worry that was still going on about furniture, I 

did a monumental piece of creative work on my computer, 

as we see in the last theme below (8). As we saw above, 

had Mildred De Vil been ‘honest, caring and professional’ 

instead of the pathological liar she revealed herself to be in 

January 2003, I would have had no such principal stress 

about ‘expensive furniture – no money!’ From then on, my 

diary gets increasingly chaotic – and finally, for the first time 

all year, indeed in ages, Cuthbert, the manager of the 

Assertive Outreach Team, paid a surprise visit on 30 th May. 

I saw my locum Doctor, then still a Dr. Algebury, the 

following day, told him I had been aware that I was ‘under 

stress – and not getting regular sleep’ and had myself 

increased my tranquilliser medication to four from three 

tablets a day. He told me to continue with that until I had 

‘stopped feeling high’. So we come to the period Monday 

20 th May (carpet fitted) – to the Monday three weeks later, 

10 th June, when disaster finally overtook me due to all this 

stress. 

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8. ‘The straw that broke the camel’s back’. Decline into chaos 

from the very ‘heart of the storm’ after my carpet is fitted 

and I still need to finance furniture. In the midst of the 

stress of worrying where furniture was to materialise from, 

for a few pounds, I got my computer back after three weeks 

stored at my parents’ house. Reacting to months of 

frustration with my book, I promptly wrote a new Paper of 

16,000 or so words on ‘PROESM’ in just two days 23 rd to 24 th 

May - including many elaborate new illustrations! According 

to the contact I emailed with the paper recently at the 

Vatican Observatory, they are ‘beautiful’ illustrations – even 

if the paper itself he found ‘too vast and eclectic’. What I 

sent him is the result of a major revision and expansion 

ending 9 th November, followed by relatively minor changes in 

early December. In fact, I had gradually been building up to 

it all year 2002 with all these thoughts: - 

‣ ‘Spiritual Energy’ makes a very strong case that the Book of 

Revelation Chapters 1 to 10 have already happened – in 

strict ‘future order’ 

‣ To my utter astonishment, three and a half days before my 

book appeared on sale – the outrages of September 11 th (‘9- 

11’) happened, resulting in a Stop Press being added. I’ve 

had feedback from many of my 40 sales agreeing very 

strongly with me that Revelation Chapter 11 totally 

accurately predicted ‘9-11’! 

‣ The Appendix to ‘Spiritual Energy’ firstly quotes in full a 

paper taken off the Internet by a friend, that warns in horror 

that ‘Occult’ forces in Information Technology already have 

the means – horrifying SILICON IMPLANTS - to impose a 

‘Beast 666-style tyranny of computerised money’ as in 

Revelation 13. I go on to give a complete antidote – a 

drastically simplified calendar that would sabotage this ‘plot’ 

- and cause the silicon chip implants to be useless! 

‣ So, logically, does that mean Revelation Chapter 12 is to 

happen ‘imminently’? In brief, this concerns a mysterious 

‘woman with a crown of twelve stars, clothed with the sun, 

with the moon at her feet’. She is about to give birth to a 

son who the Devil himself ‘tries to devour, because the child 

156

is to shepherd the nations with a rod of iron’. Can I try to 

penetrate this obviously deep mystery? 

‣ I am increasingly sure that this ‘great portent’ of Revelation 

Chapter 12 is echoed by my own Spiritual Experience Five, 

which I saw at 1am on Sunday 30 th January 1983… 

‣ I was now aware that the first image of my own Spiritual 

Experience Five, was leading me to overwhelmingly powerful 

notions of ‘cosmic eggs’ - and these being almost certainly 

the very basis of quarks, the most fundamental ‘building 

blocks of the Universe’, at least in theory. I felt compelled 

now to write this bit down, which now emerged as two new – 

and the very most important of all to date – Meanings of 

that Spiritual Experience Five! So the new Paper on 

‘PROESM’ emerged in a creative outburst, starting with 

seven pages encapsulating my book! 

Diary of my final descent into the HELL of ‘summer’ below, 20 th 

May - 10 th June 

Monday 20 th – Tuesday 21 st May. Carpet fitted. Lounge just 

has bed in it – with computer on low table. Although I can 

hardly operate the mouse at that acute angle, I type the title 

pages and first elaborate diagram of my Paper, then 

provisionally called ‘the very structure of Quarks’. Go to last 

‘Java’ class of term. 

Wednesday 22 nd May. Still waiting for my father to complete 

computer desk and bring it over. Plan rest of Paper – now 

concluding, then going way beyond, my book ‘Spiritual Energy’. 

Got to last pottery class of term. 

Thursday 23 rd May. Clearly deep into Paper – have dream 

about ‘structure of quarks’ which ends up in Paper the next 

day, when I think I have done enough. Meanwhile, my dad 

duly arrives with the several parts of the desk – and it all fits 

together first time! Once he has gone after receiving much 

thanks and admiration at his craftsmanship – I type another 

five sides that evening - up to page seven. 

Friday 24 th May. My social worker Mildred calls at 11am, but 

even though I was starting to get ‘hypomanic’ from all this 

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intensively stressful hard work on my new ‘baby’ on top of all 

the preceding stresses as above, no action was taken. I don’t 

remember whether she seemed concerned about me or not. 

Real ‘blitz’ to finish the Paper – I wrote all of nine pages that 

day, even including intricate figures. 

Saturday 25 th May – Sunday 26 th May. Immediately printed off 

16 copies of the Paper, to give to friends. Posted three copies 

to national newspapers, but never got a reply. On the Sunday 

emailed it to the IEE and the Observer. Why the IEE? Because 

I had just received a relevant journal from them. Looking at 

my diary, there is a clear sign I am now getting rapidly ill, with 

inadequate medical support, just like last time this happened in 

2000. For I start writing sporadic, increasingly bizarre letters 

and postcards – to Diamond! I never heard back, so I guess 

she never read them. However, what I did next was risky! 

Monday 27 th – Tuesday 28 th May. In a very genuine ‘gesture’, 

100% intended to help her, I send off first six on the Monday, 

then four more on Tuesday, copies of an extract I have come 

across of the start of Diamond’s book I had typed up in 2001! 

To ten publishers hand-picked laboriously from my “Writer’s 

Handbook”! The covering letter made it quite clear they should 

direct any ‘feedback’ to her – but as for the various other 

letters I sent to her, up to the end of July, for one very good 

reason that we come to at that point below, I heard not a ‘pip’. 

My assistant social worker Linda Boenke arrives, and at last the 

team seem then to have detected problems – for the first time 

in person? Meanwhile my mum had rung them, very 

concerned about me, especially lack of sleep pattern. 

Wednesday 29 th May. Nothing much happened, only it was my 

niece’s birthday so I’d sent her a card. Also phoned two papers 

I’d sent my Paper too, even though it was far too early for 

them to have considered it. Clearly, I was ‘racing’! 

Thursday 30 th – Friday 31 st May. Saw, in quick succession, an 

anxious Team Manager, Cuthbert, on the 30 th , then Mildred, 

very worried and finally my very concerned Psychiatrist on 

Friday 31 st . 

Saturday 1 st – Monday 10 th June 2002. My diary turns to tiny 

‘scribble’ for ages from here! Saw Jenny for tennis for the last 

time that year, as it soon turned out, on the Saturday, and the 

following day my brother brought over a spare washing 

158

machine – which, bizarrely, I plumbed in – in the middle of the 

night! From then for a week I had a most peculiar sleep 

pattern, mostly very little at all. I sent two final emails with 

my Paper, to the Observer and the Catholic newspaper ‘the 

Universe’, to which there were never any replies. Finally, I 

applied on Thursday 6 th yet again to Cambridge University – for 

a PhD for my Paper! Most of the rest of the week was taken up 

with patchy sleep, getting ever ‘higher’ despite sticking to the 

higher level of medication my Doctor had advised on the 

Friday. In that time, I wrote several notes and letters to 

Diamond, that got ever more intimate - and bizarre – even 

though I cannot recall any of what I said! Probably she just 

destroyed them. Notably, on Sunday, my father arrived with 

the various pieces of two bookcases he has slaved over all 

week – and they looked magnificent once he assembled them. 

Especially once we had put the hi-fi in, and later I put all my 

books in them! The final thing I remember of that week, was 

finally managing to repair my original washing machine and 

lugging it into the kitchen, and the spare one outside – then 

being unable to sleep until 9 o’clock next morning, 10 th June. 

Monday 10 th June 2002. At about ten o’clock I was rudely 

awoken by the loud doorbell, and thought ‘Who the hell is that!’ 

I soon found out. I let them in, and suddenly Cuthbert 

Glyndebourne, the senior CPN, and manager of the Assertive 

Outreach Team at Bishop’s Stortford came in, swiftly followed 

by Mildred De Vil, ASW, then my GP Dr S Gibbon - and finally 

my locum Psychiatrist Dr Algebury! The whole ‘Goon Squad’! 

A Mental Health Assessment??? YET IT WAS NOT AN 

‘ASSESSMENT’ IN ANY WAY AT ALL! The Psychiatrist said no 

more than three words throughout – and my mental health was 

never discussed, and no notes were taken at the time, despite 

the ASW Mildred De Vil falsely claiming that to me in January 

2003. For the first thing Cuthbert said when he charged in at 

the front of the ‘Squad’ was typical of the panicking and 

‘jumping the gun’, often nearly illegal, by the team, ever more 

all that year of 2002 since 18 th April when Jess left. “You are 

going into hospital on a Section 3!” he shouted! I had been up 

all night, had just grabbed a mere hour’s sleep, so pointed that 

out to them, then managed to wake up sufficiently to negotiate 

a voluntary admission to Harlow hospital. The Doctors went 

159

off, leaving the other two to arrange this admission, and there 

were several ‘mad rush’ panics! Firstly Cuthbert gave me a 

mere five minutes to pack an overnight bag (“enough for a few 

nights” he claimed. Sick joke! Five months, more like!) The 

biggest panic was the discussion between him and Mildred over 

whether they needed to ask for a police car to take me to 

Harlow Hospital! Once I had very wearily reminded them that I 

have never once been violent in my life, there was even 

another huge discussion – over whether I was even able to be 

trusted to sit in the front seat of their car – as I had argued I 

have long legs! Finally, after these several stages of, as ever, 

panicky, paranoid even, discussion was finally over, I can still 

recall a very amusing, to me, typically ‘psychiatric’ remark 

from Cuthbert to Mildred during the drive to Harlow: - 

“I must say, Mildred, this really is appropriate!” 

This statement set the entire bizarrely overly ‘politically correct’ 

tone for a lot of my yet again huge, nearly five month ordeal, 

from that 10 th June – 29 th October. Discharge coincided with 

my father’s 70 th birthday, just as the first ‘period’ of this 

confinement, as overleaf, significantly ended in drama on 

Mum’s 71 st birthday! 

160

SUMMER – June 10 th – October 29 th 2002. 

So, after taking much longer than I hoped, I am finally up 

to the period of 2002 that I am most keen to put behind me, in 

a way I have used several times before, 100% effectively, as in 

‘Which Witch Doctor?’ Writing it all down, then leaving it 

bound in my book - on the bookshelf! There is really only one 

principal theme to this ‘summer’ part - which is the obvious 

one of ‘being incarcerated in a series of psychiatric wards”! I 

am very keen to get through the ordeal of writing this part, and 

this is greatly helped by two factors. Firstly, very soon after 

discharge in October, I rapidly found I had forgotten – out of 

sheer horror? – nearly all the details. Secondly, even if I 

wanted to recall any details, except the last few weeks of my 

admission, and a vital period of three weeks when it suddenly 

turned nearly blank, my diary is mostly ‘vague scribble’! 

Luckily the few important ‘events’ as far as that 

extraordinarily ‘clear’ and supremely important three weeks 

from Thursday 25 th July to Wednesday 14 th August, are 

concerned, I can remember, or are recorded in the diary. This 

period, in a nutshell, turns out increasingly to be vital to the 

rest of this chapter. Important to me, not just because she is 

extremely physically attractive – and we did some kissing and 

cuddling for several days! The main reason, which she has 

since hurt me by calling it ‘an obsession’, is not that at all. It is 

far more ‘spiritual and mystical’! You see, it turned out until 

recently that I discovered an ever increasing number – now 

having in 2003 reached a total of all of HALF – of my ‘Spiritual 

Experiences’ that can only possibly point to her, who I only met 

in Shannon House in July 2002?!! Yet these started exactly 

twenty-five years ago as I write! 

I will be trying as briefly as possible to summarise 

‘summer’ in ‘time segments: - 

1. Monday 10 th June – Monday 1 st July (Mum’s 71 st birthday). 

Stort Ward agony! 

2. Dawn on Tuesday 2 nd July – Wednesday 24 th July. 16-hour, 

400-mile ‘runner’ – by train to York and back without police 

involvement! Inevitably leads to me being transferred on 3 rd 

July, for the third time ever, to the locked ward on Shannon 

House. The last day of this initial three weeks there reminds 

161

me of the Abba song ‘the day before you came’, as we now 

see! 

3. Thursday 25 th July – Wednesday 14 th August. She arrived 

dramatically, very ‘high’, and I helped her for four days while 

sedated. We then ‘had a kissing fling’, which lasted only five 

days, then stayed friends, even, by my strenuous efforts, 

after this Helen (18 – like Shabs in 2000!) transferred to 

Fulbourn. 

4. Wednesday 14 th August – Friday 6 th September. ‘Left alone’ 

- Shannon House. 

5. Friday 6 th September – Tuesday 29 th October. ‘Lengthy 

limbo’ - oscillating between Lea Ward, more and more home 

leave – and battles over Benefits! 

6. Monday 10 th June – Monday 1 st July (Mum’s 71 st birthday). 

After the tedious admission procedures, at which the 

nurses kept saying I should ‘slow down!’, that took all day, I 

found that security was much tighter than when I had last been 

in one of the previously ‘open’ wards at Harlow. When I asked 

for a short walk in the pleasant evening air, I was told I had to 

wait till after the Ward Round, the following day, Tuesday. My 

last time there had been in 2000, when I was briefly admitted 

to the then ‘Hopkins Ward’, as in 1997, my second time in 

Harlow then. There had been considerable other 

reorganisation since 2000. All the Wards had been renamed 

after rivers not poets – so Hopkins was now called Avon Ward, 

and only took elderly patients. The Ward I was on now, 

previously Byrd Ward, was now called Stort Ward (which I 

immediately renamed ‘Stoat Ward – where the nurses are 

robot weasels armed with hypodermic syringes’). There were a 

number of aspects of my three weeks on that Ward, which 

were mostly very familiar from previous lengthy admissions. 

Principal such aspects were these: - 

It was supposed to take only patients from Harlow town. As 

a result I never met anybody I already knew as an 

acquaintance, certainly not as a friend, for the next three 

weeks. I did meet a lot of mostly pleasant, if of course all 

‘disturbed’ in different ways, ‘Harlowites’, and became quite 

friendly with them in that three weeks. So we greeted each 

other warmly much later, whenever we happened to cross 

162

paths on walks in the grounds, after we had all got on the 

road to recovery. The staff never did ‘find me a bed’ in that 

time on Lea Ward, which took Hertfordshire people. More of 

Lea Ward much later… 

I duly saw the Doctor at the Ward Round, only to discover 

that yet again it was a question of ‘Doctor who?’ – for this 

locum since January 2001, Dr Algebury, only saw me once 

more before leaving! In the meantime he left me on only 

slightly raised medication from normal, upping the 

haloperidol by one tablet a day from three to four, even 

though I immediately asked to try semisodium valproate or 

‘depakote’, which I had heard was superb for dealing with 

‘hypomania’ like mine. He also left my lithium at 1200 mg a 

night, even though I wanted to lower it slightly to 1000 mg a 

night. So for the next three weeks I had constant 

arguments with the staff, leading to confrontations with 

other Doctors that stood in for him once a week, the only 

time I saw a Doctor at all, at the Ward Rounds. They never 

did let me try depakote or lower the lithium dose ‘officially’ 

rather than continually refusing to take the odd 200 mg each 

night – yet I turned out to be correct! Since September I 

have taken much reduced haloperidol, one tablet, with the 

replacement locum, a Greek, Dr Kristos, apparently about to 

drop it for good. As I indeed now take 1000 mg lithium 

instead of the original 1200 mg a night; and above all, 

depakote on top! So who can say what would have 

happened if ‘they’ had listened? 

The atmosphere in such a ‘diabolical place’ – of what most 

religions indeed term “evil spirits” - rapidly affected me, as it 

invariably does. There was the inevitable, unremitting, 

intense boredom, often counting the time away minute by 

minute, with mostly only a pool table to alleviate this, for 

which irritatingly the balls and cues were kept locked up for 

safety. Then of course the small hi-fi in the day area, 

sometimes competing in volume, with the inevitable 

television at the other end of the room, and so causing brief 

arguments. Compounded by it being a very small Ward for 

the number of patients, with a small so usually crowded day 

area, all overlooked. With hardly any privacy anywhere, 

even in the sleeping areas – because they were all 

163

dormitories, apart from two single rooms in the male side – 

and likewise on the female side. 

As if all this usual ‘illness-inducing’ set of problems was not 

enough, from my second day there, a massive, huge 

problem unexpectedly arose – due to my own Father 

destroying my bank account! He had severe delusions that I 

had financial problems, might even be being blackmailed, 

and although he still has no evidence for this, claimed I 

‘needed protecting from myself’ over money management! 

A vast, very hurtful insult – I manage my minimal benefit 

income and bank account every day – to the nearest penny! 

However, the female Bank Manager went bewilderingly 

beyond her legal rights, not only by totally ignoring the Data 

Protection Act in letting him have complete uninhibited 

access to the entire history of my account! As, legally 

speaking, just a ‘third party’ - when it should have been 

strictly confidential. I simply cannot overstate the huge 

stress and humiliation I was put through by the next illegal 

thing she did, which was to nearly overwhelm me continually 

for the next three months, only ending when virtually well in 

October! For to do what they did next, actually required my 

written permission in the form of a legally drawn up ‘Deed of 

Attorney’. My Father told me on the Tuesday that my bank 

card, the one essential document, had been withdrawn, and 

that I had to get all my cash from him, coming in a 60 mile 

round trip from Hatfield, against cheques that he would hold. 

I was absolutely devastated! He simply would not listen 

when I told him such ‘censorship’ was illegal, and prevented 

by legal protection measures like I mentioned above – but 

he does think of himself as ‘above the Law’! This was one of 

the very worst ongoing disasters of my time there, so I will 

briefly summarise the chain of events that followed during 

my time in hospital, then move on to other matters in this 

book. I only want to give the minimum space to these nasty 

nightmares! 

I immediately cancelled the direct debit payment of my 

benefits. These were unchanged for the first four weeks. 

Then they dropped drastically from over £170/week to just 

£49/week – out of which, I found out much later, I was 

supposed to provide £20/week rent and over £10/week 

164

council tax! I asked to be sent an order book. It arrived 

promptly – but was even worse, for it could only be cashed 

in Ware! I was even more at the mercy of my father if I 

used it, for he had to make a return trip Harlow-Ware during 

a Hatfield-Harlow round trip if I did! So I returned it and 

asked for ‘giros’. Again these were only cashable at Ware, 

so by the end of these three weeks, on about 3 rd July, at my 

next ‘port of call’ downstairs, I went back to direct debit 

payments! 

My first vital action there was needed to activate my 

‘telephone banking facility’ for which luckily I remembered 

the security codes. However that would involve usually 

lengthy phone calls, so I now tried to remember my PIN 

code for my ‘out and about’ telephone charge facility, so I 

could make any length of call from the phone-box on the 

Ward, charging it to my home account. After about three 

long calls, all while very ill, to the 150 facility at BT, luckily 

all free, I finally got them to accept that one of two possible 

PIN numbers that I vaguely recalled was in fact correct – so 

they finally let me choose a new one! 

Then there was a drastic action by the bank that lasted, as I 

recall, virtually the whole time I was down on that Shannon 

House Ward. Having stopped my vital bankcard, they now 

stopped my chequebook! My only access to my own account 

for about six weeks after that was half-hour, very rushed, 

walks to town – if a Nurse could escort me! – to the local 

branch of my bank. After intense security checks at first, 

the staff would let me draw out up to £50 just on the 

strength of having a European driving licence – even though 

the licence part had been suspended while I was in hospital, 

the photo-card was valid! 

This was unbelievably stressful for all that time – and did not 

help my recovery one little bit – quite the opposite, it 

immediately made me much worse. I finally complained by 

phone about the entire sorry tale above, and even got the 

bank’s ‘fraud squad’ involved – which temporarily made use 

of my account even harder – for they ‘put a signal’ on my 

account. I was initially delighted to be allowed to order a 

new cheque book – at first this made going to the bank 

much more ‘conventional’. Especially as they all recognised 

165

me by now, so after just a week the security procedures 

were completely relaxed. 

Then there were further problems, with this new 

chequebook! I had to pay some bills, confidently wrote out 

two cheques – only to have them returned as ‘lost/stolen’! 

After the umpteenth call to the bank, they promised to have 

reinstated the chequebook – then it immediately happened 

again – and twice more! Finally I ordered yet another 

chequebook, by which time the problem finally stopped 

happening with the other ‘on and off’ one. 

Meanwhile, of course I tried to get my much more useful and 

vital document – my bankcard, which let me draw out cash 

at ATM machines. I was eventually told ‘Hertford branch 

have it. They want you to collect it in person’. That was 

quite impossible – none of the less senior nurses were 

insured to drive patients, and true to form, the Assertive 

Outreach Team refused totally to help with this simple 

request! So I had to wait for two whole weeks for a new 

card! 

Finally, after discharge at last at the end of October, I firstly 

complained fiercely about this terrible abuse by phone, and 

got a large apology, and just £25 compensation. I sent a 

‘mega-letter’ of complaint, and got £100 more – and a really 

grovelling apology - ‘we do not know where to begin with 

this!’ 

I rapidly get very ill indeed due to all this – as ever, made 

much worse by actually ‘being in hospital’ itself. My diary 

becomes nearly totally illegible by my third week there – luckily 

I can make out some vital things for this account, as follows: - 

There were three ward rounds, on Tuesdays, on 11 th , 18 th , 

and 25 th June. I was allowed out for limited escorted leave 

the day after the first one, then the next day, leave to go to 

the nearby big supermarket. All by myself – big boy…! 

On Saturday 15 th June I got my copy of Jenny’s final school 

report before she left Little Munden junior school to start at 

Presdales girls’ secondary school in September. It was 

brilliant! As the next day was Father’s Day, my diary recalls 

me making a long phone call – and congratulating her! I 

166

was obviously getting very ill indeed at this point, for I found 

the report quite hard to take in, except that the grades were 

all ‘A’ with two ‘B’! Also I don’t recall what we said! 

After the Ward Round on the 18 th I actually went home on 

leave for the afternoon. I wrote a final ‘afterthought’ to the 

Paper on ‘Quarks’ that had been the final ‘spur’ for my being 

admitted WITHOUT A LEGALLY REQUIRED MENTAL HEALTH 

ASSESSMENT. Which I revised months later, on 9 th 

November, for the ending was slightly psychotic… Finally, 

while at home I telephoned my daughter, to say I would 

endeavour to get to her swimming gala the next day, 

Wednesday 19 th June. Of course, that morning I was stuck 

on the Ward, so never made that, nor any other ‘events’ 

involving her. That was to include me missing her playing 

‘the Queen of Hearts’ in ‘Alice’. She was very disappointed, 

as she had been delighted to get a lead role at last, after lots 

of work in the school choir, instead of a minor role as in 

previous school plays! 

At that point my diary really gets virtually incomprehensible 

with its overlapping, often superimposed, tiny scribbled 

notes! I see that I wrote ‘England-Brazil’ on Friday 21 st 

June, and recall that some relief from the tedium of life on 

that Ward was briefly provided by the World Cup! The 

following day I see that my attempts to raise some laughs 

by building and launching a ‘water rocket’ I had watched 

being ‘prepared earlier’ on the TV programme ‘Blue Peter’, 

thirty years earlier when a boy, fell flat. The launch involved 

pumping air into an upside down detergent bottle mostly full 

of water, fitted with plastic fins and a nose, with a bicycle 

pump fitted with a football valve. However, the modern type 

of valve was far flimsier and narrower than the original from 

‘my day’! Not only did my fast pumping cause the water to 

pour out without lifting the rocket up. The valve snapped, 

with the pumping! 

The next week, 24 th –30 th June, the diary is really getting 

beyond a joke! At the Ward Round on Tuesday 25 th , I was 

granted two days’ leave for the following two days – and my 

request to have one of the two private male rooms was 

granted the next day. That was highly significant. From 

there, on the afternoon of Thursday 27 th June, I saw, to my 

167

utter amazement, a brand-new Spiritual Experience, 

Spiritual Experience 22! At the end of 2001 I had believed 

they had all finished! The next day, Friday, I was given a 

Section 3 Order, and stayed on the Ward all of the next four 

days. Yet, as we now see, I saw Spiritual Experience 23 that 

very evening! 

SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES TWENTY-TWO AND TWENTY-THREE 

came true inside five weeks – and by exactly four weeks after 

the first of them, I had met their ‘subject’! 

Spiritual Experience Twenty-Two. Early afternoon of Thursday 

27 th June 2002. Exactly four weeks before Helen was admitted 

on Thursday 25 th July! Clearly, one of my ‘strange cartoon type’ 

Spiritual Experiences – and furthermore, as for quite a few 

before, formed by a cloud making this shape! This Spiritual 

Experience, like the one below, that appeared the next 

evening, were the quickest to ever ‘come true’ - about Helen! 

Clearly this vision backed the next of the following day, in 

saying that Spiritual Experience Nineteen, as in 2000 with 

Shabs, was once more to give me an albeit brief ‘handful’ of 

‘exotic, luscious fruit’! For whereas Shabs was Asian, Helen 

was part Mauritian – also 18, and equally beautiful! 

An angel, in an apparently strange pose, smoking a pipe! 

168

Spiritual Experience Twenty-Three. Evening (11pm?) Friday 

28 th June 2002. Seen as above, from my room on Stort Ward, 

Princess Alexandra Hospital, just four days before ‘doing a 

runner’ and ending up in Shannon House. Could only be seen 

from the corner of my eye. When I tried to get a better view it 

vanished. Appeared to be happening in the porch of the old 

people’s ward opposite… 

A woman in a ‘billowing’ white dress, with red stripes down it, 

dancing in a small semi-circle in front of a motionless, tall male 

figure dressed all in grey! 

2. Dawn on Tuesday 2 nd July – Wednesday 24 th July. ‘An 

immaculate runner’ leads me downstairs, inevitably, to the 

totally secure Shannon House, as my last two admissions in 

1997 and 2000 at PAH. To a ‘predestined rendezvous’ it has 

169

increasingly fiercely struck me since, with Helen, the 

‘Subject of Spiritual Experiences’! 

There were a mounting series of pressures that from being 

Sectioned on Friday 28 th June, made me decide on Monday 1 st 

July, to ‘escape North’ next day: - 

i. We have seen earlier that all the aspects of psychiatric 

wards, once more this time, always inevitably make me 

worse not better – at least at first. 

ii. All day Friday, while the Section 3 was being debated by the 

staff at great length, I was kept on the Ward – and for the 

whole of the weekend and the Monday. I increasingly found 

this confinement too much to take. The Section 3 was in 

fact imposed by a ‘Dr Igi’ rather than my own Consultant – 

who seems to have definitely left the job since the previous 

week. This ‘Dr Igi’ was about the snappiest dresser among 

snappy Psychiatrist dressers that I have ever come across. 

What with him being jet-black in colour, and extremely 

obsequious and condescending in outlook, even though I am 

far from racist, I immediately thought, ‘what a crocodile’! So 

when I described ‘Dr Igi-uana who sectioned me’ days later, 

the staff on Shannon House mostly laughed! 

iii. It was my Mother’s 71 st birthday on the Monday 1 st July. 

Due to the Section 3, I could not get out of the Ward to buy 

a card for her, let alone a present! 

iv. On an ‘unearthly note’, obviously seeing two Spiritual 

Experiences during the Sectioning, of apparently different 

beautiful women, got me thinking – and blotted out any 

further thoughts of – or certainly, writing to Diamond. I was 

left wondering! 

v. Finally, the trigger to ‘go for it – and do a runner’ came on 

Saturday 29 th June. I got the next week’s benefit giro. Now 

just to get to Ware - with no money… 

So, in the early hours of Tuesday 2 nd July, I stayed awake, 

and dressed in shirt and tie, city black shoes, and smart 

trousers – to pass as just a passer-by in the street during the 

runner I now planned, in desperation, for dawn, about 4am. I 

had a briefcase, with two damaged locks, which was to mean 

170

holding it closed with one finger all the next day. I put into this 

a waterproof, some underwear, and toothbrush and paste – 

and my British road atlas. Then I stayed up till dawn. 

Finally, with the two, male and female, nursing staff 

having calmed down and got busy with their paperwork, having 

given up on chasing me off to bed, I chose my moment – and 

opened the Ward door and dashed downstairs. With soon, both 

of them in hot pursuit. I tried to shoulder charge the door on 

the basement floor, to find afterwards I had only cut and 

bruised my upper arm in doing so. Then the female nurse 

called out to me behind me, so I ran past her upstairs, then 

past the male nurse in the corridor on the ground floor. Hoping 

that unexpectedly, the main front door to the Centre might in 

fact be unlocked, I ran to it, pushed the button, pushed it… it 

opened! Very relieved, I ran outside! 

Everything from then went more or less to plan till I 

reached Ware. I was now dressed for warmth, with a khaki 

‘camping waistcoat’ beneath an even more conspicuous army 

camouflage jacket. These were soon to be thrown in the River 

Stort! First I took a devious exit route from the hospital, that I 

knew from years before at that hospital, in particular well away 

from sight of any pursuers following from the Psychiatric Wing. 

I took an equally devious route through all the housing estates, 

as far as possible, then took the road West out of Harlow 

towards the A414, the road for Ware, then Hertford. However, 

when I reached the bridge over the Stort river, I immediately 

set off along the right bank, and crossed a lot of beaten down 

grass – and, still mysteriously till this day, across very wet 

ground with dry shoes at the end! Very luckily for me, there 

had been no rain recently. Finally, I found the towpath, which 

I followed to Roydon, in total about five miles from the 

Hospital, where I hoped, ill as I was, to ‘jump’ a train. For I 

only had 13p on me apart from the £170+ giro-cheque tucked 

safely in my wallet! 

At that point came the only real problem till I reached 

Ware. I was too early for any trains, as I had got there just 

after 5.15am – so I decided to carry on to the next station. I 

soon lost myself in a large park of static caravans, and then it 

got worse. I walked for three miles, an hour, round an old 

gravel pit, now a lake – only to find myself recognising I had 

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arrived back at the original caravan park! I returned to Roydon 

station around 6.30am. There was a train heading south to 

Broxbourne in minutes – so I got on, without a ticket, then 

found a train about to arrive for Ware, in minutes, too! Again 

without a ticket, I got to Ware about 7.30pm – with masses of 

time in hand to be first in the queue at the Post office to cash 

my giro-cheque, so I went home for a while. I decided to now 

‘head north’ after taking a taxi from there to Stevenage 

mainline station. So I took odd superfluous items from my 

case, and added some more. In fact, as if by (Divine?) ‘magic’, 

all the trains I caught all day were ‘there just in time’. 

There was one message on my answer-phone, from the 

Ward, which I duly ignored. I cashed my cheque, and headed 

for the station, at just after nine a.m., to get a taxi – only to 

find the second of only two problems with this ‘immaculate 

runner’ all day. For my father had been contacted, and here he 

was in front of me! I rapidly talked him out of ‘interfering’, 

then when he started to seriously tell me to go back to the 

hospital with him, I walked quickly away, all round the block, 

back to the railway station, and got a taxi to Stevenage. Once 

more, there was a ‘train to order’, north to Peterborough – so I 

bought a ticket and caught it. 

At Peterborough I finally started to relax, especially as I 

was now very tired, having been up over 24 hours. It was now 

about 11am. I went to the station bar, and had a ‘brunch’ – a 

round of sandwiches, followed by my first two pints of bitter in 

three weeks! Soon, I heard the announcement, ‘train to York 

in ten minutes’, and thought, “I’ve always wanted to go there! 

Especially York Minster Cathedral!” In my ill state, with money 

already depleted, I promptly ‘jumped’ that train - with no 

ticket. I remember the ‘smoking carriage’ was very stuffy and 

had peculiar air conditioning – but no Ticket Inspector came 

the whole time! 

So I got to York at lunchtime, about 1pm. It was raining, 

so I was glad I had replaced the two jackets I had started out 

with, by a waterproof top. I immediately had no trouble 

finding York Minster, for it was clearly visible from the Railway 

Station, to the left from the entrance, about a mile away. I 

headed off towards this towering monument, feeling a strange 

compulsion of ‘finding a sanctuary’ there – mostly as I was so 

172

tired, especially after the last claustrophobic stage of my 

journey, on the train. Indeed when I finally got to within two 

hundred yards of the Minster, I literally plumped down 

exhausted onto a wall outside some granite buildings. I 

remember that there was a ‘tractor mower’ working there, and 

the initially heavy showers soon cleared, to sun interspersed by 

clouds. Then, after I found my fingers were covered with blue 

ink from my leaky biro, I spent ten minutes sitting on the wall, 

wiping them clean, and feeling ‘dirty’ and so embarrassed. 

Finally, after half an hour, I got enough strength to walk 

further, to sit at the foot of this majestic edifice, across the 

road, on a bench. 

For the next half an hour I remember chatting to an old 

Lady sharing the same bench, her friends who turned up, and 

various passers-by. Meanwhile something was radiating out of 

the Minster onto me – some kind of reviving energy, as I gazed 

in awe at the beauty of the sun and shadow of clouds, playing 

on the massively solid limestone walls! Some kind of ‘Spiritual 

Energy’ even, dare I say it?! For by the end of that half an 

hour I felt no more tiredness, and for the rest of the day was 

totally refreshed! I soon wandered inside, and spent another 

half an hour, in total contrast to the bleakness of Stort Ward, 

gazing at beautiful architecture, richly wrought, exquisite 

artefacts, and was particularly taken by the West Window – the 

‘Heart of Yorkshire’, I heard a guide say. After that hour of 

‘spiritual refreshment after and during a desert’, I wandered 

through the ancient City, had a third pint of the day of – 

Yorkshire, of course – bitter, and bought some cheap ‘men in 

black’ sunglasses – it was now so bright a day… 

Finally I headed back to the station about 5pm, to decide 

whether to go further North, on just the £70 I had left, or get 

back. In the end after half an hour, I enquired the price of a 

‘single’ to my parents’ town, Hatfield, which is on that same 

line. I did not have enough! I went outside to the phone 

booths, had some more smokes to think, then tried to call 

them. They were constantly engaged for ten minutes! I called 

Harlow police, but could not get put through, so finally called 

Stort Ward, and said where I was. “York? Where is that?” said 

the Asian Nurse! “Two hundred miles away!” I said. “Well, we 

cannot possibly fetch you – you will have to make your own 

173

way back!” she said. I thought hard, realised that the last time 

I had used trains regularly had been ten years ago, under 

British Rail, and now they were all ‘multiple option’ fares, under 

the various private operating companies. So when I asked for 

the fare to Stevenage instead of Hatfield, it was affordable, and 

the train was leaving in 10 minutes! I got through at last, and 

arranged to call them from Stevenage station for a lift back to 

Harlow. So I finally got picked up, and got back to the hospital 

with no police involvement, about 8pm. Just like my only other 

runner, to Cambridge in 1995, ‘immaculate’! 

The inevitable sequel to this came after I spent the night 

getting some much-needed sleep in my room back on Stort 

Ward, having had to fight it off between 4pm and 11pm on the 

evening of the runner. I had been up for 36 hours by 4pm 

alone, without a break! On the afternoon of 3 rd July, I was duly 

approached by Sam, the very substantially built Ward Manager 

of Stort Ward. “We are transferring you down to Shannon 

House this afternoon, in about half an hour. We think you will 

do better down there. Can you get your things packed?” I was 

initially delighted by this, for as we have seen twice before in 

this book, in 1997 and 1999, Shannon House then seemed a 

much better option for me: - 

i. I was at last likely to get my requests about medication 

listened to, especially trying the new tablets of depakote, 

and lowering my lithium level, to 1000 mg not 1200 mg – 

like ‘the old days’ under Dr Gander before my ‘troubles with 

the system’ from 1993. Indeed, I was immediately seen by 

‘Dr Mark’ on admission, with no great tedious forms to fill in, 

and he readily agreed to both. 

ii. I had only been there just up till 10 th January 2001, after 

four months, so knew all the staff – some as friends, almost, 

especially Matt and Michelle, two very witty nursing 

assistants. Indeed, when I got down there to the ‘basement 

cage’, I found nearly all the staff were the same – so even 

when I did not get on with other staff so well, at least I had 

the advantage of knowledge of their ‘foibles’! 

iii. I knew the regime intimately as well, which was very 

different to Stort Ward upstairs. In particular I looked 

forward to having my own room there, far more secure as it 

was to be than my private room had been on Stort Ward. I 

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had no leave ‘off the hospital grounds’ for all these three 

weeks – until the day after, when we come to the vital next, 

third period, of five in all I am covering, which was Thursday 

25 th July. I soon started leave on the grounds with a nurse 

for half an hour, the usual regime, however. 

iv. Unlike my last stay, there was no obvious violence, unless 

you call ‘violent’ some attempts at public groping by two 

sex-starved black male patients, with records of ‘violence’, of 

the beautiful main character of the period following. 

v. Indeed the closest I saw to any such violence in 2002, unlike 

the two cowardly assaults I got in 2000, I confronted, as it 

was a challenge to me. This promptly resulted in praise from 

Nurse Mo, for ‘confronting - to the brink of apparent 

violence’ just a try-on from ‘just a feeble crack-cocaine 

abuser – hence his schizophrenia’! I was astonished to also 

see another person I recognised, as well as that guy. For 

‘Seamus’ was still there, all of four years ‘in’! He preyed on 

one’s better nature and wheedled, to meet his craving to 

chain smoke, despite only getting £15 a week! I was to give 

him over £150 in eight weeks! 

I can recall very little indeed apart from that, about these first 

three weeks there. My ‘ill’ diary reveals little – apart from 

ever-mounting tedium and frustration that led to two weeks of 

‘massive fantasising – on semi-religious yet droll themes’, 

which I actually shouted about in the yard outside, so both 

wards above heard it all! The staff called this ‘paranoid 

ideation’ in their peculiar ‘psychiatric language’! A ‘special’ 

patient was admitted on 25 th July, as we now see. It promptly 

stopped! 

Sunday 5 th January 2003. I mentioned severe computer 

problems at the start of this Chapter, and am delighted that 

since last Friday, the PC has seemingly ‘righted itself’. 

Yesterday, when I typed the last eight sides, it ran with no 

alarm going, for several hours at a time. So, as we come to 

the watershed of the chapter, I am relieved in addition, that 

whereas the first seven months have taken twice as long to 

write about as I expected, the rest of my diary is mostly clear, 

starting now! 

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3. Thursday 25 th July – Wednesday 14 th August. My only 

decent new relationship of 2002 starts – and how! I meet 

the truly beautiful 18-year old Helen, with a stunning figure 

packed into a tiny frame, who turns out to be really 

gorgeous! 

I missed my daughter’s final day at junior school the 

previous Wednesday 17 th July, but it turned out that University 

students had been celebrating for some time! For on the 

afternoon of Thursday 28 th July there was quite a disturbance 

on the Ward – a young woman had been admitted, was racing 

round the ward, and was soon cornered by a large number of 

the staff – to fall asleep under the influence of the injection she 

was given. Doubtless this was the same ‘clopixol aquaphase’ 

devil’s potion I too had been given back in 2000, for it took her 

over three days to get over it. She was dressed a bit like a 

hippy, but with her long skirt torn right across the front. My 

immediate reactions were several, and mixed: - 

1. Wow! She is beautiful! And strangely familiar! I hope she 

is not here because she has been raped, or anything like 

that, for her sake… Look at her skirt! It turned she had not, 

luckily, but could easily have been! (Just how ‘strangely 

familiar’ Helen immediately was to me, while this was 

definitely the first time I had ever met her in my life, 

becomes clear at the end of this piece). 

2. I actually hope she stays, for we could do with a bit of 

‘colour’ on the ward – and female company for poor 

depressive Jane, who has been here a year! 

3. Wow! She is ‘high as a kite’. Looks like ‘they’ are trying to 

give her a clopixol aquaphase injection! Do I just still 

remember those from two years ago when I got two in three 

days down here! Poor kid! Still, better stop her escaping 

into the smoking-room from them… I held the door against 

her, now led away… 

4. Uh-oh! Here is another 18-year old beauty – another Shabs, 

needing looking after down here by a ‘surrogate father 

figure’ like me - to her ‘daughter figure’ again - like two 

years ago in 2000! (there had been a far more protracted 

‘father-daughter protection’ going on between me and a 

176

eautiful Pakistani 18-year old on the same ward back in the 

year 2000). 

As we saw, my diary had, until that very day, recently 

been packed with ‘notes to myself’ about so-called ‘paranoid 

ideation’ - and shouting out loud about it in the yard. For the 

whole of the next three weeks, or just short of it, that she was 

there, I had her as a much healthier preoccupation, by contrast 

at least! For the weekend that followed, in fact, as it was 

clearly her first time in a psychiatric ward, and she was 

obviously scared, and needing ‘help finding the ropes’, as for 

Shabs in 2000, I was a father figure. I helped her with her 

shaking hands, from her vicious injection, to carry drinks. 

More importantly I kept joining the staff in getting her not to 

‘reveal everything’ under the one change of rather skimpy 

clothes she then had; and finally lent her some of my own 

jeans, far too big, so I gave her a belt, as well as some teeshirts. 

I got the first piece of what was to turn out to become 

increasingly strangely, if not weirdly, ‘spooky’ information 

about her, when she wrote down her full name, and parents’ 

address and phone number, both exotically in Luxembourg. As 

well as her grandparent’s address and phone number, in 

Cambridge, where her parents eventually flew in to stay for the 

duration. Finally and vitally, she added her email address to 

these, all in my address book, in her first week. She then 

proceeded to completely wreck my address book, by writing 

deranged notes over many pages, and tearing some blank ones 

out! 

My diary restarts after the initial shock of meeting such a 

beauty, with a stunningly ‘elegant’ face, who also packs a 

lovely, curvaceous figure, even quite buxom, despite only 

having a tiny frame under 5’4” tall. On Monday 29 th August is 

just one word – ‘WOW!’ The next day says ‘MUTUALLY IN 

LOVE!’ - yet also records, that night was when I tried to ‘break 

out’ of the ward – obviously extremely ill, for I tried that in the 

female shower-room! For, far faster than five weeks, as with 

Shabs in 2000, within just five mere days of meeting ‘young 

Helen’ we had an increasingly passionate ‘kissing affair’. 

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I had already found out that she had just failed her first 

year exams in biochemistry after doing no work all year at 

Oxford University. So, a third biologist or medic called Helen I 

have had a disastrous relationship with! All very ‘Helen-istic’! 

It’s all Greek to me! Naturally she only later admitted that she 

had been experimenting with drugs, mostly ‘speed’, since 

March, and was admitted to Shannon House Ward after trying 

LSD at a party at Bishop’s Stortford, and being brought down 

off a high building by firemen! 

So she has always claimed to have absolutely no memory 

of the ten days of the start of her five weeks in hospital, the 

first three weeks on Shannon House along with me, and was 

shocked by some of the things I have told her since, about this 

period. I told her, mostly to try to warn her about, and put her 

off using, any more such strong illicit drugs! So, this ‘LSDinduced 

amnesia’ was obvious, when I reminded her in an 

email of how the two Negro male patients, in particular, one 

there on a charge of Grievous Bodily Harm, and the other a 

sado-masochist, had been ‘touching her up’ early on. She said 

in reply very little, just ‘I remember none of this and I feel 

sick’. I’d turned round just in time to see the former run his 

hand right up inside her right thigh, while she sat in the yard 

‘revealing everything’ up to her knickers, with her legs splayed 

invitingly wide apart! 

The second Negro, the sado-masochist, had said when she 

first arrived in her trance, to everybody listening, “Cor! She’s a 

bit of all right! Let’s gang-bang her!” Then he did have all his 

magazines about violent sex confiscated while on that ward. 

When he discovered she was learning karate, as a novice, on 

top of her other ‘action girl’ hobby of mountaineering, the staff 

kept having to stop him engaging her in ‘play fights’, for at 

least the first ten days, until her ‘trance’ started to fade. For 

these were just a pretext for him lunging out to grab her, or 

topple her - and then grab onto her body – especially her 

breasts! 

At the time she did not react at all to any of this groping – 

which clearly in hindsight, was due to her LSD-induced trancelike 

state, having on top made her very ‘high and oblivious’ 

with the ‘drug-induced hypomania’ she was to be diagnosed 

with. The same ‘hypomanic’ label I share now, and for the last 

178

two years, which partly explains why we found it straightaway 

very easy to form a friendship – that has remained quite 

intensive, until a row cooled it off last month! 

So, was I at fault in responding to her increasingly 

passionate kissing, with equal passion in return? Actually I 

really did not find out she was so, well, promiscuous, at the 

time, solely because of LSD, until after the mere five days of 

our ‘kissing relationship’. This got quite intense at the peak, 

despite the attempts to stop it, and some ribald remarks from 

the staff, naturally including the mockery ‘She is another 

Shabs!’ There were echoes. Yet when I bought things for 

Helen, especially a dressing-gown and anorak, as well as for us 

both, a pair of matching friendship rings, they got to her intact, 

when I posted them on, unlike Shabs. I still owe Littlewoods 

£250 to cover those things and various things for myself… 

The kissing was to climax, then stop abruptly on Friday 

2 nd August. Helen ‘sneaked’ briefly and furtively into my room, 

breaking every rule, three times. The first twice I at last had 

the chance, now in private, to caress her lovely body – but only 

once each time - extremely briefly and fleetingly. The last time 

was at night, but this time the Night Sister had spotted her, so 

broke up our kissing on my bed, by bursting in and saying “Oi! 

You, Helen - out!” Apart from a ‘farewell’ kiss, cool by 

comparison, when she left on Tuesday 13 th August, that was 

the last! 

For the following day, her EX-boyfriend, as I had noticed 

she clearly regarded him, called after several such visits, 

clearly still her boyfriend as far as he himself was concerned. 

For they sat on the bed in her room, from about 11am, when 

he woke her up, to 1pm, while he appeared to be leaning 

forward hard while kissing her a lot – which she was indeed to 

tell me was rather forced by him. 

As I had myself been kissing her just the previous day, 

this was confusing, and too much to take. So when she 

seemed to ‘waft’ out later after he had gone, I was actually in 

tears – of frustration and confusion. I promptly called her 

every term I could think of for a ‘tart’ – and told her ‘you are 

lying, you’re no virgin!’ 

Not surprisingly, she slept all that afternoon, most of next 

day, and most of the Monday, after that. I still believe my 

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‘bollocking’ of her in this way, was a decisive factor in this ‘big 

sleep’ – especially the way now suddenly, after she finally 

emerged, at 11am on Tuesday 6 th August, she seemed much 

less ‘high’. After that, there were no more offers of ‘kisses’ 

from her despite my writing her three somewhat OTT poems, 

the first starting ‘hey little missus, I misses your kisses’, one 

that day, then two more by the Thursday. She much later told 

me that ‘my reason was, your own condition was not fully 

controlled by the Doctors’. 

She was so much less ill by Monday 12 th , that after the 

ward round she was transferred temporarily to Stort Ward, yet 

visited and did give me one big kiss, and a red hairband (red is 

her favourite colour!) on Tuesday 13 th August. That added to a 

lock of her hair and a pair of underpants and a red, again, 

tropical (from Mauritius she said) T-shirt, all of which she had 

already given me, that I still have tucked away… She 

eventually sent me, months after writing it, a letter she had 

written shortly after this, after she was discharged to the 

hospital at Cambridge on Wednesday 13 th August. It said 

‘thanx to the NHS we did not sleep together’! Then to my 

horror, continued - that would have made her feel raped! In 

fact, early on, she had made a number of increasingly 

promiscuous ‘offers’! I’ll not repeat any of these, for she was 

later horrified when I reminded her what she said! 

Even in her second week, she was to reveal – to me 

alone, by complete accident - nearly complete ‘naked views’, 

not just of her legs, as to the Negro above. She was coming 

out of the shower, wearing two strategic towels, and I had just 

come out of my room, so was right behind her as she walked to 

her room – when the towel round her middle fell nearly 

completely off. With a mixture of horror and delight, the latter 

due to the stunning sight I had of a statuesque pair of highly 

toned buttocks and lovely thighs, I dashed and lent her my 

spare dressing gown! It got worse, for about a day later I went 

to ask her something, even though the staff kept trying to stop 

me knocking on her door. I noticed that the blind in the green 

door to her room was fully open. Then I was stunned to see 

her approaching, naked – apart from a towel round her breasts 

– otherwise in full frontal nudity! At the same instant, she saw 

me, grabbed a towel, covered herself and came to the door to 

180

see me. I immediately showed her how to operate the blind – 

which could only be done by turning a knob in the door – from 

outside. 

There are just a few last things to mention, which involve 

the ‘unearthly, even weird!’ themes that come increasingly into 

this history of 2002 from now. Firstly, lovely Helen, allowed no 

money all this time, found it very easy to cadge ‘smokes’ – 

especially from me early on. She was immediately fascinated 

by my pipe – which had caused an immediate ‘fashion’ for 

them among other male patients! So she was soon 

demonstrating ‘how to blow smoke like a dragon’ after usually 

asking for ‘a More cigarette, please, Simon!’ - as well as often 

trying to smoke the (much stronger) pipe. Once she played a 

CD of what she called ‘trance dancing’ and started dancing – I 

realised that Spiritual Experience 22 was all about HER! Then 

again, her ex-boyfriend Hugo always wore pale grey or pale tan 

– so Spiritual Experience 23 was all about her also! Finally, 

when I found out her date of birth was 9 th November, 1983, I 

thought for one stunned second, then realised, that was the 

very night of my incredible experience with the ‘Morning Star’ 

or ‘Star of the East’ – in 1983 - Jesus Christ! This is incredible! 

Just how incredible emerged much later in the year – when I 

started a complete re-examination of all my ‘Spiritual 

Experiences’! Not surprisingly, I made sure she kept multiple 

copies, if possible, of my books… 

4. Wednesday 14 th August – Friday 6 th September. The ‘road 

to recovery’. 

My diary, largely empty for these previous three weeks 

with Helen on the Ward at the same time, now started to get 

full up again after she had gone to Fulbourn Psychiatric 

Hospital at Cambridge. However, at that stage my medication 

had clearly cut in – and she has always since had a very 

calming effect on me, revealing a good ‘insight’ into our joint 

diagnosis, even after just her one admission. Ideally her last 

as well! Her frequent calming ‘Ssh! Shhhhh!’ to me while 

there, from an 18-year old to a 45-year old, for instance, was 

very effective… So there are really only four topics for this 

piece, which culminated in discharge to Lea Ward upstairs, an 

Open Ward, with the huge bonus of having my ‘Section 3’ 

181

Order lifted at that time. 

maximum of six months! 

After just ten weeks, not the 

182

Health and Medication. 

We just saw how Helen slept for most of three days, at 

the end of our five-day increasingly ‘torrid’ affair, and from 

what she has said since, felt then that ‘the Doctors were not 

properly controlling your condition’. I in turn can report that 

she was much more demure from then, and dressed much 

more modestly, greatly helped by her parents having brought 

her lots of spare clothes from home. Had we continued down 

the path we had been going down the previous Friday, with her 

sneaking into my room, yes, there was every chance that we 

would have quickly got much more relaxed, despite the ‘danger 

of detection’. Yes, we could well have ‘slept together’ like she 

said. Or rather, then both hypomanic so oversexed, we would 

probably have torn each other’s clothes off! Enough for her to 

very much enjoy losing her virginity, as much as myself in 

taking it – in completely unprotected lovemaking! I trust she 

still retains her virginity now! 

Yes, as I recall, she was perfectly right about my 

medication - the Doctors were very concerned at the time that 

it was not working as they would like! Indeed, after trying 

increasing amounts of depakote, rising from 1000 mg a day to 

all of 3000 mg a day, along with much raised doses of 

haloperidol tablets, with orphenadrine tablets, at about that 

crucial weekend, they reverted from depakote to lithium. 

Then, I had not let them just phase out the depakote slowly, 

from a very high dose, but promptly started refusing it. At the 

time Helen rightly observed that I was ‘not fully under control’ 

– it was due to being out of depakote, with none of the other 

mood stabiliser, lithium, yet fully established. The haloperidol 

I was left with in my system, was ineffective with neither 

present… 

In fact, about a week after she left the Ward, ‘Doctor 

Mark’ announced he was going to try the latest American 

‘standard treatment’ for my ‘bipolar affective disorder’ 

(hypomanic variety). So he added 1000 mg of depakote to the 

lithium, now still 1000 mg a night, as it remained throughout 

my time on that Ward. Inside a week I was suddenly much 

calmer, less reactive, much more relaxed, and indeed felt much 

more my usual placid self! Soon discharge to an Open Ward 

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seemed likely, and was increasingly talked about for my last 

week, as we see. 

Keeping in contact with Helen after she left. Initially this was 

easy – I called her on Stort Ward during her 48 hours there, 

and she agreed to call me as soon as she got to Fulbourn. The 

same day she went there, her clothing from Littlewoods was 

delivered to my flat, and my parents brought it over. So on 

Friday 16 th I had an awful trek up to town, in a huge rush with 

it, all the details of which I won’t go into. I finally posted it, in 

a huge sweat, and the Nurse escort was all panicky because we 

were late going back! There was no call as expected from 

Helen in two whole days, so that same Friday, I was on the 

phone, making lengthy calls to Addenbrookes Hospital in 

Cambridge, after Directory Enquiries could not find Fulbourn – 

without an address for it, which I did not have. This was all 

overheard by the Nurses in my Ward, most of whom, being 

very cynical, scoffed at me, “You will never hear from her 

again! No Hope! She has gone!” Finally, late that evening, I 

had finally found out the patients’ phone number for her Ward, 

after a fluke – a Nursing Manager had vaguely recalled a 

woman of that name being admitted there that Wednesday! I 

spoke to her briefly – she was delighted! 

That Sunday came an apparent real hitch to this. Jenny, 

a deputy Ward Manager, told me (sic) “Helen’s Grandmother 

has been on the phone and said she does not want you to call 

her any more. The next thing will be harassment charges!” All 

day I festered, after the problems with Diamond earlier in the 

year. Finally at about 9pm, I actually dared take the bull by 

the horns – and rang Helen’s Grandmother – only about the 

third time I had done so. I was in tears! However, she soon 

dismissed both parts of Jenny’s claimed reportage of her 

words, and said, “It was me, not Helen, that I don’t want you 

to call. But I mentioned nothing about ‘harassment charges’”. 

I then accused Jenny of lying. She did not show any remorse, 

instead got angry and threatened to report me! 

I soon found obtaining Helen on the phone, by asking ill 

patients on her Ward to fetch her, was not easy. Besides, she 

was soon taking lots of leave, for walks, then to go the gym. I 

must have made ten calls or so to her in the next two weeks till 

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Thursday 29 th August, when she took the early flight from 

nearby Stansted Airport to Luxembourg, and her home, finally 

discharged. However, there must have been 20 other abortive 

ones, mostly when she simply was not there. There were none 

from her. There was now a problem. All these calls, that had 

been accompanied by the above parcel and some letters from 

me, were in defiance of a letter to the Ward from her father, 

asking me not to contact her, that came just after I got her 

number at Cambridge. I was not prepared to abandon all that 

hard work, so carried on calling her. However, it was to take 

help from outside to get past the problem of not being able to 

phone her parents’ home, where she now was, because of her 

father’s letter. As we now see. 

‘Business’ with my publisher… Finally he emails Helen in 

Luxembourg for me! 

I tried to get my publisher to do some editing of ‘Quarks’ 

on a small scale, run some off for me and have them bound, 

then put up my Paper on ‘Quarks’ and “Which Witch Doctor?”, 

as it was then, on his web-site, in this time. A very broadminded 

student psychiatric nurse had bought copies of both, as 

well as ‘Spiritual Energy’, and recommended that I do so – 

‘they all make a superb read, and deserve recognition and a 

wide readership’, she said. I had my backup CD with me – 

with “Which Witch Doctor?”, but not my Paper – but I’d emailed 

the latter to Dick, my publisher, as soon as I finished it. ‘Which 

Witch Doctor?’ was easy. However, there was a problem with 

the first version of the revised Paper that Dick sent – the 

relatively huge letters on the top half of the cover had 

somehow shrunk down, in passing over the Web to him, so 

they were tiny! Attempts to rectify this were to prove too 

difficult over the phone – especially when I found he had made 

quite a few mistakes in my dictating what I thought were 

simple edits, by phone. In the end, I waited till I was allowed 

home on leave, a month later, from Lea Ward, then did all 

these edits myself, and emailed him the new version! At last! 

I had had no contact with Helen for a week on Wednesday 

4 th September, so he really did prove very helpful when he sent 

her an email on my behalf – then on that Thursday, when I 

rang to check, he had got a reply! The next day I found myself 

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discharged off my Section 3, on Lea Ward, and on Monday 9 th 

September got him to email her again with the patients’ phone 

number there. The phone rang two hours later, the first call 

for me while on that Ward, I ‘just knew’ it was her – and it 

was! The first time I had spoken to her in two weeks! 

Legal pressure by myself to end my Section seems to help. 

When Helen first arrived, I had chosen that time to apply 

for my legal rights of an ‘Appeal to the Hospital Managers’ and 

a ‘Mental Health Tribunal’ to try to have my onerous Section 3 

lifted. Especially, then I could expect some leave OFF the 

hospital grounds, by continuing as a Voluntary Patient. I got 

‘Legal Aid’ to be helped in this by a female colleague of Ed 

Thomas, my local solicitor. 

The Appeal was held at 10am on Thursday 22 nd August, 

with the Tribunal due three weeks later. The first of these, the 

Appeal, was to prove harrowing. There were three reports for 

it on my health, by ‘Doctor Mark’, my primary nurse and my 

new CPN, John Murphy, who joined the Assertive Outreach 

Team after I was admitted, and visited sometimes – too late to 

help me! My solicitor and I were given these damning reports 

just ten minutes before the Appeal started! 

As a result, when I saw them, I blew a fuse! “They’ve not 

one nice thing to say about me at all! It is all negative, all 

about imaginary ‘huge debts to large institutions’!” So ten 

minutes later, after this brief furious scan, when I heard all the 

talk in the Appeal – above all, all of ten minutes of lying 

diatribe from Cuthbert Glyndebourne, head of Aggressive Outretch 

- about me ‘being a money waster’, I naturally lost the 

Appeal. I was fuming with rage throughout about this smear! 

I finally pried out the actual figures for my alleged 

‘massive, lavish overspending’ from my father in January 2003 

– and blew yet another fuse! He had lied about it all after he 

destroyed my bank account with the connivance of my bank 

manager to all the Control Freak Nurses on Shannon House 

Ward as well as the Aggressive Out-Retch Team of so-called 

‘social services’! For he said I had cost him £500 while in 

hospital! I immediately pointed out that £50 had been on a 

repair to a leather jacket that I had put in a shop in Ware 

186

BEFORE admission, and furthermore, £100 at least of the rest 

all went after I escaped to York Minster! 

So he was calling ‘lavish overspending’ what was at most 

£450 and at best £300 on average over twenty weeks in 

hospital. £1.50-£2.25 a day – ten cigarettes a day! ‘Lavish 

overspending’, my arse! You cruel traitor, Dad! – and your 

‘system’ cronies – after you destroyed my bank account! 

The Tribunal was never needed! The Monday before the 

Appeal, 19 th August, I was put on the final ‘trial’ medication – 

all three of lithium, depakote, and haloperidol – with 

orphenadrine for side effects of the latter! A week later I was 

much more relaxed, according to both me – and the Nursing 

staff. By the Ward Round on Monday 2 nd September they were 

looking for a bed for me on Lea Ward, and the Friday 6 th 

September I was discharged there – off my Section! 

Tuesday 7 th January 2003 at 5pm. I typed the above several 

pages on Sunday, and there was some mysterious ‘heavenly 

coincidence’ with my at last getting down to discussing my time 

that year in the company of the lusciously beautiful, delightful 

HELEN. For that very day the weather was beautifully cold and 

crisp and sunny – and all the three days since! So sometimes 

at least it is true – ‘the sun shines on the righteous’ – three 

days of mostly sun, after the three or four months of ‘murk’ 

leading up to it! I have had a ‘day off from typing’ yesterday, 

to catch up on other more mundane matters. The reason why 

I am resuming at 5pm is that we had a cable cut that supplies 

power to the flats, on the building site next door to them! 

5. Friday 6 th September – Tuesday 29 th October. ‘Last leg’ – 

Lea Open Ward. 

My relief on first arriving as a voluntary patient on Lea Ward. 

I don’t need to look at my diary to remember that from a 

couple of weeks of this point – surprise, surprise, from my very 

first night at home in three months - I really do hate these 

‘hospitals’ – my life rapidly returned to almost ‘normal health’. 

187

The diary only records increasingly fewer stressful things, 

mostly increasingly good things, till the end of the year. So I 

am looking forward to having to spend far less than the five 

pages per month on average it has taken so far, in describing 

the rest of a now mostly much less stressful year of 2002! 

The ‘CPA Meeting’ that morning had been very brief, and 

really all that happened was that ‘Doctor Mark’ introduced 

Theresa, a really diminutive Nurse from Lea Ward, and they 

told me to pack to go up there in the afternoon! 

However, at that time the Section 3 was still in force, with 

the Tribunal due the following Tuesday, and my solicitor and I 

were handed the slightly revised reports from the Appeal two 

weeks earlier, which were now to be just the Doctor’s and 

Social Services’ report. No problem with the Doctor’s report – 

mainly now, after a request by my solicitor in the meantime, 

the diagnosis of ‘bipolar affective disorder (hypomania)’ - B1AD 

by any other name – appeared! 

However, Mildred, my Social Worker, had embellished an 

already damning report, with not one nice thing to say about 

me, with about eight new points. These all seemed to suggest 

that – yet again, I was some sort of philanderer! For they all 

strongly suggested I would need effectively to be ‘controlled 

and nannied’ in the community, mostly with money! Then the 

report ended stating categorically that I needed to stay on my 

Section 3, no questions asked! 

A further major worry was that the Ward Round on Lea 

Ward was not till Tuesday, so I faced five days confined to the 

Ward over the weekend. Might it end as on Stort Ward in July – 

in total frustration? 

Only when I was leaving, and passed ‘Doctor Mark’ in the 

corridor, did he wish me luck, and tell me, ‘You should only be 

there for one or two weeks! Good news! Your Section 3 has 

been lifted – you are now a voluntary patient’. Double 

blessing, therefore! Indeed, I was never to be confined to Lea 

Ward at any time while there, as long as I ‘signed out’ in the 

log book with time I left, and my destination! 

As for Social Services, I have deliberately been keeping 

back to the end of this discussion of my year of 2002, a whole 

catalogue of spiteful actions or total omissions against me! 

Even abusing their legal powers over me, complete failure to 

188

act on repeated, usually desperate while so powerless, 

requests for the simplest help – and as we start to see at the 

end of this piece, complete, seemingly deliberate pig-ignorance 

about the benefits system! What else more important can their 

jobs be about? 

My first impressions of Lea Ward were ‘This is luxury 

compared to Shannon House – and even Stort Ward!’ On 

arriving with a very nearly full trolley of luggage, I immediately 

got some ribald remarks about the sheer quantity of it, from 

Nurses! However, I could now at last, as I had long intended, 

sort it out, as it was now all in one place, unlike on Shannon 

House, some in my room, some in my ‘locker’. Soon my 

parents had collected everything ‘non-essential’. 

Meanwhile what I had left was all in privacy, for I was 

given one of the really quite huge male single rooms, one of 

just six. My ex-wife’s partner had visited with my daughter on 

Shannon House, and stunned me by buying an expensive 

portable stereo, which I played, quietly due to the quietness 

maintained on the Ward, in my room, or later, in the smoking 

room. I could see the sky and the trees from either at last, 

through glass! 

Totally different from Shannon House! There were even 

pot plants everywhere! The ward was smaller than Stort Ward, 

but with fewer patients. The majority were women, and there 

was a clear resentment that they had to sleep in small 

communal bays, unlike the men, who all had large single 

rooms! Finally, the smoking room was enormous, had a far 

quieter fan than that on Stort Ward, and finally was directly 

over the Entrance to the Derwent Centre. So there was a 

lovely view of trees and sky – and, initially at least, some 

sunshine… 

Over the weekend, I thoroughly enjoyed my status as a 

‘voluntary patient’ – taking numerous walks around the 

grounds in the Autumn air, occasionally able to afford a coffee 

at the restaurant, or further afield to the town. I’ve already 

said that I had asked my publisher to email Helen, which he 

had done. He had since asked me to not use their private 

number, which I had been given by his colleague by mistake – 

and gave me his home office number. So over the weekend, 

189

when obviously he was off work, I waited anxiously, hoping I 

would catch him in to email the patients’ phone number to her. 

Monday came, and it all happened ‘like clockwork’! He 

was in, and incredibly, she happened to pick up the email from 

him on their computer in Luxembourg within the same hour! 

She immediately rang from her parents’ home, and I talked to 

her for five minutes, far quicker than I was expecting – till she 

had to catch a bus! That was our first contact in two weeks, 

and I was very pleased to chat, even if only briefly. 

For, by contrast, the only person I had met on the Ward 

till then that I already knew, was the sultry, tending to violent, 

Brian, also from Ware, who had been in various hospitals for all 

of eighteen months! Also he had received no benefit - of just 

£15 a week - in the last eight weeks! Furthermore, he was in 

one of his ‘bipolar moods’. That weekend, while a 32-year old 

woman was simply sitting in the smoking-room, chatting on 

her mobile phone – he stood up for no good reason, and 

punched her in the mouth! The police interviewed him after 

she had discharged herself, in hysterics, and I had made a brief 

statement, along with the other chap there. No action was 

taken, apart from them cautioning him. 

Finally, on the afternoon of Tuesday 10 th September, 

came the Ward Round, where I finally met the new locum 

Doctor for Ware, a Greek, Dr Kristos, with long died-blonde 

hair – and immediately obviously, also a very relaxed manner! 

I had been correct, on Stort Ward in July, for he had now 

replaced Dr Algebury. Yet another new - only locum – Doctor 

for me to get to know! 

Immediately I asked to discuss my depots of haloperidol 

tranquilliser. For although they had been stopped two years 

earlier, after I had developed hot, painful lumps or ‘lesions’ at 

the injection site, there had been a retrograde step on Shannon 

House. Under some pressure I had actually volunteered to 

have two such depots once more after all of eighteen months 

on tablets. I had had sufficient insight to realise that I would 

get better faster if I agreed to them – which I only did on a 

totally temporary ‘emergency’ basis - as far as I was 

concerned. 

Also, one night after I refused my tablet of haloperidol, I 

was forcibly given two more depots – one of the liquid 

190

equivalent of that tablet, one of another tranquilliser – for 

causing a huge fuss in the yard about taking the medicine 

orally! 

So I was delighted when Dr Kristos immediately stopped 

all further depots. Then, to my further delight, when I asked 

for some leave to go home, he said I could go on the Thursday 

morning and return before teatime. If that went well, I could 

go home again on Saturday, and once more if that was OK, 

again on Sunday, up till about 8pm. I spent the Wednesday 

making elaborate notes for an email I intended to send Helen 

when I got home, which as we see next, got considerably 

edited down. Also my publisher Dick told me when I rang, that 

his printer was broken. So the copies of my ‘Quarks’ Paper I 

had asked him to do would, in the end, would have to be done 

by myself – even though I knew I had no money to buy the 

£30 colour ink cartridge I needed for my printer! 

I got the bus home at about 10am on Thursday 12 th and 

immediately felt very ‘shaky’ at being home for the first time in 

three months, all alone. I felt very exposed, suddenly thrust 

into the ‘wide world’ after so long. Also with very little money, 

as even the £2 return bus fare was a lot, out of just £49 a 

week hospital benefit! The email I sent Helen, therefore, was 

far shorter than, and much differently worded to, my notes! 

The next day I managed to send a postal order to the 

postal developing company that I had sent two films taken by a 

Nurse on Shannon House, of me in and around the hospital – 

and Harlow. These were addressed to Helen, but as I 

explained earlier, due to problems with the bank, the cheque 

had weeks earlier been reported as ‘stolen’! She duly told me 

weeks later in an email that ‘the photos are lovely! But do not 

dwell on that place!’ I was also taken out to lunch that day by 

Paul, the project manager of my local ‘Rethink’ drop-in club. 

Finally, that day I suddenly thought of a possible answer 

to the problem above of not being able to afford even a £30 ink 

cartridge. Meanwhile, I had even bigger financial problems. 

Long before, on Shannon House, I had persuaded myself – 

without any way of realising that some of them I owed money 

on – to cancel all my utility direct debits. Since then, I had got 

my bankcard back as well as my chequebook, so had 

reinstated these direct debits. I was immediately sent several 

191

ills from utilities to pay arrears before they would restart 

direct debit payments. The biggest was the telephone arrears, 

from using the phone a lot in hospital, over £77. Then there 

were at least two others around £40. 

So I suddenly thought to ring Caroline at the IEE 

Benevolent Fund, which normally paid me a yearly £250 grant 

for phone and television bill costs around that time of year. 

She was not there on the Friday, but readily agreed to pay it 

early, even to have the money in my account on the 

Wednesday, when I called on the Monday. Yet again, for the 

third time that year after my computer and carpet, substantial 

financial help from the IEE was to prove essential! 

I was on leave for both the Saturday and Sunday prior to 

that, and got my first reply to an email of mine, from Helen. 

Dick had commented on emails from her to him, which he only 

much later sent me copies of, that they were badly spelled and 

had poor grammar. Yet her writing in my address book earlier, 

as in a handful of letters from her that I only got later in the 

year, was very neat and grammatically correct – as well as 

spelt correctly. So I emailed her back ‘does your computer 

have problems?’ - and commented on the level of English in 

her email. The answer was to come back, ‘there is a problem – 

with me and computers! Yet yes, I do have some problems 

with email on this machine!’ 

Monday was spent quietly on the Ward. So into the 

second Ward Round of my time there, with three pieces of 

good news, the first two of which turned out to be premature. 

Having been told by Shannon House nearly two weeks earlier, 

that I would only be on Lea Ward ‘2-3 weeks’ I was now told 

the same – from today, it would be ‘2-3 weeks’. As we see 

next, it was actually to become a whole six weeks more – 

nearly eight whole weeks on Lea Ward, which as we see next, 

could have been a lot less. Secondly the haloperidol would 

soon be dropped altogether, for now to just the one tablet – 

with one of orphenadrine for side effects. Yet I am still taking 

them today! Finally, however, I was to be allowed home the 

next day, then the day AND night of Thursday. On Friday I 

was to see Dr Kristos’ Senior House Officer, or SHO, to review 

my haloperidol dose being lower. Finally, all going well at that 

stage, I could go home from Friday night to Monday – although 

192

in the end I thought ‘why so?’ – and came back on the Tuesday 

morning. So at last, overnight home leave started, as we see 

next, leading to near-total isolation at home. Luckily I still had 

email contact with Helen… 

Steady progress – well, almost! – during the next six weeks, 

often at home for days 

In this piece, I am simply going to confine myself to ‘leave 

and medical matters’, mostly briefly summarising my diary, 

which is very easy, as it is virtually empty. Then in the final 

two pieces of this section, describing a very lonely six weeks, 

I’ll fill in just the briefest summary of the terrible problems I 

had with money, especially while on leave from hospital, 

actually getting extra money due for that, from the benefits 

agency at Hertford. Then at the end, the parallel ‘chief good 

aspect’ – how my emails with Helen, and a handful of phone 

calls – helped ‘keep my pecker up’. So here is a brief history of 

my last six weeks in hospital: - 

Wednesday 18 th September. First overnight leave! Last 

hectic day of 2002! So, as arranged, I got home about 

10.30am, having checked at the ATM in Ware. Yes, the IEE 

had paid me the promised £250! I immediately got all my 

bills amounting to £150, and went to the post office and the 

right banks to pay them – in cash, to avoid any charges – 

and above all to avoid my phone and electricity being cut off 

that same week! That left enough to at last easily afford to 

buy an ink cartridge, a ream of paper, four A4 envelopes, 

and some card, acetate and clip binders. Enough to spend 

the rest of the day printing off some copies of what had now 

at last become a finalised version of my ‘Quarks’ Paper. I 

posted two copies to Helen, and one to Cambridge University 

– in vain, they later turned it down as part of a PhD 

application, out of hand. 

Thursday 19 th and Friday 20 th -Tuesday 24 th September. 

From now on, for the last six weeks of my time there, indeed 

for the whole rest of the year, my diary is largely empty – 

reflecting an often lonely, frustrated existence. All I 

remember doing is relaxing at home, cooking, smoking, 

drinking, listening to the radio, etc., apart from as arranged 

returning to the Ward briefly on Friday. 

193

Tuesday 24 th – Friday 4 th September. A major diversion in 

medication starts. At the ward round on the 24 th , I made 

what turned out to be a mistake, by thinking that Dr Kristos 

had intended the previous week to drop my haloperidol in 

weeks – rather than months. So when I asked firmly to stop 

it, he agreed only on condition I replaced it with either 

sulpuride, rispiridone or olanzapine. Faced with this choice 

of one of three evils, I chose to be changed to olanzapine. I 

then spent the next week and a half with no more leave, ‘to 

be observed’ on this drug, on the Ward. I remember this 

was very frustrating. 

The day after this ward round, I was taken to nearby 

Hoddesdon by John, my CPN. Staff on Shannon House had 

noticed a small piece of varicose vein had ‘erupted’ at the 

rear of my right knee, following the operation I had on my 

veins back in 1997 at nearby Sawbridgeworth, and had 

made an outpatient appointment with a Consultant. He said 

my veins are ‘recurrent’ and needed a full scan – for which 

there was a queue of over a year! He later sent me back to 

Harlow Hospital Outpatients after my discharge – but I soon 

found the pair of surgical stockings I was given were a real 

fiddle to take on and off – and discarded them very quickly, 

as they made me look ‘like a granddad, not 45!’ 

Friday 4 th – Tuesday 8 th October. At last, more home leave. 

Much as usual, with some visits by Assertive Outreach the 

previous week in hospital, now followed on the Monday by 

one from John and Linda, the assistant social worker. Then 

on the Monday night at the Ward, 7 th October, I found 

myself incredibly restless and bored, and the Staff kept 

asking why I kept pacing up and down. “I’m totally bored!” 

I replied. Finally, just before midnight, I had had more than 

I could take, chose my moment, left the Ward before the 

staff could tell who had ‘escaped’ – and went to the bus stop 

to catch the last bus home. A nurse drove there and tried to 

talk me into returning to the Ward. I explained I was 

perfectly all right, the bus arrived and he eventually 

reluctantly let me get on, with the words, ‘you have not seen 

me’! A highly unusual ‘runner’ – by a well-behaved 

voluntary patient – naturally caused lots of comment after I 

duly returned at midday on the Tuesday. Yet again, Dr Ude, 

194

the Nigerian SHO, in particular, was muttering much more 

darkly than ever about the terrorising possibility of another 

Section. I left the Ward Round having been offered leave at 

home in the day, but not at night, for the next two days. 

Then I was called back in and asked to stay in the Hospital 

‘for more observation’, till the Friday, when Dr Ude would 

review my going home from Saturday 12 th – Monday 14 th 

October – overnight. 

Wednesday 9 th October – Tuesday 15 th October. After three 

boring days around the Hospital, I had reached the 

conclusion that I ought to be put back on the ever-reliable 

haloperidol, not the more modern olanzapine. For a start, 

just like in 1997 when I was put on olanzapine by Dr Harlot, 

it clearly was not working as well as haloperidol. The final 

factors were two strong side-effects – an ongoing, very 

peculiar physical feeling of ‘being made of plasticine’ – with 

increasingly dry, peeling, very red skin, very noticeable 

especially on my arms. So on Friday 11 th October I had a 

lengthy discussion with Dr Ude, finally ending up with the 

olanzapine being dropped in favour of 10mg of haloperidol in 

the morning, with 50mg orphenadrine for side-effects. To 

my great surprise, he let me home till the Monday, on 

overnight leave, despite this change – which my diary 

records, caused me to only get about 3-4 hours sleep a night 

while at home! 

Tuesday 15 th October – Tuesday 29 th October. Dr Ude took 

the ward round, listened, and promptly lowered the dose of 

haloperidol to half – 5mg at tea-time, taken with 

orphenadrine – where it still remains today, 9 th January 

2003. Meanwhile an acquaintance, Theresa from Ware, who 

I had known vaguely for five years since Hopkins Ward in 

1997, had been admitted on a Section 3, and was upsetting 

the whole Ward. Not only were the staff having to force her 

to take her medication. She was also increasingly violent, 

due to being ill. Now she suddenly announced she was ‘in 

love with me’! In a very strange way, which I would 

normally call ‘lust’ instead – mostly enquiring about the size 

of my private parts! Anyway, she lent me all of £50 on 

Monday 21 st October, which was very generous and very 

vital. In the meantime, after a day at home on the 

195

Wednesday – i.e. Hertford Benefit Office, for the umpteenth 

time in the six weeks I had leave – I was allowed to have a 

day overnight on the Thursday, before collecting enough 

medication to last till the Ward Round on the Tuesday. I 

then had three huge, intensely frustrating periods of ‘waiting 

around’. Five hours at the Benefit Office on the Wednesday, 

were followed by waiting from 3-6pm for medication 

(“TTA’s”) on Thursday, and finally on Friday I waited three 

hours for Dr Ude to bother to turn up as arranged! Finally, 

that afternoon, after just five minutes, I was to be on leave 

from then until the brief review at the Ward Round the 

following Tuesday 22 nd October, where I was sent home 

again fully expecting to be discharged at a ‘CPA Meeting’ on 

Tuesday 29 th October 2002. Auspiciously, this was Dad’s 

70 th birthday, so when I went to their house in Hatfield, I 

was surprised to find a party for their friends going on. This 

was followed by a second party for the neighbours the 

following week – they had too many ‘friends and neighbours’ 

to accommodate at once, in one party. The rest of that 10 

days of leave, apart from yet another necessary but very 

bureaucratic visit to Hertford Benefit Office, was uneventful. 

I was duly discharged on Tuesday 29 th October 2002! 

The big headache of the above period of increasing home 

leaves. Money or the lack of it, compounded by dreadful stress 

with actually getting the benefit - in cash! - to fund each such 

period of leave. Meanwhile, an ongoing hideous series of everchanging 

bills for Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit 

keeps mounting! 

I had been claiming my current set of benefits since 

January 1998, so knew from two previous long hospitalisations 

since, in 1999 and 2000, that I was due considerably increased 

benefit for days on leave. An ‘uplift’ of incapacity benefit to the 

normal amount, i.e. an extra £5 or so a day; plus I soon found 

out I was entitled to a further £10 a day or so in income 

support. So in principle, for days on leave I should get an 

extra £15 a day over my hospital rate of £7.10 a day, i.e. 

£22.10 a day. Almost like being an outpatient! 

However, two problems soon emerged with this. The first, 

main one nearly ended up driving me back into hospital, I got 

196

so frustrated in the increasing leave periods I took between 

Thursday 19 th September and Tuesday 29 th October. It had 

two facets. Firstly, all leave had to be taken before one 

produced a letter from the Ward, in order to claim the £15 a 

day I mentioned for that leave. 

Being ‘back in society’ was costly – yet I was only being 

paid in arrears. Had I just put my letters from the Ward in the 

post, I might have waited ages for a ‘giro’ in the post, to my 

home address, whereas I was usually by then back at the 

hospital. This process was far too uncertain for me, so I ended 

up spending several hours at a time, in total all of six times 

according to my diary, waiting for a ‘counter giro’ to be paid 

immediately, usually after lengthy and heated discussion at the 

incredibly grim Hertford Benefit Agency. 

Secondly, even then, all but one ever payment of 

incapacity benefit only arrived about two weeks after such a 

visit – as that was paid from Stevenage not Hertford Benefit 

Office. The former said their rule was, ‘you are paid fortnightly 

your basic amount of incapacity benefit – into your bank 

account. So you’ll have to wait five days after some days of 

processing, for your payment for leave you have just reported, 

to actually see the cash in your bank account!’ 

Meanwhile, I had had a steady trickle of increasingly 

worrying statements saying I had to pay about £20 a week of 

my rent, plus £10 a week or so Council Tax, immediately after 

income support stopped four weeks into hospital. As soon as I 

started taking leave at home, this grew to a torrent from the 

housing benefit computer, after income support restarted. For 

six whole months I increasingly asked the Aggressive Out-retch 

Social Services Team to stop this flood. Mildred De Vil had 

actually insisted that I sign a letter of authority for her to deal 

with my housing and council tax benefits, back in July. Yet she 

then seemed to do hardly anything about them! 

Finally, what they did to ‘exempt’ me from just the 

Council Tax only, was crassly unnecessary, completely thickskinned, 

and totally incompetent, and finally incredibly 

offensive to me, as we see under ‘Winter’ overleaf! 

I had no friends – certainly nobody intelligent – apart from 

brief contact in this time with Jenny. However, having fought 

197

to keep it going after she left and was discharged, I am very 

grateful to have an ‘email and some phone’ friend – Helen! 

The main characteristics of my home leave were boredom, 

frustration at what seemed like an endless six weeks before I 

was discharged – and above all, needing to sleep a great deal, 

after the over four months of unexpected ordeal I had just 

been through. Unbelievably, my parents, who like to think of 

and even boast about themselves as ‘the best carers in the 

world’, never visited me once at home on these extensive 

leaves – even for a cup of tea! 

Jenny visited me just twice, as far as I recall, to relieve 

the loneliness - the first time on Lea Ward, where she was 

brought by my Mother. Then on Friday 4 th October, at home, 

my sister brought her, at a time when the Benefit Agency had 

as ever let me down – and I was desperately short of cash, and 

openly said so! 

That very same morning, Helen had rung, to wake me up 

from having nightmares about the Benefit Agency! So she had 

to calm me down, and as ever was superb at that! So below I 

outline our emails of that time, for that was only the second 

time she had called me on the phone (and has never done so 

since!) 

Early on, Helen said she was ‘in two minds’ whether she 

wanted to continue this contact with such an obvious 

reminder of Shannon House as myself. She and her parents 

all wanted her to forget all about the wholly nasty 

experience… 

Helen had been debating on that ward, whether to take a 

year off before re-sitting her exams in biochemistry at 

University in 2003, or to resume doing Fine Arts instead in 

October 2002, which because her college had links there, 

might even be in Hatfield at the UH! She soon decided to do 

the former, and turns out to have a backup option, in case 

she fails again, having since secured a place to study Law at 

Sheffield. 

In the meantime, after four months away from ‘that place’ 

she had a job interview to be a low-paid receptionist, i.e. 

unstressful work, with lots of time to revise for her re-take 

exams in June 2003. Very fortunately, as we see soon, 

when I phoned just before discharge, not only did she say 

198

she was starting the job around 5 th November – but gave 

enough description of the place of work for me to call 

Directory Enquiries soon in November – and talk to her 

within five minutes! 

She said she remembered nothing of our ‘romance’ of 

August – she had been on LSD. Once she said she was 

desperate to take ‘speed’ like earlier that year! So I 

reminded her of various incidents of ‘touching up of her’ by 

other patients, as well as her sexual ‘offers’ to me in her first 

week. This seemed to help her ‘stop thinking wistfully – and 

dangerously – about drugs’! 

Helen was resting for several months while pursuing her 

rather ‘action woman’ interests of mountaineering and 

(white belt then) karate. She was very worried about having 

started to put on weight - which I pointed out was probably 

due to medication. 

199

WINTER. 30 th October 2002 – 31 st January 2003. 

Friday 31 st January 2003. Yesterday, Thursday 30 th January, 

turns out to have been a momentous ‘watershed day’ in so 

many ways that this account is now having to be extended 

from December 2002 into all of January 2003! 

My diary for November and December 2002 is 

reassuringly nearly empty, so we will be able, as originally 

planned when I started this account a month ago, to deal with 

events then very quickly below. However, even though it is 

blank from today into the foreseeable future, the last four 

weeks show increasingly dense entries. Suddenly yesterday, 

everything came to a head! Today there is no more pressure, 

so at long last I am finishing chapter one, hopefully by tonight! 

As the coincidence of all sorts of pressures all lifting in one day 

yesterday, is so compelling, we start there with a full account 

of most of them, leaving some, such as the overriding abuse by 

the Aggressive Out-retch Team, to Chapter Two... 

1. Six whole months of doubt and worry about Housing Benefit 

and Council Tax Benefit should now be over – no thanks, 

quite the opposite, to the A/O Team! The entire Aggressive 

Out-retch Team lied for months that all the relief from 

benefit deductions I could be saved, was by them going 

behind my back and getting just my own GP, Dr S Gibbon, to 

give me the abysmal label ‘Severely Mentally Impaired’! We 

come to the full story later of how they refused to help me 

with the much more important housing benefit, and tried to 

justify branding ME ‘mentally handicapped’ (a Cambridge 

Scholar and Graduate, a Chartered Engineer able to witness 

passport applications!) I finally got fed up with all this shit 

and foul abuse in the name of ‘care’ on Monday 6 th January. 

The Money and Benefits adviser from the Citizens Advice 

Bureau was at the local Rethink drop-in that afternoon, and 

after just five minutes with her and the ‘rule book’, I had 

confirmed what I had remembered from previous admissions 

in 1999 and 2000. The rules had not changed – all the 

Aggressive Out-retch Team had needed to do was ask me to 

backdate my claim for these two benefits – with the right 

really trivial form, which I got from the Rent Office just a 

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minute from my flat – and hand it back in. The Aggressive 

Out-retch Team had completely neglected their duty of care 

and trust by failing to tell me for all of six months that I had 

been entitled to full benefits for my flat for up to twelve 

months in hospital, when I’d been in for just five months! 

Not only that, they had all conspired to lie that branding ME 

‘severely mentally impaired’ i.e. ‘mentally handicapped’ was 

all that they could do! I received a letter from the Council 

on Monday reassuring me all my benefits since last April to 

November 2003 were guaranteed, apart from just one week 

last October. On Wednesday I duly posted the proof of my 

income that week, which will definitely guarantee me full 

benefits for that week too. My problems with rent and 

council tax all over! That vital letter went first class so will 

have arrived yesterday, the vital day of Thursday 30 th 

January 2003! 

2. Two weeks 29 th December – 10 th January 2003 with the 

problems of my Personal Computer overheating, mentioned 

throughout this chapter, are followed by three more weeks 

of it totally out of action! After not just one but two trips 

back to Watford for repair by the supplier under warranty, it 

finally returned, fully working, at 10.30am yesterday – 

again, Thursday 30 th January! After waiting patiently during 

the problems I have kept mentioning before with my 

computer, RL Supplies were supposed to be finally back after 

New Year on Wednesday 8 th January. However, despite 

endless phone calls to either their technical support line or 

sales line, I simply could not get through to them for a 

massive, exasperating two days! At first I was suffering 

nightmares they had closed down. Finally I got through late 

on Friday 10 th January, and they offered to send a fan and 

heat sink for the computer, as I lived so far away. That 

evening the computer printer stopped working, and the disk 

started developing severe ‘write errors’ – the computer had 

broken completely. So on Monday 13 th I rang them, got a 

‘returns number’ and my Father came over, picked me, the 

printer and computer up from my flat, and drove the 30 

miles to Watford. There was all of a half hour queue just to 

be seen to hand it over! On Wednesday 15 th I got a phone 

call from RL Supplies saying they had changed the disk – so 

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it was all fixed. I queried why a new disk would fix a CPU 

problem, and the rather cocky technician said ‘Oh! Disk 

virtual Memory!’ I got the bus over to Hatfield in the cold 

and pouring rain, the following Monday 20 th , and my Father 

repeated the journey to collect my PC and printer. ‘Just’ a 

60 mile round trip this time, not the original 90, as I had 

come by bus. That night I had nearly finished reloading 

most of the software – an arduous task. So far so good. 

Then the following morning, Tuesday – disk write errors 

again! I rang RL in exasperation and spoke to the same 

cocky – yet clearly incompetent – technician. “You have 

changed the disk but there are still disk problems! The 

motherboard must be faulty too!” He agreed, and 

reluctantly offered to pay the freight to ship the PC to and 

from their factory unit. It finally left here on Thursday last 

week, was duly fixed – at least it seems to work so far! – 

and as I said returned yesterday morning at 10.30am. 

3. On Tuesday 14 th January 2003, Mildred De Vil, ASW with the 

Aggressive Out-retch Team, lies to and about me 

pathologically for a quarter of an hour of hell, as described 

overleaf under ‘crimes against my Soul by the Aggressive 

Out-retch Team’. After the ‘SMI’ branding of me in (1) 

above, this is adding insult to injury – yet my parents 

refused to believe any of those ‘crimes against the Soul’! I 

become increasingly furious with the Aggressive Outreach 

Team, refused to have any more to do with them, demanded 

I should return to the Cygnet House team, just 200 yards 

away, and also with my parents as their gullible cronies who 

are taken in by all their lies. In the night of Saturday I 

composed a huge letter to my parents, hand-written with no 

PC, condemning the way they have kept destroying my life – 

by bullying me to follow ‘brilliant’, yet in reality utterly 

disastrously crass - plans for my future. My father took 

about ten such crass technical decisions immediately I joined 

his computer company in 1980, that condemned me to a 

miserable, low-paid, battle to create huge software systems 

with unbelievably expensive yet hideously obsolete 8-bit 

computer equipment from an unknown American supplier. 

The bizarre thing is that these ‘brilliant decisions’ that were 

202

so crass were utterly devious – yet he keeps on insisting 

totally falsely that it is ME not him who is devious! For he 

took them all with no consultation at all, totally arrogantly, 

without consulting not only myself as his own son, but an 

entire department of four microcomputer experts, relatively 

speaking, from the partner company that was funding the 

project! When he later tried to impose his wonky logic of 

technical ‘decisions’ on them – they laughed in his face as if 

he was completely crazy! For he spent £30,000 to buy a 

crap development machine – with no disk! - far less powerful 

than a Sinclair ZX80 costing only £80 just two years later! I 

was condemned by him, ruining my career for good, for 

eight whole years, when for that vast amount of money, 

back in 1980 he could have bought a state-of-the-art 

minicomputer-emulator from the world’s leading instrument 

supplier, Hewlett-Packard. I spent 16 pages of my letter 

going through all this in detail. When I arrived unannounced 

– their phone had been engaged – by bus on Monday 20 th to 

go to collect my PC as above in (2) I saw the letter lying on 

a desk, looked away, and meanwhile he had sneaked round 

the corner and picked it up! Not only that, the 16 pages 

about how he destroyed my career and condemned me to 

slavery 1980-1988, recruiting my mother to help emotionally 

blackmail me not to leave his ‘company’, had conveniently 

vanished! That left just the first four pages, explaining in 

detail how his destroying my bank account had caused me 

massive mental torture. It only briefly mentioned that after 

he destroyed my career, I could not get work for a year in 

1992, and had no income at all, not even benefit. I had 

retrained myself on my PC at home while looking after 

toddler Jenny on the floor next to my desk – impossible! At 

that point I had no psychiatrist, yet was fully well and 

compliant with my medication. My Nursing Manager Mother 

took full advantage of my plight – and got me in with great 

difficulty to see a ‘brilliant’ Psychiatrist in the ‘wrong’ Trust – 

despite my protests that I needed NO Psychiatrist at all - 

now free of the creatures. I was promptly made ill for two 

years continually due to his treatment, have been abused by 

other rubbish Doctors most of the years since, and spent 

three whole years of the last nine years, in six admissions 

203

each lasting months, to horrendous mental wards. 

Culminating in now having to sack the Aggressive Out-retch 

Team, who I now immediately decided in fury to take advice 

about, with a view to possible legal action – possibly even 

criminal charges? My parents, certainly not my clearly 

furtive, embarrassed Father, have not even mentioned my 

20-page letter, let alone started to apologise or even 

consider doing so! So the Sunday 19 th January, after writing 

and posting the letter to my parents, I spent over a whole 

hour and a half discussing that letter and my grievances 

about the Aggressive Outreach Team. In strict confidence, 

to a very good listener who really did seem to understand 

my rage – Paul McManus-Wood, the project manager of the 

local Rethink drop-in club. Concerning my parents’ 

determination to continually wreck my life, especially 

exploiting my weakness of ‘mental illness’, he said, “You 

have two choices. Either lots of family counselling – I have 

done a lot of it. Or else you simply disown them!” That had 

been Diamond’s solution with her parents, so it may yet 

happen to mine! Concerning the Aggressive Out-retch 

Team, he agreed I urgently needed legal advice – not on the 

telephone, but face to face with a solicitor. So started over 

ten whole days of a search for such a solicitor – and my 

mounting astonishment, worry and ultimately rage, that for 

a long time, such a person did not seem to exist! I rang 

several legal advice lines – Manic Depression Fellowship, the 

Law Society, and – with great difficulty getting through – the 

Rethink mental health charity that Paul represents. No luck. 

A week went by. I went to the police station, to be 

summarily dismissed by a very cynical, even mocking ‘PC 

Jefferies’! To my astonishment, my usual solicitors, 

Bretherton of St. Albans, refused point-blank to get involved 

in any litigation against the Out-retch Team. Finally, the 

advocacy agency Pohwer in Stevenage rang on that Tuesday 

28 th , to tell me I was now a priority case because I had to go 

to a CPA meeting at Cygnet house on Wednesday 29 th 

January, two days ago. I asked if they could tell me of 

solicitors dealing with BOTH mental health and human rights 

– I had got nowhere with that specification with any of the 

above advice lines, or ringing local solicitors directly. They 

204

came back within half an hour with all of four! I rang one, 

got straight through to a foreign-sounding lady ‘Katrina’ who 

confirmed that while the Out-retch Team had not quite 

falsely imprisoned me on June 10 th , they had clearly abused 

their positions of care, trust and above all professionalism, in 

many of the things I told her about them. Then when I rang 

the second solicitor, Austin Allen in Luton, it took a long time 

to explain to Louise, the secretary of the solicitor, Lorraine 

Thompson, that I could not travel to see her without a car. 

Finally, Louise rang yesterday with absolutely wonderful 

news at the end of eleven days of heartache trying to find 

just one solicitor to talk to about my grievances. Mrs 

Thompson can travel to see me here or in Harlow, once they 

have confirmed she can access an office, and has a spare 

afternoon to travel here and back to Luton. Once more, end 

of suffering on Thursday 30 th January 2003! 

4. The Aggressive Out-retch team are completely off my back 

at long last, and my fears are allayed of possibly being ‘put 

away in hospital’ while completely well – possibly as a 

vicious reprisal for my sacking them. I have a useful 

meeting that re-establishes Julia Pehrson, who I mostly 

trust, as my Social Worker, at least ‘for the time being’. This 

all happens Thursday 30 th January 2003 – yet again! 

Certainly I would never dream of telling my parents that, 

against their advice, I am pursuing my litigation against 

three NHS Trusts and their Psychiatrists, for complete abuse 

of me 1993-2000. Certainly never, that now on top of that, 

I am meeting a solicitor, Lorraine Thompson, very soon, with 

a view to taking legal action against their precious cronies, 

the Aggressive Out-retch Team. Indeed, apart from Paul 

McManus-Wood at the drop-in, who was a great help in 

giving me the above final breakthrough with Austin Allen, I 

only mentioned such angry legal action to just two 

‘psychiatric’ friends I could trust. I just did not want the 

Out-retch Team to find out – and possibly try to ‘put me 

away’ out of spite all over again! Both John Murphy and 

Cuthbert Glyndebourne tried to telephone me over the last 

two weeks, but I simply said, “We are not on speaking 

terms! Goodbye!” and put down the telephone on them. So 

205

when my father listened to me about the ‘Severe Mental 

Impairment’ branding being a set-up, and then about 

Mildred De Vil's purely pathological lies on the 14 th January, I 

thought I was getting the message through. Then he utterly 

appalled me by saying that last Friday 24 th January he was 

going to see Cuthbert Glyndebourne at Bishop’s Stortford “to 

beat him up”. I rang that morning and said, “Why are you 

going all that way to see him? Why isn’t he coming cap in 

hand to see you? I FORBID YOU and Mum to go and listen 

to his breathtaking lies! He will wrap you round his little 

finger!” Yet when I telephoned my parents the following 

day, they HAD gone to see what their crony Cuthbert had to 

say. All my father would say about it was, in effect, “It was 

quite a long meeting. It was very useful. Words were said.” 

Typically secretive and holding all the cards to his chest, or 

so he thought! By last Monday 27 th January, the longplanned 

Care Programme Approach Meeting was imminent, 

being due for 2.30pm on Wednesday 29 th January, two days 

ago. I asked to speak to Dr Kristos, my new Consultant, 

about my urgent need to get shot of the dreadful Aggressive 

Out-retch Team. Instead his secretary made me an 

appointment to see him at 4pm that same day. I remember 

being very angry about all the above things. The appallingly 

crass, unprofessional behaviour of the whole Out-retch 

Team; my Computer being such a huge problem for the 

whole of the last five weeks; seemingly being unable to get 

to see a solicitor; and my parents ignoring everything I say, 

however rational and sensible! He replied ‘if you get any 

angrier than this you will totally lose control – and have to 

go into hospital!’ Naturally that remark really worried me. 

First I had been worried about the Out-retch Team once 

more putting me away – now the Consultant himself was 

saying it might be necessary! I now took a risk, and that 

night dropped him a line saying that as I had not secured a 

legal adviser, I would be skipping the CPA meeting that 

Wednesday. Wednesday came, and my parents duly 

arrived, and immediately revealed that they must have been 

totally brainwashed by Cuthbert Glyndebourne on the Friday 

– for they now seemed to want to convince me that being 

branded ‘Severely Mentally Impaired’ really was necessary 

206

and totally justifiable, a virtue even! I naturally exploded at 

them, and my mother typically irrationally said firstly, ‘you 

are being totally selfish!’ which still makes no sense to me at 

all! Then she added her usual crass remark whenever I get 

angry at their stupidity, especially believing a con man and 

fluent liar instead of their own son, “You are getting ill and 

will have to go to hospital!” I tried to reason with them, 

they stormed out and off to their precious meeting with their 

cronies, to talk about me behind my back. Meanwhile I went 

off to the drop-in club, saw my friend Chris was there, and 

asked him to come back with me, as I was very angry. He 

readily agreed, and at 3pm, half an hour after the time of 

the CPA meeting, we met my parents. They told me the 

Out-retch Team was no longer in charge of my life, and that 

I would soon hear from Julia Pehrson, who had been there, 

and was now my acting Social Worker. Julia indeed rang 

inside the hour – to ask me to pop down the road and see 

her at 2pm the next day, along with her Occupational 

Therapist colleague Jenny – the fateful Thursday. Thursday 

came, and so did my PC, so immediately I was busy 

installing it, reconnecting the printer, and putting on 

software I had failed to load onto it when broken. I was 

hugely relieved when the CD with all my own backup files 

copied on without any problems. I found the Microsoft site 

on the Internet so I could download the latest version of 

Internet Explorer 6 rather than the old version that came 

with my Windows 98 CD. The site claimed that it would take 

nearly three hours to download – but when I started 

downloading at 1.30pm, it now said it would finish at 

2.20pm or so – midway through my planned hour with Julia 

and Jenny. I could not afford to leave the phone running 

doing nothing, at peak time, for those 40 minutes to 3pm! I 

had started downloading, so could not telephone Julia to 

rearrange the planned meeting at my flat. So I trotted down 

the road, in snow flurries, in a freezing, blustery wind, and 

bumped into them, and explained. They put on coats and 

followed me to my flat, where I immediately made some tea. 

Then, for the first ten minutes, still very angry about all the 

adverse people and circumstances that had been bothering 

me recently, especially my very own parents, I paced quite a 

207

lot, finally sitting down for half an hour until they left at 

2.40pm. They already knew from Dr Kristos quite a lot of 

what was bothering me – and discussed ways I could get 

help – especially with handling my wayward parents. To 

stop any more career-bashing, followed immediately by ten 

years of increasingly hellish psychiatry I never really needed, 

and had actually escaped from, until their arrogant “I may 

be ‘just’ a Nurse – but I appoint psychiatrists!” As for the 

most recent piece of devilry, my father destroying my bank 

account, I pointed out that had been illegal, so I could not 

have stopped the sod! We all agreed I would see Julia 

again, at least for a while, and I agreed to getting help from 

Jenny in handling anger, and other emotions, and matters 

like using body language to conceal any excessive feelings! 

Just before they left Julia said she had seen Kristos after the 

CPA the day before. She had explained that on top of 

everything that I had already revealed to him was bothering 

me, if my Personal Computer had been out of action for over 

a month, it was no wonder I was upset! There was no way I 

was going back to hospital, as far as they were concerned – 

they understood where I was coming from. So, once more, 

a very positive renewal of a working relationship – once 

more, on Thursday 30 th January 2003! 

5. As it is so cold and windy, my father comes over and takes 

me to pick up Jenny from school for my first ‘Contact’ 

session in two weeks. She says she can only stay an hour – 

which becomes FOUR hours as soon as a blizzard produces 

just one inch of snow across Southern Britain that cripples 

transport! Jenny and I had arranged on the Wednesday 29 th 

that I would pick her up from school at 3.50pm the following 

very fateful day, take her to my flat for two hours as usual, 

then my ex-wife’s partner Rodney would pick her up. 

Thursday dawned very cold, with a blustery wind and some 

snow at lunchtime. Along with everything else we have seen 

was going on that Thursday, I phoned my parents to take up 

an offer of them coming over and giving me a lift to and 

from the school to pick Jenny up. I had got the computer all 

working apart from discovering I had lost all my email 

addresses and messages in the chaos of a new disk and 

208

motherboard being required. My father arrived at 3.30pm, 

we had a cup of tea, and picked Jenny up from Presdales 

school. Then she suddenly announced, once back at my flat 

with my father already gone, that she could only stay one 

hour not the usual two, and Rodney was collecting her at 

5pm not 6pm. Then the elements dramatically intervened. 

By 4.40pm there was a raging blizzard and complete ‘whiteout’ 

of snow outside, and my mother called to say Jenny’s 

mother and Rodney were stuck in the snow on the road out 

of Stevenage. Jenny immediately stopped her English 

homework (drawing and labelling the clothes of ‘the ghost of 

Christmas future’ from Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’) to gaze 

in awe at the huge amount of snow falling outside, that had 

caused this. My father had also phoned my mother to say 

he was stuck in heavy traffic and snow on the A414 

Hertford-Hatfield road. Clearly the mobile phone networks 

were also badly affected, for Jenny could not contact her 

mother or Rodney on either of their phones, despite trying 

several times. A friend in Dane End was waiting for his wife 

to return from picking up their son from school in Hertford, 

so could not help take Jenny to Dane End. We passed the 

next hour by popping out to the grocery store to buy some 

chocolate. Also, my computer ‘mouse’ worked much better 

once I cleaned it with a cleaning kit that I suddenly 

remembered I had, so we went to the local stationery shop 

and bought a soft mouse pad – only £1.16! After that Jenny 

drew me a snow scene with snowman, with the Windows 

‘Paint’ utility. Time went on. We started to wonder if she 

might have to stay the night, with me sleeping on the floor 

in my sleeping bag, and her in my bed. I kept reassuring 

her there would almost certainly be no school in the 

morning, Friday. About 7pm my mother rang again and said 

that Rodney had managed to phone to say they were on the 

hill from Watton-at-Stone, midway from Stevenage and 

about five miles away. Then, the usual total silence of the 

telephone, and only a huge series of weather and road 

bulletins on the radio, talking about nearly all the roads in 

Southern Britain being cut off by just one inch of snow! 

Finally at about 7.50pm Jenny and I were both getting quite 

hungry, so I started making bacon sandwiches. Suddenly, 

209

around 8pm, a horn went outside, and she looked out of the 

window to see that Helen and Rodney had finally made it – it 

had taken four whole hours just to get from Stevenage! She 

left her bacon sandwich, collected her coat and bag, and we 

went out to meet them – very frustrated… 

6. Two Magical, Mystical, Mysterious Anniversaries! Thursday 

30 th January 2003 just happened to be the exact 20 th 

Anniversary of my Spiritual Experience Five. Also, the exact 

25 th Anniversary of Spiritual Experience Two. I have now 

reached 2003 – my ‘Silver Jubilee Year of these Spiritual 

Experiences’…! Now I am going to make a seemingly 

monstrous claim. Tony Blair and his cronies do not control 

the weather and the elements in general – God does, of 

course. If they seriously believe they can go to war with a 

fierce nation like IRAQ this year, if they cannot avert total 

chaos over most of Britain after just ONE INCH OF SNOW, 

they really are MAD – far more than anybody can claim that 

I – or Helen! – ever have been! I say that just in case you 

start to think that anything I say next is ‘mad’! For when 

you read “Which Witch Doctor?” and my ‘PROESM’ paper, 

you will see that my Fifth Spiritual Experience on Sunday 

30 th January 1983 in my bed at home in Stevenage, had a 

huge number of meanings. Five, as recorded in my earlier 

volume of this autobiography “Which Witch Doctor?” – but 

there are now all of the EIGHT meanings predicted by the 

first image! My lovely young friend Helen was born on 9 th 

November 1983 – the same night as ‘more than a Spiritual 

Experience – a Magical, Mysterious, Mystical, Meeting and 

Meander with the Morning Star’! Spiritual Experience Five 

on 30 th January 1983 was therefore exactly 284 days earlier 

than her night of birth. This happens to be the exact clinical 

theoretical time of a human pregnancy – so she was 

conceived that night. My Experience shared with hundreds 

of others of seeing five yellowish lights in the night sky in 

majestic line astern procession over Cambridge town centre, 

going North – did indeed happen on 30 th January 1978. i.e. 

exactly five years before Helen’s conception – with the five 

bright lights each symbolising ‘one year to go to a 

momentous event, highly important to God Himself’. For, 

210

whereas you may dismiss Spiritual Experience Five as pure 

‘madness’, I had been greatly encouraged to share my 

Spiritual Experience Two with over 600 other passers-by in 

King’s Parade in Cambridge town centre, just outside my 

college, King’s, that night. Helen’s clinical conception date, 

therefore, coincided precisely with me seeing Spiritual 

Experience Five. This is Spiritual Experience Five’s allimportant 

sixth ‘Outcome’! 

7. Finally – seal it with a kiss? Not only was Thursday 30 th 

January 2003 the 25 th Anniversary of Spiritual Experience 

Two; and 20 th Anniversary of Spiritual Experience Five – 

both portending the very conception of Helen – so clearly 

very important to GOD! It was also a Half Anniversary. Six 

months exactly after Tuesday 30 th July 2002 – which was the 

very day that Helen started our brief affair – with her first 

kiss! 

We leave those seven compelling coincidental events, on 

Thursday 30 th January 2003, with these ‘mystical’ comments. 

My original plan for this part of this discussion of ‘Winter 2002- 

2003’, three weeks ago, before my computer became 

inoperable, was just to discuss my ‘nearly empty diary’ for 

November and December 2002 – in just a few lines. Instead, I 

have just found myself now also describing January 2003 – 

especially apparent massive Divine Intervention on 30 th 

January - yesterday – taking all of eight pages! 

211

Lingering problems – and battles – over Benefits that still linger 

in February 2003! 

Now back to far more mundane matters that happened 

between November 2002 and January 2003 – concerning 

money. Firstly, we just saw that as of ‘special yesterday’, my 

Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit are at very long last 

back in order, only due to my exasperated overriding of the 

sabotage and apparent viciously spiteful smearing of me rather 

than helping me, by the Aggressive Out-retch Team. The letter 

from the Council saying bleakly and dismissively, ‘the person at 

the above address (not even my own name – just a ‘number’!) 

is Mentally Impaired and so exempt from Council Tax’ had 

arrived in December. 

We see overleaf how the person who applied for this black 

travesty, John Murphy, my CPN from the Aggressive Out-retch 

Team, told about three major untruths to me on the telephone. 

For I rang him up, furious about it, as soon as I had found out 

from East Hertfordshire Council that he had signed the form. 

His lies all came out when I wrote to them, denied the hideous 

‘label’ he and my GP had oh so casually tried to stick on me 

(that is all it takes – not even a Psychiatrist!) and demanded 

they send me the original application form for this. 

Meanwhile, in early November 2002, immediately after my 

discharge from hospital, it took quite a while to get established 

on my benefits as before admission. Namely, with them all 

paid on a Monday, on a weekly basis. For three weeks I was 

getting some money in my bank account, some in girocheques. 

Then on 11 th November, some £44 of income support 

never arrived as promised in my bank account – it turned up a 

day late, the next day. As a result, the bank returned my 

Littlewoods direct debit, due that day, and they wrote in due 

course to say they were going to charge me a vast £30 over a 

direct debit of £12. Then Littlewoods’ statement showed they 

had added a £10 administration charge of their own to this. I 

gathered the evidence and complained to the Benefit Agency in 

writing with it. I have finally received two letters this week 

apologising and saying they are refunding the £40 – with no 

indication of when, so I had to ring to hear them claim that it 

will be ‘next week’. Three whole months after the event! 

212

So I was appalled when four weeks after the above 

incident, on 9 th December, even though I was supposed to be 

paid a whole week’s money that day in benefit, it was never 

paid. I rang them up, and the man on the phone peered into 

their mysterious computer screens and told me ‘either the 

“computer has slipped to paying fortnightly because you get 

incapacity benefit, which is paid fortnightly” (very dubious) or 

somebody has simply gone in and changed you to fortnightly 

payments”. I had to go over to Hertford for the umpteenth 

time that autumn and winter to collect the giro-cheque for the 

week’s money. 

Worse – it had happened again! This time both my 

Littlewoods direct debit and my TV one had failed to clear, 

costing me £60 in bank charges, and this time Littlewoods 

wanted all of £20.35 in administration charges. I wait with 

some trepidation and total cynical disbelief for my papers to be 

processed at first Stevenage, then for some reason going to 

Cardiff for the ‘special payment’ giro-cheque to be issued by 

the Benefits Agency. For the total owed to me of £120.35 for 

these two incidents – nearly one week’s Benefit! – months after 

the events! 

The much-interrupted Litigation Process resumes. On 17 th 

December 2002 my parents and I caught the train to Harley 

Street, London, ‘centre of medical excellence nationwide’, to 

see the Consultant Psychiatrist deciding if I have a case! 

My litigation solicitor had finished collecting and often 

fiercely extracting my medical notes back in the Summer, from 

Harlow and Welwyn Garden City hospitals, as well as Cygnet 

and Oxford Houses. I was now due to be seen by the single 

‘legally expert’ Consultant Psychiatrist deciding if I ‘had a case’. 

As so often, massive decisions about me were being made by 

just one such person in isolation! However, due to my 

admission on June 10 th , the meeting was deferred till after my 

discharge, and rearranged for 17 th December. When it finally 

came, such a long time after discharge, I was to find it very 

baffling and disappointing. 

The Consultant saw me first by myself for an hour and a 

quarter. He had a desk with a pen and pad with five skimpy 

lines of terse notes about dates, and an unopened file 

213

apparently containing some of the voluminous notes on the 

case. Yet, to my astonishment, he had clearly done no 

homework or prior preparatory reading of these! For all that 

time he just got me to give a verbal account of my version of 

the case I had, not even having read the detailed statement I 

had made! 

We should have been discussing ‘fine points’ not basics, 

and were still on the latter for the remaining ¾ hour with my 

parents there! So, when he kept on muttering, ‘but just what 

is the case here? Where is the damage?’ I was flabbergasted! 

He is supposed to be producing an ‘expert report’ for us, but 

six weeks on, there is no sign of it. I very much doubt he will 

support Court Action… 

214

I have deliberately kept the final two ‘pieces’ below to the very 

end of this Chapter One, to give me some light relief before yet 

more agony, writing Chapter Two! 

Contact ‘across the water’ with Helen after my discharge until 

February 2003. 

Helen and I maintained regular contact by email, at least 

until December. However, I found that, with having lots of 

time on my hands, I was writing about five, often long, 

emails, to get one, very brief, misspelled reply on average! 

I got no reply to all of nine in December, only a very belated 

New Year Greeting on 8 th January, so have given up since 

altogether, on emails. 

Initially several of her emails literally pined to get hold of 

‘drugs’ – one saying she felt ‘light-headed’ and ‘needed 

some coffee – and some speed’. She never responded to 

several fiercely worded emails warning about the dangers of 

drugs. Finally when in a phone call I said, “You don’t need 

drugs to get high. You have got hypomania like me now!” 

she scoffed! 

She finally started work as a receptionist on 5 th November 

2002, so her emails soon nearly stopped altogether. 

I sent her a ‘moon and stars’ watch for her birthday, and an 

entire copy of all my CD’s, that she had said she would love 

while in hospital, as both ‘birthday and early Christmas 

presents’. I got thanked in a brief email for those, at least, 

and indeed she said the thought of all the work I had put 

into the CD’s nearly made her cry! 

Just before her birthday I substantially revised and extended 

my PROESM paper, somehow managing to finish the work 

exactly on that day of her 19 th birthday, 9 th November 2002. 

After final refinements to the section on ‘quarks’, I scoured 

the Internet for people to send it to, and sent 36 emails with 

it at New Year. The response has been very limited… 

On 14 th November 2002, I finally felt very lonely, but she 

had given me enough hints to ring International Directory 

Enquiries, and narrow down her place of work to one of just 

two likely places in Luxembourg. The first number rang, I 

asked for her in French, and within five minutes of first 

thinking of this idea, she was totally delighted to hear my 

215

voice! It has since turned out that calls there only cost 

about 15p a minute, half the cost of calling a mobile phone 

from my phone in England! I have been on the phone to 

her, as she has never called since September, infrequently 

ever since. It is much easier to talk to her than arduously 

composed emails – rarely getting a reply! 

From 20 th November to 24 th November I composed a huge 

16-page letter to her mother, with a copy to Helen sent first, 

about what even then I was still developing. As an overall 

picture of lots of my Spiritual Experiences having referred to 

her, years ago, some even before she was even thought of! 

There was no reply, but Helen did reassure me that her 

mother said she was totally open-minded about it! 

Meanwhile, on 22 nd November, in the middle of that, I finally 

got my only letters from Helen since meeting her, and then 

the three of them were all old. However, I had an 

immediate flashback, once I found the single passport photo. 

Stunning, even though I had asked for decent sized portraits 

of her. It is still my only tiny photo of her! 

I had been offered £600 from the IEE Benevolent Fund to 

take a holiday, and had in idle hours found from the Internet 

I could get to Luxembourg and back by air for just over 

£100, very cheaply! So I could stay a few days. Acting on 

impulse on the 5 th December, I got the IEE to activate this 

grant – and booked a flight for the 10 th . I phoned Helen 

immediately after that, told her I ‘had a surprise’, about 

which she seemed very dubious. On the Sunday I got one 

very curt, even abrasive email from her, saying she would 

not be able to spend much time with me, if I went, and she 

even dreaded to think what her parents would say if they 

found out! A second email promptly apologised for the 

severe language of the first! 

Then fate intervened. That same day, I found my left heel 

was so incredibly painful, I could not hold even a four-pint 

bottle of milk in my left hand without crippling pain in my 

heel! So the following day, I saw a GP at my practice, and 

got a medical certificate for all of £15 – and cancelled the 

holiday. Even then, taking that £15 into account, I only got 

a net return of £15 to me, and £19.60 back to the IEE, even 

after many phone calls, on the insurance policy. 

216

I got just one email after that in reply to nine from me, and 

despite me sending both a card and another small present, 

not even a card or email at Christmas or New Year. What 

with all this writing work since, I have only as a result 

phoned her twice in January. I really resent being given ‘the 

cold shoulder’! 

I had limited Contact with Jenny November-January, but start 

meeting her from school on Thursdays! Christmas comes up, 

and I manage to buy good ‘bargains’! 

Finally, I had a few days at weekends at my parents’ 

house with Jenny, but above all, have met her about four times 

from school to go to my flat 4pm-6pm. Several other times 

have been cancelled on rather feeble excuses, usually she 

‘cannot get a lift’ – typical for my ex-wife! In the dark 

evenings, to date we have generally made short trips to the 

shops, and I’ve helped her with homework. Buying Christmas 

presents looked like a bleak prospect, until not only did I get a 

£100 IEE grant, but added to that £200 of the abortive holiday 

money that I had planned to use for that purpose. Then I 

shopped in Hatfield Galleria, near my parents’ home, and found 

lovely books and CD’s – half price or less. I then went to 

Harlow and found some amazing bargains, to complete my 

shopping. Having bought a whole synthesiser keyboard for just 

£9 - £200 some years ago – I even went back the next day and 

bought the last one – for Jenny to have at my flat! On the day 

before Christmas Eve my sister and I took her to see the 

Second ‘Lord of the Rings’ film in Hatfield. I stayed Christmas 

Eve and Christmas day for an ‘adults only’ present opening 

session and inevitable meal. On Boxing Day Jenny joined us 

for a memorable day at my brother’s with their three kids! A 

good time! 

217

CHAPTER TWO 

Tuesday 18 th February 2003. This chapter follows on from the 

inclusion on pages 3 and 4 of this book, of the last chapter 35 

of the prequel, with a brief as possible summary of my plans 

for the future, including the likely results of several new 

developments since then, back in 2001. In particular, the very 

first section is completely new, and describes the outcome of 

presenting the Appendix to a solicitor, a week ago, after at last 

finding one willing to talk to me. Seemingly I am regarded as 

a leper and sub-human, just by being an alleged ‘psychiatric 

patient’. For I spent two incredibly frustrating weeks in 

January making dozens of expensive calls on the telephone, 

unable to find anybody at all even willing to talk to me, despite 

the huge number of practising solicitors. 

After a whole week of fruitlessly trying to get any sense, or 

even any meaningful response to simple communications from 

the three officially recommended legal bodies I have talked to 

about my clear-cut torture and poisoning in the last section, 

etc., etc., I have finally lost my patience. As we see, I am left 

with no choice but to bring out a large set of Exocet missiles, 

and as the last resort, bring charges myself against all the 

felons I described there. 

The story resumes with events from Thursday 22 nd January 

2003, with the utterly dramatic set of breakthroughs I found 

myself with on that day of the ‘great 1” of snow in the evening 

that paralysed the entire country’! That day I finally heard that 

my original social worker, one Julia Pehrson, from Cygnet 

House, just two hundred yards from my bed-sit, had taken 

over from the S.S.S. Aggressive Out-retch Team, and she 

called round. However, very soon I learned that my letter 

telling them quite plainly they were sacked, my legal right 

under the Disability Act, had been ignored. They were 

tolerating Julia replacing them only until I could be persuaded 

to actually attend another C.P.A. or Care Programme Approach 

Meeting, having boycotted the one on Wednesday 21 st January. 

They seriously expected me to face the three of them, 

218

doubtless with cronies, in the usual confrontational semi-circle 

around me, and justify alleging every single item of abuse of 

the above massive campaign by them. Apparently, they 

seriously think they can whitewash the whole victimisation, 

false imprisonment and immense mental torture. All by 

pathologically lying to and about me, as we have seen! They 

will never expect the aftermath of various copies of this 

arriving at various Crown legal bodies. But then, I don’t expect 

anybody has ever had such a thorough, clear-cut case for 

tackling such a bunch of Nazi thugs, whether they believe they 

really are legally impregnable and totally ‘above the law’. The 

same day, after waiting weeks, the two means essential to 

achieving that swift vengeance we are about to come to, both 

came about, so ending a month of a very full diary indeed, 

leaving it blank for the next month. My Personal Computer had 

been nearly unusable for two weeks from 29 th January, and 

finally went back to the suppliers after that for repair under 

warranty – only to return still broken, and finally, after much 

argument, returning at last, fully fixed, on the vital 22 nd 

January. Then, after weeks of intensive phone calls to many 

legal advice lines, and dozens of solicitors, I finally got 

reluctant agreement from a Mrs Lorraine Thompson of Austin 

Allen solicitors in Luton, to arrange to meet me at of all places 

– Princess Alexandra Hospital, Harlow, Psychiatric Unit! 

However, this was to be at the offices of the Advocacy Service, 

for after pleading urgency, I had learnt of Mrs Thompson 

through being assigned an Advocate, Sally Hyde, from Pohwer 

of Stevenage, who would oversee the meeting. I immediately 

started typing a huge summary of my case with much 

background, nearly 90 pages long, presented as the Appendix 

to this book. I had a problem from the start with what I knew 

would be a long, immensely difficult piece of writing to face. 

Ink on computer printers costs a ludicrous fortune, especially 

to pauper me on just disability benefits, so any attempt to do a 

series of rough drafts would take all my ink – probably several 

times over – not to mention paper. So I had to set out doing 

two double-sided pages at a time, starting in 1977, when I was 

first given ‘stelazine’ for depression, and then work painfully 

through the 26 years since, of my entire history. However, 

above all, I was for the first time ever, discharging all those 

219

quarter century of years of pure virulent puss, while having to 

get every single important detail accurately from my memory 

onto paper. So by Saturday 8 th February, I had with huge pain 

and difficulty, only got ‘part 1’ down on paper – describing how 

my brilliant career as often so-called ‘genius’ at ICI had ended 

in all of eight disastrous years working with my father. Then, 

how I found myself in 1988 with only minimal skills, all 

obsolete, and dating back to 1980 – when the entire computer 

job market apart from me was regularly retraining in new skills 

every six months! My career from then was doomed! That 

nine days after Thursday 22 nd January was incredibly stressful, 

but at the end proved cathartic, and I breathed a huge sigh of 

relief, speeding on to parts 2 and 3 – in principle much easier. 

Meanwhile I had a very quiet week to do all this, with only 

three significant and relevant events in the week, to at all 

interrupt or disturb me. Firstly, on the Monday, I got a most 

verbose, rambling, illiterate, incoherent letter from Cuthbert 

Glyndebourne, ‘Manager’ of Aggressive Out-retch S.S.S. After 

trying to get at what he was actually saying, I noticed that he 

said the word ‘apologise’ three times, and that it was about 

‘the wording of that council tax exemption letter having clearly 

offended me’. So he was pretending to apologise for merely 

the wording on a letter from the council, that had not offended 

me much at all for the only offensive words were the title 

‘MENTALLY IMPAIRED’. He had completely refrained from 

apologising for all the following campaign of lies, cover-ups and 

going behind my back to get this latest smear applied – 

probably the worst ever ‘label’ I have ever had to endure – 

then only needing my GP to rubber-stamp it: - 

I had the original of this document sent to me by the 

Council, and gave it to Lorraine Thompson to copy. It was 

applied for by John Murphy CPN, with no consultation with 

me in hospital, on 23 rd August 2003, although I only first 

ever heard of this travesty in early December 2003. As we 

saw in the last section, he lied evasively and furiously when I 

challenged him about it 

There was absolutely no need for it to be applied for and it is 

blatantly false to allege that I am ‘Severely Mentally 

Impaired’, i.e. Have ‘learning difficulties’. 

220

Murphy and my GP Gibbon must themselves be completely 

round the twist and/or utterly perverted to smear me with 

that label, knowing all the following: 

I was the brightest academically at Newtown Junior School in 

Hatfield, and easily won a scholarship to St. Alban’s Direct 

Grant School from there. At ‘O’ level I got the best grades 

of anyone in my year, of 10 A* and 1 A, in GCSE equivalent, 

followed by three A grade A levels, two grade 1 Special 

grades, culminating in 1975 with an Open Scholarship to 

King’s College, Cambridge. 

I first read Natural Sciences, in which in 1977 I got a First 

with an extremely high First in Chemistry, nearly top of the 

whole University. Mentally Impaired? The following year, I 

got ill for six months, yet at the peak of that narrowly 

missed another First in Physics and Maths. 

In 1978-1979, I had been totally bizarrely wrongly 

diagnosed ‘schizophrenic’, and found myself on injections of 

totally the wrong medication, and utterly stigmatised by 

former ‘friends’ because of that wrong ‘label’. So I only got 

a II:2 in that final year. 

Until my last nine years of absurdly irrelevant torture with 

the wrong drugs, with all of three years of that spent in 

places similar to concentration camps, I held down good 

jobs, married a Vet and had a lovely, bright, highly 

intelligent daughter. 

This ‘Doctor’ Gibbon creature has written on the SMI slander 

form that he thinks I have been that way for well over five 

years. Well, I can’t say much about my full-time job five 

years ago, for I had signed the Official Secrets Act - for the 

third time. I will dare to say it was for Lockheed Martin 

Solartron, now in Hertford, next to the Courts, and involved 

highly advanced virtual reality simulation in 3-D and real 

time, of missiles, aircraft and tanks. Rocket Science! – by 

somebody smeared by the lunatic Gibbon et al. to be SMI??? 

Ever since, throughout the whole five years since, that this 

Gibbon creature says I have had learning difficulties, I have 

written and published four books. While unable to earn 

more than £20 a week without coming under the draconian 

government 100% super-tax, and paying the tax man every 

penny I actually earned above that minuscule amount, I 

221

have done private tuition. I have received, despite all the 

obstacles we have seen, about five glowing references from 

parents who have seen their child’s A level grade in maths, 

physics or computing, rise by two grades or more in just a 

few sessions. Just last summer, before they put me away 

illegally, I got my best result ever. An AS level maths 

student had got 18% in his mock exam, and in just three 

intensive two-hour sessions, I got his ability and confidence 

up so much he achieved a ‘B’ grade in the actual exam. 

Severely mentally impaired A level tutor? My arse, Dr 

GIBBON, your DNA is clearly grossly inferior to mine! 

The second interruption was also stressful, but also helped 

me in the end. First Sally, my advocate, rang on the Tuesday 

to ask me to meet her and the solicitor in a week, on Tuesday 

11 th February, in Harlow. I had got to Thursday, getting 

increasingly under pressure of time to finish all this incredibly 

arduous typing by then, still in the middle of my career in the 

1980’s – so way off the vital parts 2 and 3 of my report as in 

the Appendixs to this book. Then Louise, the solicitor’s 

secretary also phoned to confirm, but said it was absolutely 

impossible to delay the meeting to give me more time to finish 

this lengthy typing! 

I pressed on, then on the Friday realised it had been a 

whole two months since 17 th December. When after nearly two 

years my parents and I had finally had a very disappointing 

meeting with the solitary ‘expert’ psychiatrist in Harley Street 

would alone determine whether my case even got to court. So 

I phoned my litigation solicitor, Rod Findlay of Samuel Phillips 

of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who said he had actually just spoken 

to this ‘expert’ Dr Lachlan Campbell of 10 Harley Street, and 

the report was imminent and should be here by about a week. 

So I slaved on with all this typing, and finally got it finished at 

11 pm on Monday 10 th February. Now I was set for the 

meeting at Harlow, with the litigation report results also 

imminent. Results soon? 

Thursday 20 th February 2003. A promising meeting with the 

solicitor and advocate on Tuesday 11 th results in immediate 

actions by me the same day, that completely make the above 

222

case watertight and 100% concrete, so I ask her to issue a 

summons for several charges, and ask for substantial criminal 

and civil damages. Then I sent a further email asking her to 

raise incredibly serious charges, after the appalling report by 

the ‘expert’ arrives! Tuesday came at last, and soon seemed to 

hold promise, for things went like clockwork. First I had to 

bind three copies of my fat report, now all printed out, yet the 

binders were too small. Then I found that by splitting the 

typing in two, the six binders I actually had would just take the 

paper. I ambled off to catch the 12.49 bus, allowing spare 

time because the 724 to Harlow from Ware is notorious for 

often being late – and even worse, early. So when I got to the 

bus-stop with five minutes to spare, I was not at all surprised 

when it arrived ten seconds later! So I had over three-quarters 

of an hour to ‘kill’ before the meeting at 2pm, and so had a 

leisurely coffee – and sent a heartfelt message to Helen in a 

Valentine’s card. The meeting was in a former bay of a ward 

now used as offices, and went on just over an hour. Sally, the 

Advocate, mostly just listened while Mrs Thompson asked me 

all about my grievances, took notes, and took all my original 

documents to photocopy and return. She promised to write a 

serious complaint to the S.S.S. about the SMI smear, and to 

my Doctor about the truth about the torture over ‘alleged 

overspending’. When it came to the bank, she told me to 

contact the Ombudsman for Financial Services, which I said I 

had done way back in December. What with acute loneliness 

while recovering from all the abuse, then Christmas and the 

stress since, I had not done any more since never hearing 

back. Finally, I said the Mental Health assessment I should 

have had by law on admission effectively to a ‘lock-up’ i.e. 

false imprisonment, never took place, so she agreed to apply to 

the hospital for all the notes. That might sound a simple 

matter of a day of photocopying and posting, and no doubt, in 

hindsight, she fully expected me to instead wait bizarrely long 

months instead. That is the actual practice, ridiculous as it is, 

when patients are supposed by law to have full access to their 

own medical notes on demand! I immediately realised that if 

that happened I was wide open to yet another illegal 

imprisonment like last year, and however wary I was, there 

would be a constant need for vigilance against another S.S.S. 

223

‘tap on the shoulder’ like last June – or worse. I had loads of 

time till the bus home left, so had a coffee, and then 

remembered that my litigation solicitor Rod Findlay had told 

me that the ‘expert’, as ever, had insisted on having the full 

notes for my whole admission last year. Clockwork again. I 

got home at 4.40pm, with ample time to first, ring his 

secretary and simply request a copy of my own notes, without 

saying why, of course. A quick phone call the next day 

confirmed I would get them by Friday. Then for what turned 

out as I expected, to be a much more involved call – to revive 

my case at the Financial Ombudsman’s Office. After taking an 

inordinate amount of time to explain several times over, that I 

had never received a letter the computer clerk claimed they 

sent on 19 th November, he finally agreed to get a Samantha 

Scrubb, the caseworker, to call me Wednesday morning to 

reopen the case. While I had waited patiently for a response to 

my complaint back in October, they said they had waited at the 

same time for a response from me to a letter that never came! 

What happened from Wednesday, after the promised phone 

call from Ms Scrubb never came, is described in the last part of 

this section. Another sorry tale of official complacency due to 

pure STIGMA! So, on Wednesday and most of Thursday, I 

rested after all this typing up, at great personal pain, of a long 

history of abuse. I heard nothing from the solicitor by 

Thursday, so called to quietly ask about progress, and spoke to 

her secretary, Louise, just after lunch, at 2pm. She told me 

she was just about to type the three letters agreed at the 

meeting on the Tuesday, so as Lorraine had promised as for all 

correspondence, I would get copies in the post immediately. I 

told her that I had the notes coming, so she need not type a 

letter to the Princess Alexandra Hospital to request them, after 

all. There was a sudden pause, then she said, “I’ll tell Mrs 

Thompson”. Last Friday the complete notes arrived – as 

certified complete by the Trust concerned, and obviously not 

touched by my own solicitor in giving me them. After just half 

an hour of looking through I had confirmed everything I 

needed to know: - 

The top priority was to get to the start of the admission, and 

see what if any Mental Health assessment took place on 10 th 

June 2002, when I was admitted. You might think that as 

224

the Law claims to give all patients access to their notes on 

demand, even if mysteriously it takes months or even years 

to achieve that ‘on demand’, they would be presented in 

pristine date order. You might naturally expect them to be 

filed very carefully, hardly a difficult job, in an apparently 

politically correct, pristine, ordered, ‘hospital’. Far from it. I 

had only once before got hold of notes in this way – so 

utterly chaotic and totally out of order, back in 1995, that I 

gave up even trying to make sense of them. These were 

slightly more evident of some kind of respect by the staff in 

the hospital, but only just. So eventually I spent ten 

minutes going through the chaotic mess from the hospital, 

page by page. Just as I expected. The notes started from 

the day, 10 th June 2002, that I was admitted. No mental 

health assessment was done then, nor notes taken, despite 

the lies of Mildred de Vil! 

The notes for that day of admission only record that I was 

speaking rather quickly, and my own comment on that was 

recorded that I badly needed some sleep. The notes say 

that I slept well, and woke up much more relaxed. No sign 

of any illness. I was completely WELL, if only very tired due 

to hideous lying by my social worker three weeks earlier, 

when falsely imprisoned by a ‘hit squad’ – including her! - as 

above. However, the law was yet again immediately 

blatantly broken in every respect by people I naturally 

trusted as below, to completely sabotage my only remaining 

civil right while there, control or even any access to my own 

financial affairs and banking account. Without those vicious 

criminal actions, I would probably have caught up with my 

sleep, after losing many nights over barefaced lies by my 

social worker, and gone home after just a few days. For on 

my second morning there, my father visited and 

unbelievably alleged ‘you cannot be trusted with your own 

money’. So, incredibly, he had gone to the nearest branch 

to me of the Woolwich, and they had blatantly, promptly 

broken the Data Protection Act, since fully admitting that, as 

well as giving my father total control and full access to the 

entire history of my account. Without a hint of any 

absolutely legally vital Deed of Attorney! With not one letter 

of even warning, let alone explanation, the Woolwich 

225

mounted a campaign of months of abuse amounting to 

mental torture! They only finally reluctantly started to make 

amends, still with nothing in writing, after I phoned and 

demanded their own ‘fraud squad’ took action. Even then, 

that ‘fraud squad’, if it existed took weeks to respond, and 

has never once telephoned or written to me! Very strange 

indeed. The full list of draconian measures by my bank 

appears in the last section below. As we saw, the lies about 

‘lavish overspending’ and ‘Simon building up several vast 

credit card bills’ in the five months, not now just a few days, 

were all complete smears. My average request for help from 

my family above the minuscule £7.10 a day benefit I got in 

hospital, was about £2/day – 8 cigarettes/day! I have only 

one debt in the world, on very long-term repayments, of 

£250 on a store-card, all up to date. I have not owned a 

single credit card since 1997! Clearly, all that campaign of 

hatred about money was all a pack of vicious lies, and the 

only reason that having been illegally imprisoned, I did not 

return home rested in days! For only that same afternoon 

after my father visited, do the notes start to record a slow, 

steady decline into alleged ‘elatedness’, and that same 

pressure of speech. Not a hint throughout the next few 

months, note, of any other symptoms of ‘mental illness’, at 

all, certainly nothing at all remotely ‘schizoid’. As we see 

below, I may poosibly soon often be in Court claiming huge 

criminal damages against the S.S.S. Team, and Doctors 

responsible, and the Chairman of the Woolwich plc. Why 

him? As my bank account is centralised nationally, so they 

won’t even give out the telephone number of my nearest 

branch, at Hertford, scene of all the criminal activity. 

After several phone calls, at last yesterday, Wednesday, 

all of eight days after the meeting, I received some letters from 

this Mrs Thompson. Well, one required my daughter and I to 

walk two miles there and back, because the letter turned out to 

be short of stamps by just 7p. So there was also a huge 80p 

‘handling charge’ from the Post Office, to add insult to injury. 

There were just brief letters of acknowledgement to my 

two lengthy emails at the weekend, and just a small comment 

about one, that completely missed the point! Then to the big 

226

one with the 87p fine for 7p of stamps being left off by them. 

There were copies of two incredibly brief, insipid, letters to the 

S.S.S. Team leader, Cuthbert Glyndebourne, and to my doctor, 

as discussed, but totally lacking the ‘teeth’ I had expected. 

Then the ultimate bombshell. This solicitor, or ‘legal executive’ 

as she styles herself, supposedly expert on the Mental Health 

Act, and criminal law, so seemingly ideal, now claimed bizarrely 

in a final letter, to not even have the most basic legal capacity 

of any solicitor. She alleged that she has no authority even to 

sue anybody – even on my behalf in such a clear-cut case - 

and ended up lamely resigning:- 

“I am not the lawyer for you”! 

THE BIZARRE WHITEWASH OF THE REPORT FROM 

‘EXPERT’ ‘DOCTOR’ LACHLAN CAMPBELL OF 10 HARLEY 

STREET. Just as for the alleged 'NHS Independent Inquiry' 

held at the QEII in 1999 with me very conveniently on a 

Section 3 there at that time so rendered 'ill so not allowed to 

speak'! The 'Expert Report' on QEII and Harlow 'treatment' 

and 'care' 1993-2003 was even far worse than a complete 

whitewash. I'll briefly describe the main features of this report 

by yet another 'senior Crony of Whore etc. First to dismissively 

summarise the 'expert report' - revealing the author to be 

apparently 'Severely Mentally Impaired' while claiming to be 

highly qualified. 

1. The report goes on for all of 12 pages with extraordinary 

bias, about the two versions of my treatment, with only 

just a few sentences of my own even mentioned. Vastly 

preferred over just me as the patient, even if I was 

supposed to be his client, and even if his black report was 

costing two thousand pounds of MY legal aid, the 

DOCTORS' version of my disastrous treatment for 

'schizophrenia' or 'schizo-affective disorder'. 

2. However, he must think I was born yesterday, for the 

discussion stops incredibly abruptly back in 1999, just 

tailing off by saying I was later admitted to hospital in 

2000 and 2002. Hence he never even gets to the last 

three years, and so completely ignores my entire case, 

which is for those three years, increasingly, and certainly 

since January 10th 2001, my diagnosis and treatment 

227

have consistently been 'bipolar affective disorder' to ALL 

the staff treating me. What a completely breathtaking 

sabotage of my case by the 'expert' supposedly 

representing me!!! Complete and utter vicious, dismissive, 

belittling distortion of the truth!!! Absolutely glaring 

cronyism by a Senior Consultant, just like in 1999, when 

other 'experts' were also complete 100% cronies of all 

those crooked Doctors accusing me of schizophrenia. 

3. A very revealing feature of his report, after full access to 

my medical notes, is that the entire case for my alleged 

'schizophrenia' is pure doctors' judgmental views that I 

have 'religious delusions'. All my entire history as a falsely 

alleged 'schizophrenic' turns out to hinge on that bizarre 

delusion of of all those Doctors themselves and amounts 

to religios persecution over 23 whole years! My own views 

on religion are to treat it only as a scientist. I have 

published a book and a paper, both on 'science and 

religion', in the science section at my publishers' web-site 

www.authorsonline.co.uk which I hope to combine in a 

Second Edition to market myself in North America through 

two HUGE distributors who have already offered to market 

it. Once I can afford a print run and some marketing 

funding. Also I have used the two above sets of writing 

as the basis of applying to Oxford University hoping to 

take a M.St. leading to a full D.Litt. (i.e. become a doctor 

myself!) in Science and Religion. 

4. The Psychiatrists hide away their own supposed reference 

books, printed in relatively tiny quantity compared to the 

Bible, and at great expense. Hidden behind tons of forms, 

bureaucracy and Freemason-like secrecy, so the public 

find it virtually impossible to even get a look at them. I 

have seen DSM-IV after my father got hold of a copy with 

the greatest of difficulty, and DSM-V is hardly different I 

am told. So why all the secrecy and mystery about such 

psychiatric textbooks? 

5. Firstly - they are so simplistic and clear, that a 16 year 

old school student could do a Psychiatrist's job just with 

those - they completely destroy all the mystique 

maintained by Psychiatrists about their 'oh so clever' 

"profession" i.e. really Black Art......... 

228

6. If Psychiatrists revealed the simple recipe-book contents 

of their textbooks to patients in particular, firstly the 

patients would be able to challenge the Psychiatrists' 

treatments. Furthermore, most of this would be to 

overturn absurd experiments by these quack 'Doctors', 

who all conceal their textbooks for the most important 

reason of all - to get their power to 'experiment, and so 

abuse with the wrong drugs and casually applied dismalsounding, 

damning labels'. Casually branding people with 

a usually arbitrary selection of the latter is their greatest 

cheap thrill of all, yet they always try to deny it gives 

them their greatest 'power kick'! 

7. The alleged ‘symptoms’ or rather as we see, one totally 

isolated, then only alleged ‘symptom’ that led to me being 

branded ‘schizophrenic’, has only been observed, it is 

clear from the report, twice, twelve years apart. Even 

then, the allegations, that on those two very isolated 

occasions that I showed signs of ‘religious delusions’ were 

complete nonsense. Even more bizarrely abusive, clearly 

from the report, that utter lie of one alleged ‘symptom’ I 

never had, was never accompanied by hearing voices, 

paranoia, bizarre delusions, thinking people were talking 

about me, etc. etc. All psychiatric theory manuals state 

that to be labelled ‘schizophrenic’ you need to have clear 

evidence of a long period of at least two, usually more of 

such ‘schizophrenic symptoms’. I have been branded as 

such, forcibly given hundreds of hideous, totally 

unnecessary injections and bizarre tablets, ending up with 

the last nine terrible years of HELL, with absolutely ZERO 

clinical justification. I have been framed as allegedly 

schizophrenic when NOT! Even their one symptom was a 

complete lie – I have never had any ‘religious delusions’, 

certainly not for long periods! 

8. I had absolutely no symptoms of mental illness at the 

two-hour interview, that ‘expert’ readily commented. Yet 

as they all do, he simply felt compelled to brand me with 

his own label of 'schizophrenic', despite my last two years 

consistent treatment for B1AD! Just to add his own 

pathetic little flourish (he struck me throughout as just 

another 'pathetic little man' with too much power - 

229

especially to casually invent and apply labels to others - 

now based totally on hearsay from other similar Control 

Freaks)! So he now branded me, with absolutely no basis 

or evidence, quite the contrary, 'schizophrenic with 

intermittent hypomanic episodes'!!! 

9. Then it got unbelievably bizarre indeed. The main 

poisoning had been with clozapine in 1995. Here I am 

totally euthymic and normal on just lithium - with 

haloperidol in reserve just in case. Now this monster, 

unbelievably, finished the 'report' - by saying that 

clozapine is in fact the only possible cure for the alleged 

'schizophrenia' he branded me with, with absolutely no 

basis except hearsay. 

10. This appears to be an unmistakable case of a doctor who 

is arrogant to the point of being Severely Mentally 

Impaired! 

11. So, that means that however much I may try to argue 

back at him, he has started out from such a position of 

complete hyperbolic claptrap, deceit, cronyism and 

sabotage that there is no chance he will even budge 

slightly from such flawed, arrogant views! The whole 

report is an unbelievable whitewash! 

12. Meanwhile for the past two years, the ‘diagnosis’ has 

abruptly switched, until bizarrely he has tried to reverse 

all that with absolutely nothing except hearsay evidence 

when I was clearly 100% fully fit - as he readily admitted 

at 10 Harley Street on 10 th December 2002. Yet in 2001, 

two years ago, ‘they’ suddenly stopped treating me for 

‘schizophrenia’ – as above which had no basis, despite 

destroying my life as a result, back in 1995 onwards. 

230

231

PART TWO 

Six MORE months of Sheer Hell, 

February to August 2003! 

No Helen to help me at all! 

Locked away a ninth time, in my 

‘Nine of Diamonds’ year of 2003! 

2,000 miles and 200 ‘runners been’ 

– or times ‘AWOL’ – in three 

dramatic months! 

Is a reprise appropriate of hit song 

‘2,000 miles’ by Chrissie Hynde and 

the Pretenders, from the winter, 

1983, when Helen ‘Ariel Morning 

Star’ was born? 

I end up no more being “let off for 

bad behaviour”. Sent to the Locked 

232

Ward at Shannon House, Harlow, yet 

again! 

233

234

CHAPTER THREE 

SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE TWENTY-FOUR. Mid-February 2003. 

Completing a cycle? Once again, a ‘crucixion experience’ - this 

time very complex and extraordinarily painful, is warned about 

in a vision. The pain of last year’s admission is indicated to be 

far more complex in the new admission imminently predicted 

for this year of 2004, with agony over Helen shown as the root 

cause…! 

Definitive Interpretation of Spiritual Experience Twenty-Four 

This Vision was again, as for most of my similar 

Experiences of the last few years, very quick and easy to 

interpret, by about May 2003. Once again, I knew that the 

crosses, one fading, symbolised three ‘crucifixion’ experiences 

in psychiatric units, from previous experience of seeing five 

such crosses in Spiritual Experiences, at the time of such 

hospitalisations. See the prequel to this book, “Which Witch 

Doctor?” There had been no such vision of a crucifix before or 

during 2002. It appeared now as the first Image of this latest 

Spiritual Experience Twenty-Four. However, I quickly realised, 

as the inevitable admission of 2003 got underway as we see 

next, that the key factor in both those ‘crucifixion admissions’ 

235

of 2002-2003 was the ‘gash, wound, or slash’ of the first Image 

above. 

This clearly symbolises my broken heart after high hopes, 

both years 2002 and 2003, over ‘young Helen’. The plain cross 

in the centre of the image, predicts my further crucifixion 

experience in 2003 as described overleaf. The incredibly 

complexity of my suffering in yet another crucifixion experience 

with yet another girlfriend again uncannily called Helen, in 

2004, as in the sequel to this book, is symbolised by the ornate 

nature of the third cross! Indeed, as we see now, 

‘More pain and suffering, it is hard to imagine a mere 

mortal enduring’. 

236

1. The upset, cornered, distressed fox is snared by bulldogs on 

26 th February 2003, in yet another Section 3 – with no right 

of reply or any questions asked 

We pick up the story in Part One, back on the vital date of 

Wednesday 22 nd January 2003. I was terribly frustrated at my 

total lack of success in finding a lawyer to take up my 

grievances against ‘The (psychiatric torment) System’ of the 

previous summer of 2002, especially the false imprisonment 

and torrent of abuse and lies from the S.S.S. Even involving 

my own father breaking the law in very crass fashion, just to 

dominate me and destroy my five months in hospital. 

So that Wednesday evening I found myself at the local 

Hertford Police Station, where on asking to see the duty 

inspector and duty solicitor about the very serious charges we 

have seen I wanted brought, I was derided and scoffed at. The 

normal police stigma about ‘mental health’ meant I was told 

that I was being seen just by ‘an officer’ instead. So when, 

after half an hour with me pacing angrily outside the front 

reception, smoking, a sneering PC Jefferies finally asked me in 

to see him and his silent colleague, I feared the worst! 

In the interview room, Jefferies asked me what my 

allegations were, but as soon as I mentioned ‘mental health’ 

his attitude turned into a thinly disguised condescending sneer. 

After five minutes of him deliberately ignoring all my 

complaints, and only noting down the little I said about myself, 

I gave up in despair. I went home, beaten again by 

Establishment stigma, as soon as one has any sort of ‘label’ 

stuck on one’s back - however wrongly and unjustly, as in my 

case - and long history of virtually every ‘wrong label’ 

imaginable, as agonisingly described in the prequel to this 

book, “Which Witch Doctor?” 

However, by the following Friday 31 st January, when my 

computer was finally returned from the suppliers fully working, 

I ploughed into the Appendix of this book with a vengeance, 

and finished it late on Monday 10 th February. Just in time to 

hand it over for the meeting on the Tuesday 11 th February at 

Harlow hospital, with Sally Hyde of PoHwer and my new 

solicitor, Lorraine Thompson. 

237

At that time, a deeply thought out seed was planted that 

took root, and comes in again at the end of this part of the 

story. I applied to the very same college, St. John’s, of which 

Helen was still officially a member, as first choice, to read a 

Science and Religion Master of Studies degree at her Oxford 

University in October 2003. Just in case she actually passed 

her retake exams this June 2003 – I could then live and study 

in her close proximity! Quite a set of long shots! 

By Sunday 16 th February I finished Chapter Three and so 

Part One of this Book. I complained to the police about my 

abysmal treatment by their PC Jeffries on January 22 nd , and 

then when I got no response, posted my serious allegations in 

Chapter Three to the Crown Prosecution Service at Chelmsford. 

I was getting fired up by beating all the huge stresses of the 

last year or so, and around then, lost all my fear in the world, 

seemingly for good! 

The Crown Prosecution Service, whom a lawyer on the 

Manic Depression Fellowship help-line had very reliably told me 

I could turn to if the police failed to act, proved another flop. 

They just passed the buck back to the local Police, returning all 

my carefully prepared documents. 

My daughter’s 12 th birthday came on 22 nd February 2003, 

but my parents made their arduous conditions for seeing her at 

their house for this so very humiliating, I refused to turn up! I 

had not seen her since 30 th January, and have only had about 

one hour or so, last month, with a couple of momentary five 

minute meetings, ever since, till today, as I write, Tuesday 12 th 

August. 

Finally I was at last supposed to see her on Wednesday 

26 th June, when first one police constable appeared outside my 

flat while I waited for her lift from her stepfather Rodney Pugh 

to arrive, then another. Finally a rather gruff old man hobbled 

up with a walking stick from nearby Cygnet House S.S.S., and 

proved reluctantly he was a police surgeon, sent to give me yet 

another Section 3 – with no questions asked or alternatives 

allowed, such as of course voluntary admission. He was joined 

in this by the tall Alistair, as approved Social Worker, who also 

came from Cygnet House. 

238

My psychiatrist had supposedly signed the Section 3 

papers, without even seeing me to ‘assess’ me, and my GP and 

‘normal’ social worker were also apparently in ‘hiding’ behind 

the scenes of yet another contrived Sectioning, only a bit 

better than 2002! 

Another ‘set up’ forcible admission to hospital, just like 

last year, that I had to rush Jenny out of the middle of, once 

she shortly finally arrived – Rodney late as usual! 

Britische S.S.S. Konzentrierungsanlage (British Psychiatric 

Concentration Camp) ‘Chelmer Ward’, St. Margaret’s ‘hospital’, 

Epping, Essex. Wednesday 26 th February to Tuesday 4 th March 

2003. One week apprenticeship in going AWOL! 

I arrived at Epping that night with only 40 cigarettes to 

last until I was paid my monthly grant by the IEE on the Friday, 

as all my money for that week had gone in printing my report, 

and getting copies to the police, etc. Alistair took the lead in 

his car, with the two PC’s past Harlow Hospital onto Epping by 

back roads. The police commented, ‘why doesn’t he go down 

the A10?’ 

The Ward was all on the ground floor and initially seemed 

very modern, with all single rooms. I settled into mine, and 

only went out to have a smoke in the smoking room. The only 

patient there that I met again in later weeks, once back on Lea 

Ward, my designated ‘normal’ Ward, was a blonde girl called 

Claire, who was fully well at Harlow when I bumped into her, 

but very withdrawn at Epping. The reason was the same for 

everyone there, and soon revealed on my first morning, 

Thursday 27 th February. 

The twenty-year-old Mental Health Act 1983 was in the 

process of being overhauled, and was not replaced by the far 

tougher new Act, due to fierce opposition from pressure groups 

and patients’ groups. So, as ever, it seemed, since my last 

hospital admission ended just four months earlier, the new 

severity seems to have been ‘slipped in’ by the current ‘New 

Labour’ Government by its favourite devious tactic, ‘STEALTH’! 

239

For the staff in the morning, all smiles initially, nearly all 

women, of all colours and nationalities, nearly all turned out to 

have an icy undertow, that all the patients must very strictly 

‘follow all the rules’ - one fair-haired tight-lipped bitch in 

particular. However, by midday I was out roaming the 

grounds, in boredom – mostly, it turned out, demolished to 

leave a huge empty car park. 

The birds seemed to be my only friends in this strange, 

desolate spot, miles from Ware or my parents and sister at 

Hatfield. They were definitely coming out in sympathy, 

breaking off flying and swooping in salute overhead! Soon I 

was answering the calls of rooks (laughing at us humans 

below, I have always thought!), starlings, sparrows, blackbirds 

and thrushes, to actually start “talking in Gifts Of Tongues 

birdsong”! 

Soon I was wandering increasingly off the grounds, 

spending my last few pounds on cigarettes at a nearby garage. 

In the woods at the edge of Epping Forest there, I found tame 

peacocks, and exotic hens, running free from a nearby house. 

On Thursday night, 27 th January, I had no money and no 

cigarettes, so tried to cash a cheque with just my passport in 

nearby Epping, in the rain. I failed dismally, and got back to 

sharp remarks from the fair-haired bitch, “he keeps on going 

off the grounds but he is on a Section 3!” to no avail. 

The following day my bankcard was delivered in the post 

that my parents brought over, as my previous one had been 

stolen. I got out some money from the bank in Epping again, 

having had to ‘cadge’ cigarettes till then, and bought 200 at 

Tesco’s, once more up town. Absent With Out Leave (AWOL) 

that week many times, out of about 200 times in total in the 

next three months! 

I remember my first phone call to Helen, at her work, in 

weeks, and she was quite upset to learn I was back in hospital 

again. Her tinkling voice full of quavering youth, ‘like daisies 

and buttercups, flowing down a cool, burbling, mountain 

brook’, had an astonishingly beneficial effect on then extreme 

emotional pain in my left thigh. The agony – literally – went 

inside five minutes of talking to her. Sadly, when I called her a 

few days later, I learned she had abruptly left that job – I 

240

never found out why, but presumably it was to study for her 

biochemistry retakes in June at Oxford. 

A long weekend passed with me passing the time by 

discovering that the fans in the smoking room had infra-red 

detectors which turned them on whenever anyone moved in 

the line of sight of that IR. So I got all the ‘blue-tack’ I could 

from pictures on the Ward, and covered the fan IR detectors, 

stopping the fans. I explained that I ‘did not want my internals 

fried’! Eventually the staff discovered this and removed the 

blue-tack. 

By now I was freely leaving the Ward and going AWOL off 

the grounds, despite my Section 3. Then on the Monday 3 rd 

March 2003 I was taken back to Lea Ward at Harlow. Not 

before pointing out to fellow patients and visitors that 3 rd March 

2003 was a special day, 3/3/3 at 3:33.333333… being a very 

special time! 

Two (World Record?) mega-runners of three altogether, the 

first two in one weekend, in my first two weeks at Harlow 

Hospital on Lea Ward 

War rumours were rife at the time, with the US and UK 

building up huge forces in the Gulf prior to the imminent 

onslaught on Iraq, that was to start on Thursday 20 th March. 

No doubt this only fuelled the paranoia of the psychiatric staff, 

to hold patients on the ward as much as possible, not just 

confining us to the hospital grounds. 

I saw Kristos on Tuesday afternoon, 4 th March, that pansy 

in very strident mood, demanding, to know, hysterically 

almost, if I ‘heard voices’! To which of course my answer was 

a flat denial, with much annoyed exasperation at that question 

being asked for the umpteenth time in 25 years. 

I was only then allowed limited access to the grounds 

only, not outside, and then escorted by a member of staff – if 

one could be found spare to take me – and by the end of the 

week was totally fed up with that restriction. 

Finally, on Friday 7 th March, I dressed SAS-style in my 

blue Guernsey sweater from home, with check shirt collar 

241

showing at the top of it, jeans, flying jacket, blue sunglasses – 

and vitally, my purple college rowing scarf. I waited until the 

evening staff were in the office, and slipped off the ward 

around 9pm, and walked steadily to the railway station 1½ 

miles away. 

To spend the next 18 hours overnight, in the first of 

several high adventures – all while supposedly strictly confined 

by law to the hospital – and in particular, that Lea Ward. Soon 

the staff were taking these ‘jaunts’ as quite amusing! I also 

soon added to their joke by calling myself ‘the Chairman of the 

Ward’! 

A train for Cambridge was just leaving, so I got on and 

after just a few stops, got by this express to my old University 

town, with no further plans, and having paid no fare to get 

there. Just like in 1995 as in my ‘great escape’ then from the 

QEII hospital, as described in “Which Witch Doctor?” 

I now put my vivid purple college rowing scarf round my 

waist like a military sash! I deliberately looked like a solitary 

senior SAS officer, fresh from some formal ‘do’! I walked into 

the town centre, as I was short of money so could not even 

afford a bus. I got to King’s, my old college, and got in with a 

crowd of students, my scarf an easy passport through the 

security of the porters on duty. I popped into the bar, and 

remember I thought distinctly ‘this is not the place for me right 

now’. So I left again, and wandered around the town a while, 

until I went past the police station, now with my scarf back 

round my neck. 

By now I had become aware of increasing numbers of 

taxis, passing me frequently although empty of passengers, 

busy on their radios. I realised I was being ‘buzzed’ by a large 

proportion of Cambridge taxis, and this was to continue all 

night long, well past any time they could conceivably expect to 

pick up any passengers. Indeed I was continually passed by 

empty taxis, their drivers on the radio, all night long, clearly 

very worried by a senior SAS officer being there - solo! 

I went into the main University Arms Hotel, desperate for 

a drink of some sort, either a beer or coffee, about 11.30pm. 

After I rang the bell a suspicious pair of receptionists appeared, 

unlocked the front door, and said they were closed, especially 

242

for non-residents as I clearly was. Even, slightly euphoric, 

trying to bluff my way in by inventing a fictitious guest I was 

supposed to be meeting earlier, did not work, so I left. 

I wandered down Mill Road, at the ‘wrong’ side of town for 

students, especially as it was now in the small hours, and had a 

coffee at a coffee bar about 12am. Then till about 2.30am I 

wandered, lost, through the roads to the north of Mill Road, 

whenever on main roads pulling my hood up in a ‘grim reaper 

impression’, aware of loads of taxis very mysteriously still 

about. Clearly because of yours truly! 

About 2.30am I found a Greek coffee bar where some 

security men were taking a break from night duty. I wandered 

on after my coffee, scarf once more around my waist like a 

military sash, and at about 3.20am found another coffee bar on 

the point of closing, so had another coffee. 

About 3.40am I wandered back off into the maze of side 

streets, losing the mad rush of empty taxis completely. For the 

next hour and a half, of all things, a blackbird seemed to lead 

me by the direction from where it perched and sang, first deep 

into then back out of a maze of tiny side-streets. When I 

crossed through a cemetery at one point, I got out at the far 

side as quickly as possible, suddenly aware of loud shouting 

close behind. Was I being followed? 

At 5.10am I had been led in this way back to the railway, 

which by what immediately seemed like “God’s Timing”, for 

sure, was just open with the very first Stansted Express of the 

day – leaving in five minutes! I walked fast to the far end of a 

long platform where this train stood in front of several others, 

on the point of going. I became aware of a cry ‘Oi! Mate!’ from 

the solitary taxi-driver I had seen parked outside the station, 

now pursuing me on foot towards the train. 

However, this pursuit was being observed nearby, and 

help was at hand! I walked all the way down the train to the 

first carriage containing the driver’s compartment, and the 

drivers closed – then clearly locked – the doors just in time to 

stop my taxi-driver pursuer getting on after me! I clearly 

heard them laugh ironically in the cab just ahead of me, having 

got on just after me, clearly intent on locking the doors in this 

helpful way for me, ‘Hard luck mate, you can’t get on!’ 

243

In a few seconds, again without a fare, I was en route to, 

second stop, Stansted Airport – my first ever visit there! I 

arrived about 6am, with daylight arriving, and scarf back round 

my neck while on the train. 

Soon I was sitting having a rest after my overnight efforts 

at walking about 20 miles in circles around Cambridge, with a 

beer in one of the bars in the terminal, in that futuristic dome 

of a terminal at the airport. 

Security was supposed to be incredibly tight in the prelude 

to a likely imminent war, but there was no sign of any security 

at all! In the bar, I got chatting to a Frenchman and his 

English girlfriend, finished my beer, wrapped my scarf round 

my waist once more, and made sure the CCTV cameras got a 

good view of what happened next! 

It remains for me to wonder whether my head had the 

same astonishing appearance on CCTV at Stansted, as at Dover 

a few days later! For I said to the young couple, “Here goes! 

Cambridge Headlights Solo, for real! Wish me luck!” 

I then passed all the shops, all empty of customers, 

getting a heated reply of ‘yes!!!’ from a lady looking in awe at 

one boutique’s variety, and prices to match, when I said, “The 

21 st Century for you – loads of choice – but no freedom!” 

Then into all the ‘no entry’ areas I could find, very self 

conscious in my mock ‘uniform’, ending up on the ‘secure’ side 

of the baggage handling area! In the toilet, my next door 

fellow reliever nodded furiously when I commented, ‘this place 

is a security nightmare!’ Then for another drink of beer, to 

actually spot the first signs of security – had I placed them on 

‘jet black alert’ from ‘complacency level’ by my tour on CCTV of 

all the ‘no entry’ areas? Two policemen with sub-machineguns 

passed by me with my beer, without a glance in my direction… 

I made one half-hearted enquiry about flights to 

Luxembourg at the Luxair desk, still seriously pining for lovely, 

luscious Helen all the time since last year, but was told I could 

only book a flight via the Internet! Was this a pure bluff to me, 

who could not afford the £100+ fare anyway, due to the 

security alert I must inevitably have succeeded in causing, my 

entire plan there as at Cambridge, just before a war in which 

this country was threatened by suicidal terrorists? 

244

So outside onto the road, where taxis and cars dropped 

off, to observe the runways and outbuildings round the airport. 

“Christ!” I thought, “One Exocet missile from an enemy plane 

just two hundred miles out from here – and this place would go 

up like a nuclear bomb, with all these millions of gallons of 

aviation fuel!” Down under the underpass, again on CCTV, 

past all sorts of unsecured ‘restricted’ areas, up to the bus 

stops, and my way out – where? 

I scanned all the bus destinations, with only a few pounds 

left, in search of a likely ‘randomly-picked destination’, for 

about twenty minutes. Aware of being watched, especially by 

an angry pair of Irishmen with beards and rucksacks – IRA 

sympathisers whom I clearly confused and outraged in my 

mock ‘uniform’? 

Finally – saved! The local bus for Old Harlow appeared at 

the far end of the bus terminal, and I eagerly boarded it. It left 

minutes later, with a wry comment from the driver, clearly 

aware I was being followed, and glad to help! 

So to Bishop’s Stortford, where I decided to get off and 

post an empty, blank and sealed white ‘white feather-like’ 

envelope at Oxford House. I had to find it first, and wandered 

through the side streets dressed in my ‘mock SAS’ outfit, 

aware that most passers-by were staring at me. Eventually 

after a very devious route, I found London Road, so to Oxford 

House after finding the railway station (I don’t know Bishop’s 

Stortford at all well) and so a path I knew past the extremely 

polluted River Stort. 

I got back to the railway station, still aware of being 

stared at, once more especially from the many empty taxis, as 

at Cambridge! No buses went past at all in the next twenty 

minutes. I had put the large over £100 deposit on a mobile 

phone the week before, so was now down to my last £4 till 

Monday. I bought a ticket for £2 to Sawbridgeworth, the first 

stop, just to be able to get past the barrier and board a train 

and get out of that town. I was heading for Broxbourne to get 

a bus home, in fact several stops away, so too expensive to 

buy a ticket for with my £4. I got the train ten minutes later, 

with no sign of pursuit, and duly arrived at Broxbourne, still 

245

dressed in pseudo chief SAS officer outfit, so again causing 

strange, worried looks. 

I bought a half-pint at the pub next to the station, for late 

‘liquid breakfast’. Then I started to walk to Hoddesdon up the 

main high road, where I had worked under very grim 

conditions years before in 1996-1997, as in “Which Witch 

Doctor?” for a defence company, Lockheed Martin. As I got to 

Hoddesdon I collapsed exhausted on a bench by the road, 

opened my eyes with my arms outstretched, to find my appeal 

to the Heavens for strength, was inadvertently also directed at 

the police station windows opposite! 

I got my strength back, and wearily walked into 

Hoddesdon town centre, and found that a 310 bus left for Ware 

in 10 minutes. I had two pounds left, just enough to get home 

with my half fare bus pass, which I qualified for through being 

banned from driving on health grounds. 

Before the bus came, I saw a lay preacher with a tiny 

young audience standing by the War Memorial, and sat to 

listen on a nearby bench. The sun suddenly shone straight 

through the centre of the cross on the War Memorial. I got up, 

feeling very moved, and walked to the opposite side of that 

cross to where the preacher was ‘crying into the wind’, scuffing 

my feet in three six-foot salutes to the war dead, before 

continuing to circle the cross clockwise. As I passed the 

preacher, our eyes met, and he twinkled at me, and I at him! 

So back on the bus to Ware, to spend just one hour 

wondering what to do next, until the doorbell rang and two 

young police constables appeared at the door, to take me back 

to PAH and Lea Ward. I explained that I had been out of the 

hospital because, as for all my previous lesser such AWOL 

‘runners’, the staff failed to prove that their precious ‘Section 3’ 

existed at all – by producing the paperwork! So I insisted on 

seeing the paperwork – scientific proof to me as a Cambridge 

trained scientist that the Section 3 logically existed – before 

being forced to return to being confined to the hospital! 

They pretended to agree with this, but drove me back to 

Lea Ward without a hint of really challenging my detention on 

Section 3. Now late on Saturday afternoon, I had tea, stayed 

246

awake exhausted, now up 36 hours, until after taking my 

nighttime tablets, I woke up quite late on Sunday morning. 

I had no money till paid again on Monday (being paid in 

full like when at home was crucial to this last runner and what 

came next) and borrowed some cigarettes as a result from my 

new friends Monica, Tracey, and renewed old acquaintance 

Brian. Already I was looking forward to my Monday payday, 

and attempting an even more spectacular and ambitious 

getaway. Desperately pining for ‘young Helen’, now more than 

ever before, I planned to get over the Channel to her parents’ 

home in Luxembourg, the very next day of Monday 10 th March! 

The ‘heroic failure’ of my attempt to reach Luxembourg – and 

ideally Helen’s arms after we could conceivably have renewed 

our love of 2002 – makes another great story, to eventually 

relate, or as here, read to the grandchildren! 

Monday duly came, and I now filled the many pockets of 

my flying jacket with my razor, toothbrush, toothbrush and 

paste, underwear and one tee shirt, and chose my moment in 

the middle of the afternoon, to open the ward door and stroll 

once more to the railway station. I passed the bank machine 

at the Sainsbury’s supermarket on the way, and withdrew all 

my money for the week. 

Once more, as for all previous ‘runners’, a train was 

leaving minutes later, so I bought a ticket to ‘all terminals’ for 

about £6 – which was indeed inspected on that train to London. 

Once in London, I walked across the road from Liverpool Street 

station to an Austin Reed men’s clothiers store, and asked for a 

carrier bag, which they happily provided at no charge. I found 

a nearby pub, and emptied my pockets into this carrier bag of 

all my minimal travel gear. Then after a pint of beer, I caught 

the tube to Waterloo, as I honestly thought that as the 

Eurostar goes from that station, other Dover-bound trains 

would too. 

However, there was a bomb scare on the Northern Line, 

heightened by fears of terrorist threats provoked by the high 

security surrounding the forthcoming war with Iraq, just a 

247

week away now. After seeing hordes of apparently nearly 

panic-stricken fellow travellers rushing past me, I diverted onto 

the Central then the Circle lines to reach Waterloo. Finally 

there, I suddenly realised that there were no trains to Dover 

and the ferry terminal, and I could not afford the Eurostar! 

So finally I caught the slow train to Hastings, as being the 

nearest destination to Dover I could see advertised, again 

leaving with “God’s Timing” in a few minutes, which a torturous 

two hours later got me to St. Leonard’s – the stop just before 

Hastings. I got off the train, wandered around, found no sign 

of any buses to Dover, then returned to the station. This time 

there was no mistake about the effect my peculiar garb had on 

people. For on the road down to the station I heard somebody 

comment as I passed him and his friends, “that man is being 

followed!” Back on the next train to Hastings. Again, no buses 

to Dover! 

Again, back to the station, and unable to afford a ticket, 

but there was again a train leaving in minutes for Ashford 

International Station – where, the driver said, I could get a 

train to Dover. I got to Ashford without paying any fare, for 

even though a pretty blonde ticket inspector got on, she just 

smiled at me and said, “You’ve paid already, haven’t you!” As 

on Saturday at Cambridge, help from railway staff for 

somebody in some kind of distress – and being chased? 

At Ashford I was still aware I might have pursuers as at 

Hastings, and so only pretended to get the lift to the Eurostar 

terminal, but went downstairs instead onto the platform for 

local trains. Once again “God’s Timing” was working – a 

Dover-bound train arrived in minutes. I did have to pay on 

that train, got nearly the last bus at 8.45pm to the ferry 

terminal, and now had only £4.04 left on me – to try to cross 

the Channel! At that point my luck finally ran out, for I found 

out that the £1 ‘special’ one-way foot passenger fare, as in my 

trip to Calais with Diamond in 1996 in “Which Witch Doctor?” 

had long since been discontinued. 

The standard minimum foot passenger fare to Calais, the 

only route open, due to military security, with absolutely all 

other routes closed, was now all of £8 – I was short by £3.96! 

So I went into a nearby pub in the town to have a couple of 

248

pints of beer, leaving the princely sum of four pence! As I 

walked in, three rough-looking men abandoned their drinks and 

rushed out, looking terrified of me! Had my ‘fame’ or was it 

‘notoriety’ in this mock uniform spread so far? 

I tried to sell my electric razor in that rough pub, to raise 

the money to cross the Channel. It would have to be Calais; all 

other routes were closed along with Folkestone and all other 

channel ports, due to the high national level of security in that 

week immediately before the week the war with Iraq started! 

However, the pub landlord would not ‘touch my shaver with a 

barge pole’! 

In the next hour or so, I tried everything I could possibly 

think of to get across to France, then on to Luxembourg to 

surprise my beloved Helen, whom I had missed so very much 

over the previous six months. I hitched lorries, first cheekily 

right outside the port police station, then, for longer and more 

optimistically, at a crossroads further back in the town! 

However hitchhiking is out of fashion and too dangerous for 

either party in this 21 st Century, so after about two hundred 

lorries had simply thundered past, that idea came to an end. 

I walked up the steep hill, got up to the entrance to Dover 

castle, and looked in amazement at those incredibly thick walls 

and moat so deep, that it had stood there impregnable for 

nearly a thousand years. I thought hard what to do next, then 

walked back down to the sea front. I rang both my father and 

my ex-wife’s partner on my new mobile phone, outlined the 

situation, and asked them directly to put some £100 in my 

bank account in the morning. Both very suspicious, refused 

point-blank in turn. 

Eventually I walked out along the shingle beach in the 

dark, and for a while scrambled on old seaweed-covered sea 

defences, until I nearly slipped in, so quickly got down onto the 

shingle beach again. The whole time, a flock of seagulls kept 

up a loud, eerie cry just outside the distant lights of the 

harbour mouth, and seemed from the sound to be flying left 

and right, to and fro. 

When I got back to the ferry terminal about midnight, I 

suddenly realised for the first time that the departure lounge 

was closed, which turned out quite soon to be due to security 

249

eing very tight at that pre-war moment. The few people to 

appear that night sat in the chilly booking office, with a chill 

wind blowing in sometimes from a night of occasional heavy 

coastal rain, whenever one of the doors opened at the westfacing 

entrance. 

I was delighted to find a discreetly hidden smoking room 

by the left hand side of the entrance, which if unheated, at 

least offered a sheltered place – where of course I could smoke 

indoors, not outside in the cold and increasingly frequent 

overnight downpours. Now with just four pence left to my 

name, I spent the night mostly there or on the seats in the 

booking hall. 

At one point, after a smoke outside for a change, I 

thought, ‘Iraqi terrorists will never invade this country with 

such security!’ I suddenly struck a theatrical pose facing one 

of the side doors, exactly like one of the ‘Kings of the North’ at 

the end of the first ‘Lord of the Rings’ book and film. Right 

hand held palm facing towards Iraq, I said quite loudly, with 

nobody to hear, the phrase these kings had used to their 

enemies there, “You shall not pass!” For some mysterious 

reason, the central automatic revolving door nearby, with 

nobody using it, promptly slammed to a halt as I spoke – all by 

itself! 

However twice I wandered past the ‘no entry’ signs 

towards the closed, locked-up departure lounge; where I found 

a fire escape on the left, decided to explore, and found myself 

inside the private office area – including the offices of HM 

Customs and Excise! The first time there, I saw an open door, 

with somebody inside, so I just smiled broadly at him, and 

said, “Can you help me? I seem to be a bit lost!” He just 

grinned back, completely at ease with me! Soon he directed 

me down the corridor a bit further to the ‘migration office’. 

‘Aha!’ I thought, ‘will they let me cash a cheque against 

my passport, even though I am migrating OUT of the UK, i.e. 

the wrong way?’ It turned out in the morning, when they 

opened, that of course, inevitably, they would not. 

I had already cracked jokes with the ferry operator staff, 

who turned out to double as security people. What DO they 

have on their computer screens when apparently serving 

250

customers – not just information on ferry sailing times, but 

CCTV security pictures? Without saying anything, they 

deliberately amused me, while I sat there, by demonstrating 

graphically how they controlled the doors to the terminal by 

remote-control, especially the central revolving door. They 

made it slow down, speed up, stop and start at will, while I 

looked on, laughing hard! 

Then about 5am I went to the adjacent port police station 

and tried to ‘hand myself in’. However I was told, “Don’t be 

silly! There is nothing wrong with you! Go away and don’t be 

so cheeky, asking for a cup of coffee!” Finally, exhausted, 

about 9.30 in the morning, I went back to try to borrow some 

money – from the police! 

Instead of obliging with this unusual request for help, 

clearly to cross the Channel, the desk PC, Ron Saunders, took 

my passport away, and soon there were lengthy discussions 

with his team upstairs while I supped a very welcome coffee in 

the interview room, as guest rather than felon. I heard a 

policewoman say upstairs, clearly about me, “Does that make 

him a hero, then?” The reason for that particular puzzling 

remark became clear later, after my next journey. 

For soon another PC was driving me in a police van, with 

no hint of any criminal offence, as fast as possible but as 

carefully as if I was a crate of eggs, back to Ashford. I chatted 

in the back of the police van with Ron, mostly about my life 

and some of his, until we finally reached the William Harvey 

Hospital’s Psychiatric Unit. I can only describe this as a 21 st 

Century ‘Victorian-style’ lunatic asylum, of the old ‘grand style’ 

of the 19 th century, just very modern and only recently built! 

There were no real grounds, just lots of car parks, and it 

turned out during my stay overnight, that most patients never 

even got onto even those! 

I soon realised I was being admitted here until being 

taken back to Harlow, and it was on my admission that I saw 

that Ron Saunders’ colleague had a large stack of A4 papers 

with him – “to do with me? How strange!” I thought to myself. 

Then suddenly this PC accidentally let me catch sight of 

the top picture of what turned out to be CCTV photos of me – 

and I did an astonished double-take at what I saw, which fully 

251

explained the woman PC’s remark at Dover police station, ‘Is 

he a hero, then?’ 

For that top picture – and so presumably all the others in 

that pile – clearly showed my head obscured by a two-foot 

diameter AURA or HALO!!! Completely obliterating any view of 

my head with what would have appeared as multiple-coloured 

flames bursting out, in a colour not monochrome picture! 

Clearly this was God’s reward to me for being such an 

‘heroic failure’ in trying so desperately hard, to cross the 

Channel to get to be with my much missed, much-beloved, 

lovely, luscious, gorgeous Helen! I immediately reacted to 

seeing this CCTV photo by saying to Ron’s colleague holding it, 

“The Russians have done a lot of work on photographing such 

things! That’s my aura or halo!” 

A few weeks later, back at Harlow, I rang Dover Harbour 

Police Station several times, trying for acutely obvious reasons 

to get hold of copies of those incredible CCTV pictures. For one 

thing, the story just might influence Helen’s then opinion of me 

as only having had a brief relationship with her last year 

‘because of my male hormones’! Especially if there was 

scientific evidence that I had a HALO that night! At first they 

were economical with the truth, in putting me off. 

The fourth time I rang, I was told any more phone calls 

would result in legal action against me! So I sent a fax, and 

left it several months after getting no reply. Then in August, I 

had one last try, and actually talked to PC Ron Saunders on the 

phone who claimed the pictures would have been destroyed by 

now! 

So I am left only with Dover Harbour Police Station full of 

that morning’s shift of policemen and one particular very 

impressed policewoman, who saw these photos and remain as 

witnesses that they showed up this halo or aura – but no 

pictures in my hands! 

That hospital really astonished me. As we drove up, there 

were clearly dozens of similar large buildings, which all turned 

out to contain a large ‘rabbit warren’ of wards. The Scarbrugh 

Ward that I was eventually placed on, was modern, but had a 

very dead, stifled atmosphere of lethargic staleness. Obviously 

252

many of the patients had been there for many months, without 

a break! 

I leaped into desperate action to improve the atmosphere 

of decay on the ward! I opened all the windows, changed the 

lighting around, to strong protests from the staff, tidied up, 

and tuned the TV in properly, from a fuzzy blur. 

Soon the atmosphere, especially with a sudden influx of 

fresh air throughout the ward, woke up the people there from 

the previous deathly pall, especially when an irate Arabic 

woman who spoke little English, had a sedative injection and so 

stopped shouting and screeching in her Moroccan patois! At 

the height of my ‘home improvements of the ward’ a Sister 

from another ward came in, laughing and smiling her approval 

of my dramatic stirring up of the ‘dead’ ward. I smiled back 

and said to her, “A whirlwind has blown in from the West!” 

I scrounged cigarettes for the night, with only my 4p on 

me. Then I befriended Liz, a farmer’s wife whose husband 

back at home would not talk to her, out of the stigma of her 

‘Section 2’ 28-day confinement for ‘euphoria’ like I occasionally 

also suffer from. I could and did obviously help her – with her 

story being so very familiar to me – so she helped me out in 

the morning by giving me £5. So I bought some cheap 

cigarettes off the hospital trolley when it came to the ward. 

Meanwhile I mostly got decent Radio 2 music playing in the 

smoking room – my idea of decent taste, anyway, at ‘fortysomething’! 

Morning came and an ambulance arrived from Harlow, 

and soon I was back on Lea Ward, on Wednesday 12 th March, 

with all leave naturally lost. My parents gave (lent?) me £150 

to survive the next ten days. I was hailed as a hero by the 

other two principal ‘escapologists’, Tracey and Monica, who as 

women in their mid-thirties, could not of course emulate my 

own dramatic exploits that weekend! 

Wednesday 13 th March – Monday 18 th May 2003. Over two 

months varying between limbo and purgatory, with a far less 

than fond ‘dumping’ by young Helen, still in Luxembourg so 

400 miles away ‘across the water’. This on top of everything 

else going on yet again broke my heart! More AWOL trips by 

253

the dozen, flowers everywhere for Mother’s Day, Palm Sunday, 

and Easter. Finally I teach myself how to HEAL rather than 

hear schizophrenic voices! 

1. My appalling clinical treatment on Lea Ward over the next 

two months or so, with no less than three locum Consultants 

in turn pretending to ‘care’ for me 

My treatment had been put back on admission to – 

haloperidol tranquilliser, orphenadrine tablets for the side 

effects of these, and depakote and lithium mood stabilisers. 

Hence I was restored to depakote, which was to remain an 

enormous problem until it was finally stopped, with huge 

pressure by me, all of four months later, as we see in chapter 

four later. 

The diagnosis remained ‘hypomania’ but if anything this 

heavyweight medication induced all of that – my mind reacted 

from being depressed and so suppressed quite so much – with 

all of three mood stabilising drugs at once, when most 

‘hypomania’ sufferers like myself, just took depakote! 

On Wednesday 12 th March, on getting back from Dover as 

above, I had missed the ward round on Tuesday – and found 

myself being given a depot injection of haloperidol (haldol). I 

did go to the ward round on Tuesday 19 th March – got some 

leave back at last, just on the hospital grounds – and 

afterwards put my ‘pseudo-SAS’ gear on and went back to 

show the Doctor. Kristos came out, and his eyes very slowly 

raked me from my head to my feet in astonishment! 

That same week the sickening three-week Iraq war 

started, and I attended a management appeal, which I lost 

because the report by my Primary Nurse, the Nigerian 

‘Kwadjo’, either grossly exaggerated – or just plain lied. Two 

weeks later, I also lost my ‘Mental Health Tribunal’ for similar 

reasons. With more truth about I could have actually won 

either, so not staying in hospital on my Section 3 Order till 28 th 

August – when it was to be renewed for up to six months 

more! 

254

I continued to try to resist being forced to take depakote, 

throughout my stay in hospital, till I was at last and at length 

heard in July! How I finally forced the issue with great 

difficulty, is described in the next chapter. 

Suddenly on Tuesday 22 nd April a new locum Consultant, 

one Dr Tunstall, took over. I did well for a week, then was 

suddenly told something appallling, with the usual rude to the 

point of stigmatised disdain, by Oxford House. That even 

though I had discarded them twice now by solicitor’s letter, no 

less that they were holding my Care Programme Approach 

(CPA) Meeting – with absolutely no written or even verbal 

notice given to ME – the PATIENT! 

I immediately boycotted this travesty of a meeting, and 

this had disastrous results. Tunstall changed my depakote, 

that I had not been even taking, to carbamazepine – and 

DOUBLED my haloperidol! When I objected that this was ‘yet 

another wild experiment with an untried drug – carbamazepine 

– on my brain by Doctors’ he grimaced – but insisted on 

carrying on! 

The following week he in turn left the job, to be replaced 

by the Nigerian Dr Okolie, who I immediately dubbed Dr “Don’t 

call us” Okolie! He said he would not stop the carbamazepine, 

even though I hated it, for fighting it gave me pressure of 

speech like I was ill! So I had a ludicrous situation from then, 

for a few weeks. “Doctor’s Orders” to refuse a medication 

written up under a Section 3 Medication Order! 

I put up with this completely ludicrous, itself insane 

nonsense for three weeks, nearly, until on Friday 16 th May, 

Okolie gave me leave for the whole weekend, only to be taken 

with my parents. As we see at the end of this chapter, the 

cruelty of them refusing to have me to stay, while themselves 

having my daughter Jenny to stay, left me abandoned to a 

‘sleep-over’ on Stort ward, with no bed anywhere to call my 

own, feeling simply ‘homeless’ again! No wonder I went AWOL 

again and caught the bus home in disgust on Saturday 17 th 

May! 

255

2. Continuing AWOL ‘runners been’ on a large scale and 

frequency 

Once I got my ground leave back, a week after my above 

two ‘runners’ to Cambridge then Dover in five days, I soon 

started to go AWOL – shopping at the local Sainsbury’s 

supermarket, or having a coffee in the town. 

In the three weeks leading up to the end of this period on 

18 th May, I must have set world records in hateful avoidance of 

my Section 3. About 2,000 miles AWOL in total, mostly on foot 

but including 350 miles there by train and back by ambulance! 

On 1 st April after the abortive CPA meeting above, frustrated by 

having no official leave at all, I spent the night at home. That 

was the only time that I actively resisted my return to hospital, 

until the police PC’s involved, followed me the wrong way up a 

one-way street, then persuaded me to get into their car and go 

back to hospital. 

I consistently argued that my Section 3 ‘did not exist’ 

unless ‘they’ proved that by producing the paperwork and 

letting me to read it. ‘They’ of course always refused this 

simplest of requests, even though you are supposed to have 

full access to your notes. In practice while in hospital you 

cannot – only if you wait months afterwards – too late! – if you 

apply to have a copy! 

3. My birthday and Mothers Day are on the same day, so I 

provide flowers galore. War galore, and then Palm Sunday, 

Palm Week and Easter Sunday come. 

In the week running up to Mothers Day, and the clock 

change, which coincided with my 46 th birthday on 30 th March 

2003, I had leave off the grounds at last. So I got flowers from 

the shop up town, and got the other flowers I needed by 

‘robbing Mother Nature’ from the woods outside the Psyche 

Unit, and made sure that there were unprecedentedly – flowers 

in every smoking room window in all five wards in the Unit, on 

Mothers Day. 

256

The following day, Monday, without any leave, I asked all 

the staff on the ward, and then my family, to get me some 

money from an ATM bank machine in town or at the local 

Sainsbury’s. None of the sods would help. In the end I gave 

the very dodgy, slow Brian my card and PIN number; he 

reappeared at midnight from the police station, having twice 

tried to obtain £200 – not from the ATM machine by the actual 

shop of Sainsbury’s. Without my signature, nor the funds 

available – I asked him to withdraw £80! Crook! 

Chaos ensued for the next week or so, until I got the till 

vouchers and got the funds back that had been set aside or 

‘ear-marked’ for a whole week after this. In the meantime I 

had no money at all for tobacco or anything else for that 

matter! 

Throughout the horrendous Iraq war I kept flowers in 

quantity on the shelf of the window in Lea Ward smoking room. 

Just before Palm Sunday I spotted in a department store, and 

snapped up, two half-price walking sticks. I bought some 

silvery-grey and holographic tapes, and holographic stickers, 

and made a bizarre four-foot high cross! It had a gaudy 

holographical vertical ‘spiritual’ bar and grey horizontal 

‘worldly’ bar. I even walked round the town with this gaudy 4’ 

long walking stick before turning it into a cross! 

It was in the smoking room window till Easter, part of a 

‘shrine to love’ made of pots and flowers. I gradually perfected 

this ‘shrine’ by constant rearrangement, with a miniature 

bronze of a Rodin statue of two naked lovers embracing, my 

parents had brought in from my flat, as the centrepiece. After 

Easter I gave the two pieces of the cross to my daughter, who 

left them at my flat. So it was on May 17 th they ended up at 

King’s College Cambridge after I put them in my suitcase and 

took them there on the train, before their final resting place – 

presumably the bottom of the River Cam, for all I know now! 

HeaLing Voices! I taught myself to heal schizophrenics of 

‘voices’ and paranoia! 

257

When I arrived on Lea Ward on 26 th February, I met an 

acquaintance of a patient also from Ware, one Brian. He had 

been there and other hospitals already for eighteen months! I 

realised he had learning difficulties and epilepsy as well as 

acute paranoia, and heard schizophrenic ‘voices’. Very early on 

I saw him have an epileptic fit, was deeply moved, and later 

once he recovered, laid my right hand over his right forebrain, 

and realised that the lesion from a fight, that caused his 

epilepsy, was healed by this! 

He was very aggressive still, and was to physically beat 

me up four times in total during that first stay of mine on that 

Ward this year. That did not stop me from gaining his trust 

and befriending him, especially in supplying each other with 

tobacco or cigarettes, when the other ran short. Finally, I was 

moved by his plight, to ‘have a go’ at his ‘voices’, and was 

encouraged in this by weeks of seemingly having got rid of his 

epilepsy. 

I found the Holy Spirit getting me to ask him where his 

voices (evil spirits!) were, and he said they were in his neck. I 

found myself again led by the Holy Spirit to use my by now 

fluent Gift of Tongues Satanic or Devil, to anti-anti-Satanically 

abuse Brian’s ‘voices’, including crucially the magic phrase 

‘metabarak!’ This was all I knew the interpretation of as 

meaning ‘Go to Hell!’ I repeated this on his ears and finally 

stomach, knowing by my Gift of Discernment of Spirits of the 

Holy Spirit – that he had ‘voices’ or ‘evil spirits’ there too! 

Instantly, after I ended this healing session by laying on hands 

again and saying ‘Holy Spirit, send down Your Fire!’ he 

positively beamed, and said they had all gone! I shook my hair 

and hands free of the evil that had left him, in case it attacked 

me… 

With that first and violent experimental case tamed, about 

ten more schizophrenics with such ‘voices’ came my way in the 

next four months, all of which I tried to heal, 95% successfully! 

Two men called John in Lea Ward came next, both with voices 

in their ears, one with them over one eye, both very grateful 

when I healed them! The first John with voices just in his ears, 

also had a severely cricked neck, which freed completely, so he 

could move his head from side to side to side for the first time 

258

in months. When it gave a loud crunching ‘click’ when without 

warning I suddenly gave him an Indian head massage in the 

smoking room! 

Terry (Teresa for short) at the unit patients’ ‘drop-in 

centre’, then an in-patient on Stort ward, has a strong 

Christian faith, so was easy! After ten seconds of anti-anti- 

Satanic abuse, as ever immediately praying down the Fire of 

the Holy Spirit to replace the voices, she looked stunned. She 

beamed as Brian had done and said, ‘there was a rushing 

vacuum sensation downwards – and they went! Thank you 

very much, Simon! That was amazing!’ 

Likewise Dennis or Dee, a Jewish half-caste man with four 

prison sentences in the past solely because of his ‘voices’, was 

easy because of his strong faith. He too was delighted – 

especially as his voices, once gone, could never again force him 

into prison. I have statements from Dee, Brian, the second 

John, with voices over his eye, and hope to get one from Terry 

soon, about her and the next person, Wendy. I met her on 

Friday 16 th May with Terry, when on a ‘sleep-over’ on their 

ward, Stort Ward. As ever the healing session took place in a 

smoking room! 

She was the only person I have healed to date with both 

‘nasty’ and ‘nice’ voices. The latter made her close her eyes 

and giggle inanely, so when after Terry asked me, I drove out 

the ‘evil’, accusing, nagging voices, Wendy nearly fell asleep, 

with an inane giggling smile. Terry urged me to realise that 

these remaining ‘happy voices’ were just as bad, so got me to 

heal Wendy of these too. 

This proved harder, and I actually had to physically lay 

the palms of my hand on her neck and nape of her neck, while 

she sat in her chair that night in Stort Ward smoking room, 

while calling down the Fire of the Holy Spirit, to drive them out. 

Suddenly Wendy looked up, looked startled but fully ‘awake 

and aware’, and said, “what has happened?” She was cured, 

that is what! 

That weekend, as we see in due course, led to two and a 

half months on Shannon House yet again, initially at least told 

by all the nurses, ‘you should not be here at all!’ Down there I 

healed Daniel and Steve of voices. Typically Doctor Mark gave 

259

the credit for curing Daniel to ‘his medication’, and Steve has 

since not been able to sign a further statement – as ‘they’ have 

changed his medication to olanzapine – and his ‘voices’ have 

returned! Given a chance – I would have another go at healing 

him, if I see him again! 

4. The amusing yet frustrating incidents with the local ‘cheque 

broking shop’ i.e. pawn shop! 

My hi-fi had been on its last legs for some time, with the 

tuner and CD player effectively completely broken. I had my 

parents bring it all into Lea ward, midway through April, and 

sold it at the local pawn shop, after fruitlessly trying to repair it 

myself. I already knew a commercial repair was not worth it. I 

got £65 for the four separates, speakers and turntable, which 

was better than nothing! 

I repeated this ‘scam’ later on, when on Shannon House 

Ward yet again, as we see in a while, after I accidentally tipped 

some coffee on my only other, portable hi-fi set, and it too 

stopped working. It eventually dried out and worked just well 

enough in the same pawnshop for me to get £12 from them for 

it. 

Many nurses, and some patients, applauded me with 

much laughter, for ‘playing that very dodgy shop at their own 

game’ – not just once, but twice! 

5. I get my posture back in amazing fashion after years 

previously slumped over tiny computer screens! 

Shortly after my abortive ‘heroic failure’ trip to Dover on 

March 10 th , and my aura or halo appeared on CCTV at Dover 

Ferry terminal, something nearly as remarkable happened. I 

got immense pain in my shoulders and down the middle of my 

shoulder blades. I found that my slumped shoulders, forced 

there by years of computer work and above all the utter misery 

of ten years with ‘my last four years in hospital due to stigma 

and incompetence’, had suddenly jumped back to the correct 

260

posture and position. My chest popped out at the same time – 

suddenly I looked much more like a barrel-chested man, fully 

matching my forty-six years, far less rather of a wreck! 

However, the pain was such that I was taken to the 

Emergency medical unit at the hospital, to be given an EEG. 

This proved normal, and not surprisingly the Consultant 

Surgeon there attributed my severe pains to ‘skeleto-muscular 

pain’. 

Young Helen had last year commented on my poor 

posture. As we see now, she has recently told me never to 

contact her ever again, which has of course caused me 

agonising pain again – but of the emotional sort! If and when I 

ever see Helen again, she simply will not recognise my posture! 

Or the new resolve on my face – having beaten all my 

problems of the last year or so since 12 th August 2002, when I 

last ever saw her and she gave me her last ever kiss – 

farewell! 

6. The desperately frustrating way that months of ‘crossed 

wires on the telephone and in emails’ finally broke down and 

I last spoke to Helen by phone in May. 

I had my last ever meaningful phone call to Helen, as I 

said earlier in this chapter, while at Chelmer ward at Epping in 

my first week in this latest confinement in hospital, and soon 

found I could not call her there any more – she had left her 

job. There was only to be just one phone call lasting more 

than ten seconds, before three in which she just put the 

telephone down on me, in the last six months! After that 

obviously, I gave up calling her, especially after a final call of 

all, in which her sister Hannah told me directly, ‘You are old 

enough to be Helen’s father!’ True enough, but this did not 

help my deep emotional involvement. 

This last meaningful phone call came about April, after on 

a rare illicit trip home I had found I could set up a Microsoft 

‘hotmail’ email account which I could use from any PC with 

Internet access in the world. So I sent her some emails 

expressing the still incredible depth of my feelings for her. I 

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got the one email from her I had got in months, and none 

since. It was far longer, literate, well spelt and to the point – 

and devastating – than anything months earlier. Clearly she 

had done some ‘growing up’! Devastating, because she 

transformed my account of my deep emotional feelings for her 

– into clinical, biochemical terms. ‘It was all down to your 

hormones’ she claimed bizarrely and to my utter disgust and 

horror and loathing. 

So in the last meaningful call, before the final three before 

she simply put the phone down, I said ‘You have got me all 

wrong! It is not all down to my “hormones” at all! I am madly 

truly deeply IN LOVE WITH YOU!’ No avail, phone down, and 

down ever since, in all three attempts. I gave up telephoning 

about June, when as we see in the next chapter, I could not 

make international telephone calls to her in Luxembourg from 

Shannon House, so the few I made were on my charge-card 

from phone boxes. 

In the meantime, starting soon on Lea Ward, I realised 

she had given me her grandparents’, her mother’s parents’, 

telephone number and address in Cambridge. So followed 

increasingly emotional calls to them asking them to intervene. 

Her grandmother seemed to like me and was very sympathetic, 

but mostly I spoke to her grandfather. He generally felt I 

should try to ‘forget all about young Helen’! Finally as I write, 

last Thursday 28 th August he finally lost patience with me, and 

asked me not to call so often. I promised him the next thing 

he would here from me would be a finished copy of this book in 

the post. With a copy of the new book I am soon to start 

typing after finishing this present book, ‘The Lord God’s Name 

is Father Time’. Looks like that is my last chance – through 

third parties, her grandparents – of contacting Helen again! 

7. An AWOL ‘runner’ in desperation , takes me as if by chance, 

to not one but TWO ‘midnight witching hours’ – in one night! 

– in Cambridge again, in the small hours of Sunday 18 th 

May. Followed inevitably by being locked away in Shannon 

House Locked Ward - yet again! My fourth ever stay there! 

262

I had a miserable ‘sleep over’ night on Stort Ward on 

Thursday 15 th May, followed by being given my first weekend 

leave the whole time in hospital, with my parents, who had my 

daughter to stay. To my horror and disgust, they simply 

refused to have me there, for weird reasons! Another ‘sleep 

over’ followed instead on Stort Ward on the Friday, which was 

when I met and healed Wendy of her ‘voices’ as described 

earlier. Then in desperation, with only pence to my name after 

finding the bus fare, I went AWOL yet again to my flat and 

slept the night of Saturday 17 th May. 

On Sunday 18 th May 2003 the ward rang up in the 

morning and asked firmly for me to return to the hospital, but I 

said I had no money for the bus fare – which was true! Finally 

my father arrived with my daughter Jenny, fully fit, although 

my mother had lied the day before that she was in bed with 

‘tonsilitis’, so could not see me at my flat! 

They soon left, having failed to persuade me to return to 

hospital with them, and then I saw my father busy on his 

mobile phone – to the hospital no doubt – in his car parked 

opposite my flat. I found some clothes, and packed a suitcase, 

including – for then unforeseeable reasons – the two pieces of 

‘walking stick cross’ Jenny had left in my flat. I had no money, 

and went round to see my friend Joan nearby, to borrow some. 

She lent me £10, just enough to pay a train fare fine, then I 

set off to the bus stop, intent on getting to Hertford North train 

station. 

On the way I happened to find the post office had had a 

bank machine installed, and decided to check my balance – 

‘just in case’. I found that I had been paid my benefit earlier 

than usual, so took out a further £80, from my £100 for two 

weeks, leaving £20 to clear the cheque I had left with Joan to 

pay my £10 debt as well as an earlier £10. 

I got to Hertford on the bus, and had a pint about 6.30pm 

at the ‘Woolpack’ pub. Then I got another bus to the rail 

station. There was a train leaving for King’s Cross, London, 

immediately, so I got on, leaving where I ended up from there 

to the Holy Spirit. Yet again my prayers that there would be no 

ticket inspectors were answered. I had two pints of watery, 

over-priced beer at King’s Cross Station, and pondered my next 

263

step. Suddenly I heard the tannoy announcing the direct train 

to Cambridge left in a few minutes. I bought a single ticket for 

all of £15 and just caught it before it left. I had already 

realised that trying to get to Luxembourg again on just £90 – 

especially with Helen recently proving ever more distant, 

hostile even – was out of the question! 

Forty minutes later a taxi took me to my old college, 

King’s, about 11pm. I had rung earlier and tentatively booked 

a tiny guestroom, X.5, where I had also stayed on my very first 

AWOL ‘runner’ back in 1995. This time was to be very different 

indeed… 

I was thirsty, so went out to a stall in the market place 

and bought a can of cold soft drink. Two policemen bought a 

burger each there, at the same time, but completely ignored 

me. I wandered back to the college, and made some coffee in 

my room. I walked round the college, then on the grass, 

answering the challenge of a porter about that, saying that 4I 

was allowed to walk on the grass being a senior member of the 

college. It was a bright, moonlit, dry, night with scudding 

clouds. 

I found myself walking anti-clockwise round the fountain 

on the front lawn which has two statues facing north and south 

on either side, of women reading large books. As I walked 

back off the grass towards the Porters’ Lodge, I found myself 

saying out loud, to the surprise of a female student passing in 

the dimly lit dark, “Amen! Hallelujah! Amen! Hallelujah!” I 

got excited. Spooky yet deeply spiritual things were happening 

in that huge dark space between dimly lit Gothic college 

buildings. 

Finally I crossed the huge rear lawn diagonally, and then 

returned to my guestroom X.5. The ritual, as if a puppet on 

strings, continued. I went to the bridge that I had jumped 30’ 

off into the bottom of the river twenty five years earlier in 

August 1978. Finally, back in my room, I unpacked the 

‘walking stick cross’, realised why fate or the Holy spirit had 

made me pack it, and went outside and laid it reverently on the 

ground on the concrete area by the river. 

On the exact spot, where 25 years ago (24 years, 9 

months, 3 days, 9 hours to be precise – all multiples of three!) 

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the beautiful depressed undergraduate I had been in 

unrequited love with then, had sat and cried very confused and 

hurt over me. The very sight and hurting of that had made me 

have my first ever nervous breakdown, and jump off King’s 

Bridge, totally destroyed emotionally, and very confused – but 

with no intention of hurting myself, only feeling desperate. I 

looked at my watch immediately after ‘being led to’ place the 

cross on the special spot of hurtful memory. Midnight! The 

‘witching hour’! 

Back in Room X.5, I realised that sleep was absolutely out 

of the question, as I was involved in a massive healing process 

by what psychotherapists call ‘regression’ – even physically at 

the exact spot where the original trauma occurred. Even more, 

at midnight – the ‘witching hour’! Feeling a sudden wave of 

peace and tranquillity, I realised that I had just completely 

solved all the pain of my first and only real ever nervous 

breakdown, back on 15 th August 1978! 

Soon I packed my bags, handed the key in at the Porter’s 

Lodge, failed to have my £20 for the room refunded, and 

headed across town to the nearest taxi rank opposite Mark’s 

and Spencer, by the church there. About 12.55am the taxi got 

to ward S4 at Fulbourn, where young Helen had gone last year 

from Shannon House. I instantly recognised it as the same 

ward that I had briefly stayed in 1978, the original and oldest 

ward there, surrounded now by dozens of low buildings 

containing other newer wards. I rapped hard on the door and 

rang the bell. Nobody replied. Typical of my entire 

acquaintance with young Helen – lights out, nobody at home! I 

glanced at my watch again. Exactly 1am BST. 12pm GMT. 

I had just laid not one but two ghosts – starting with two 

statues of female undergraduates at King’s front lawn – at both 

midnights possible in one night! 

I wandered round the other wards, and eventually found 

one with the office open, and somebody, a lady Chinese nurse, 

actually visible in the window. We talked and she soon called 

the Nursing Officer, who said that if I wanted to admit myself, I 

would have to go to Addenbrookes General Hospital Accident 

and Emergency Department in the town. I only had nine 

265

pounds left by now, so he kindly arranged to pay for a taxi 

there, with hospital funds. 

I got to Addenbrookes A&E Department just before 2am 

Monday morning on 18 th May 2003, and was to have it entirely 

myself until I left again at 4.40am, so I spent most of the time 

outside, freely smoking or having occasional drinks or snacks 

from the vending machines there. About 3am I was finally 

seen by the female Duty Psychiatrist, who chatted to me for 

about 20 minutes. Totally different to him, but in the same 

way as the hideously twisted and arrogant Dr Lachlan Campbell 

back in December in Harley Street, this lovely young lady 

doctor, found no signs at all in very tranquil me of any ‘mental 

illness’. 

About 4.10am she ‘wrote me up’ for a truly trivial 1mg of 

lorazepam, and just 1-2 mg of haloperidol, to be taken as 

required! She then told me to wait for an ambulance to take 

me back to Fulbourn, Friends Ward, where she had just about 

managed to find a bed. I arrived there about 5am, just as the 

smoking room opened. It seemed like sheer Heaven compared 

to Harlow hospital, one of many wards all on the ground floor! 

I sat and smoked and unwound or ‘chilled out’ and chatted to 

other patients, surprisingly mostly very early risers. I was 

soon even out in the lovely garden. 

This lovely dream instantly evaporated about 10am, when 

I was told to get ready to be taken to Harlow – to Shannon 

House, the locked ward, for the fourth time, and within months 

of being there last year! Finally about 2,000 miles of AWOL 

excursions or ‘runners’ were over and I was at last no longer 

being ‘let off for bad behaviour’! Above all, even though I had 

just had a completely independent second opinion that all my 

alleged ‘mental illness’ was in fact just a load of slander, and 

that I was fully mentally (and physically) fit. 

This second opinion was to be immediately, totally, and 

savagely overruled, in truly bizarre but typical fashion – as 

soon as Doctors Simon George and Mark van der Vyver saw me 

at Shannon House that Monday afternoon. For the notes they 

had, Mark said, were totally in chaos, and they could not even 

find any record of my medication on discharge last 29 th October 

2002! 

266

Eventually they had to sheepishly ask me, as the patient, 

the drugs and doses they had left me on then. Innocently I 

told them, only for them to slap me back on them, willy-nilly, 

completely ignoring my recent second opinion, that I was fully 

fit off medication altogether! So began two and a half months 

between 18 th May and 31 st July on Shannon House, of 

purgatory, hanging in limbo for ten whole weeks, with more to 

follow back on Lea Ward… 

267

CHAPTER FOUR 

18 th May 2003 – September 2003. From the sublime to the 

completely ridiculous! Instead of discharge from Fulbourn – on 

no drugs, and even possibly ‘out of the psychiatric system’, I 

spent the next 10½ weeks i.e. 2½ whole MONTHS back in the 

utter boredom, purgatory and limbo of Shannon House Locked 

Ward. 

My only ‘symptom’ remained as anger at my ‘treatment’ 

mostly based on breathtaking lies, throughout those weeks and 

the weeks, mostly kept endlessly waiting for discharge on 

home leave, that followed back on Lea Ward. While the 

‘system’ sorted ‘them’-selves out over the appalling treatment I 

had received since 10 th June 2002, mostly from the S.S.S. 

Aggressive Out-retch Team, with my family blithely ignoring 

my mounting complaints about the way that their ‘care’ was 

entirely based on abusive lies. Even assisting these cretins in 

this campaign of hateful lies most of the time… 

Monday 18 th May – Wednesday 9 th July 2003. The end of the 

nine years of my tenth and eleventh ‘Nine of Diamonds’ 

Spiritual Experiences from 9 th July 1994 

Two things struck me firmly as soon as I arrived at 

Shannon House. The first was the dramatic effect of 

medication being restarted after three heavenly days without 

any. With no consideration at all on Monday 18 th May by the 

two Doctors at the Ward Round, of my second opinion in the 

early hours of that same morning that I needed none, nor 

indeed whether I actually had any symptoms that needed such 

treatment! 

An Advocate from Pohwer in Stevenage, Rosemary, noted 

down on the Wednesday morning 20 th May, of the second ward 

round that week, after I restarted taking the huge doses of 

foul, totally unnecessary drugs, that I literally got about twenty 

distinct, unmistakable ‘side’ effects. Mostly from the 

268

haloperidol tablets, Dr George claimed at the ward round, when 

she read out the long list. 

Not surprisingly, I started a long campaign of refusing 

some or even all of these drugs, to be immediately threatened 

with ‘injections of clopixol aquaphase’ twice that first weekend! 

The second thing I noticed was that for my first two weeks 

there I had no memory at all of young Helen ever being there 

with me last year. I prayed about this to the Holy Spirit, who 

said He Or She was sparing me the agony of that. 

Then on Monday 2 nd June, for two or three days really 

acutely painful longing memories of Helen briefly flooded 

backed completely. This was while sitting on a particular red 

metal seat in the yard there! I realised, so soon after my trip 

on 18 th May to Cambridge and Fulbourn, that seeing Helen with 

her ‘ex-’ boyfriend snogging for hours in her room there on 

Saturday 2 nd August 2002, had actually caused my second ever 

real nervous breakdown! Two such breakdowns ever, caused 

by immensely powerful unrequited feelings of love for two 

beautiful undergraduates, the first at Cambridge, the second 

from Oxford. Two nervous breakdowns, both caused by 

unrequited passion, ever – both over now! 

Now reminded yet again of young Helen, I got a letter 

from Oxford University Admissions Office. Back in January, at 

the height of my stresses, I had applied to her college to take a 

Master of Studies (MSt.) possibly leading to a DPhil, in 

Theology (Science and Religion – my ‘pet subject’). It now 

seems to have been a fruitless, whimsical attempt to ‘get near 

her next year 2003-4, possibly to resume our relationship?’ 

This letter reminded me that they still needed two more 

academic references to the one King’s had sent them. Over 

the next week, I got hold of Tess Adkins, who had been my 

Senior Tutor while at King’s, and got a letter from the college a 

week later saying the two errant references had been sent. 

On Thursday 5 th June 2003, I did my first load of washing 

on Shannon house – to find it in another patient’s wardrobe, all 

mixed up with his washing, once dried! I was humiliated by 

not once but twice having to hunt through his wardrobe to 

retrieve my own clothes. Two pairs of expensive designer 

jeans, and nearly all my underpants and handkerchiefs had 

269

vanished! Only the staff who had mixed up the washing in 

such obvious vindictive sabotage, could know how these vital 

clothes had ‘somehow’ vanished off the totally ‘secure’ 

premises. 

That day, having been told by Helen not to contact her 

again or else her parents would take legal action, which 

obviously caused me no end of upset hurt and grief, I started a 

long series of phone calls to her grandparents in Cambridge 

instead of Helen. I had already called them a few times while 

on Lea Ward, to ‘offload’ my hurt, confused feelings about 19- 

year old Helen! Her grandmother was always very 

sympathetic, even very approving of my obviously totally 

genuine and extremely deep feelings for Helen, and my hurt at 

the ‘crossed wires’ of Helen totally misconstruing my deep 

feelings as ‘hormones’! Her husband Robert usually told me I 

had ‘better forget about Helen’ – but was a good listener! 

Then on Tuesday 10 th June, I had my last ‘leave’ for some 

time, which had always been ‘given out’ by the staff all the 

previous week, very reluctantly, if at all. I sorted out a new 

bank account, and took a long time trying for the umpteenth 

failed time to get a credit card to go with it. 

On the morning of Thursday 12 th June, I was left for hours 

by the night nurses, screaming and crying with pain in my left 

leg, especially my left groin, because my varicose vein 

operation of 1997 had ruptured there! Finally, finding myself 

unable to breathe because of the pain, I ran out of my room at 

3am into the yard, gasping for fresh air. 

By Friday 13 th June 2003, with no leave at all, all week, 

and a desperate tobacco shortage on the Ward, I suddenly felt 

a real cold chill of a need for ‘vengeance’. For me, for Shabs in 

2000, a bit for young Helen last year, and above all for 

Seamus, who had been imprisoned there for all of four years. 

My first challenge to myself was to smuggle the bag of 

scrabble letters, with the Ward full of people, off the only table 

there, and down the nearby toilet! Eventually I chose my 

moment, slipped the bag of game letters under my leather 

jacket, and flushed them away, with a firm shove of my hand, 

down the loo! They were soon missed, but it took some hours 

270

into the night for that toilet to completely block. The next 

Monday it required a machine to unblock it… 

Then, that night I unscrewed two fire detectors off the low 

ceiling, and also put them down the two toilets. Then I 

casually tipped orange juice on the table football game pitch, 

and then down the keypad of the awful telephone, which 

despite all the claims by the staff which followed, was on its 

last legs. It never accepted money easily, frequently misdialled, 

and the display was completely broken. After this final 

act of cold-blooded sabotage, it started ringing plaintively, and 

the nurses were alerted by this, told me off and I went to bed. 

On Sunday 15 th and Monday 16 th June, as a result of all 

this ‘behaviour’ I was given two clopixol aquaphase injections, 

despite being calm throughout it all. By Wednesday 18 th June, 

I had got used to them, so the two final ones I had that day 

had little effect on me. These were given, while the staff, 

especially supposedly ‘rational’ senior ones like Jenny, the ward 

manager, kept angrily accusing me of criminal damage costing 

‘hundreds of pounds’. They wanted their cake and to eat it too 

– to accuse me of being ill while I did all this ultra-cool 

sabotage; and at the same time to accuse me of criminal 

damage, threatening constantly to produce large bills for all 

that. When I coolly replied, ‘Call the police in then, I would 

love to see them!’ they were furious! 

Finally that week, just as the last two aqua-phase 

injections wore out on Thursday 19 th June, peace broke out at 

1am in the small hours! That morning another patient also 

called Simon, who had constantly harassed me for tobacco, 

then paid me back, with a gift of £25 on top, when he got 

some money, made peace with me. For two days after that he 

had started badgering me for that £25 gift back again, often 

extremely abusively. At last at 1am on 19 th June, I was able to 

pay him off. Peace broke out! 

Friday 20 th June was Midsomer’s Eve, and I tentatively 

translated Chapter One of the Book of Revelation out of my 

Greek ‘interlinear’ Bible, which has the literal translation of 

each word beneath it in English. I picked this work up on 

Thursday 3 rd July, and translated the whole of Revelation 

271

afresh, with lots of comments, taking about 200 hand-written 

pages, as we see soon. 

Thursday 26 th to Sunday 29 th June 2003, I did a whole lot 

more grieving, mostly over my daughter Jenny and never 

seeing her. Also over my renewed – and crushing – memories 

of young Helen, as I sat on the same red metal seat in the 

yard, where I had a nervous breakdown – my second ever – 

over her last year. 

I started refusing medication at the same time, then on 

Saturday 28 th June, when I was let out on leave by myself, I 

went for a five-mile walk, and drank three pints of beer, as it 

was so very hot. So upset was I at all this recent grieving over 

both young Jenny, my daughter, and young Helen, my kissing 

partner last year… 

So from Sunday 29 th June I lost all my leave, just because 

of this ‘escapism from purgatory and limbo’, till Monday 7 th 

July, for in the ward round on the Monday I was once more 

very bold. I told Dr Simon George exactly what I thought of 

his ‘intensive care nursing’ ward. I told him and his colleague 

Dr Mark van der Vyver about the fact that I could have gone 

home weeks earlier, with none of his oh so precious 

medication, had I been allowed to stay at Fulbourn not here. 

I got yet another clopixol aqua-phase injection that 

afternoon for my pains, but stayed coherent under it, long 

enough to argue with Dr Mark that I should go back onto drugs 

“that had always worked”. A haloperidol depot with a small 

daily tablet, plus orphenadrine for its side effects, and lithium 

at night. NO depakote! 

On the Wednesday, accordingly, I had a depot injection of 

haloperidol or haldol, and thankfully was told there would be no 

further aqua-phase injection. Finally I saw Mark a second 

time, still under the influence of aqua-phase, and at last got 

my depakote fully stopped. Now on just one mood stabiliser, 

not the two that crucified me, with the perennial success of 

haldol in depot form, for the first time in months, I stood a 

fighting chance of ever getting out! 

From Thursday 3 rd to Sunday 6 th July I wrote about 200 

hand-written pages of notes for a finale to my books ‘Spiritual 

Energy’ and ‘PROESM’, called ‘the Lord God’s NAME is Father 

272

TIME!’ This is a quite astonishing totally fresh translation, with 

full commentary, of the last book of the Bible, the Revelation to 

John. I followed that with all the notes for the present chapter 

of this present book, ending at 5pm, teatime, on Wednesday 

9 th July 2003. 

That is, the ninth anniversary of my ‘nine of diamonds’ 

Spiritual Experience of 9 th July 1994, at the start of my really 

core nine years of tribulation till now. 

I spoke to Helen’s grandfather on Monday 7 th July, and he 

said she had been in Oxford in June to retake her first-year 

exams in biochemistry. He did not know where she was now. 

I tried her home in Luxembourg from a phone box on leave on 

the Tuesday 8 th and did not let her get a word in for a whole 

minute as I poured out my soul to her. “You have got me all 

wrong. It is not my hormones. I really do desperately love 

you. I am trying to get into your college at Oxford this year 

too!” was the gist – all to no avail, as she simply said ‘goodbye’ 

at the end and put the phone down on me. On the Wednesday 

9 th July when I called again, she just replied “I can’t help you!” 

and again put the phone down. Those were the last words I 

have heard her speak in about three phone calls since, when 

each time she just cut me off by putting the phone down…! 

Saturday 12 th July. Several key points have arisen. 

1. I was put away in hospital on 26 th February for complaining 

to senior police about police brutality in dismissing my 

complaints about last year’s also being ‘put away’. The 

‘psychiatric excuse’ this time around – there was none last 

year! - was that I had stopped taking depakote. After four 

and a half months of further torture, a lot here in this 

diabolical ‘ward’ / prison, only by being very firm in 

discussion, and getting off their precious depakote, have 

‘they’ suddenly said, ‘You are now calm enough for an Open 

Ward’! How ironic! 

2. Furthermore, the evidence of my admission to Fulbourn 

hospital, Cambridge, on 18 th May, is that I would be even 

more well on no medicine at all! 

3. Very distressingly, which has made me cry heavily quite a 

lot, my one-time young girlfriend here last year, Helen, has 

273

put the phone down on me twice now. Her grandfather has 

since commented to me when I rang him instead, that she is 

now very unlikely to return to Oxford University. What a 

relief! I have immediately dropped all plans of taking a 

Master’s there in ‘science and religion’, with the upheaval 

that would have involved just weeks after the ordeal in 

hospital finally ends – in September now? 

Monday 14 th July to Sunday 20 th July 

Clearly going back to my same medication as all of ten 

years ago, with some considerable effort on my part, is 

working wonders! I had increasing leave all week; first an hour 

by myself with an hour escorted Monday and Tuesday; then 

two hours unescorted Wednesday and Thursday. 

Helen had now put the phone down on me without a 

word, all of three times I had tried to phone her recently! I 

spoke to Hannah, Helen’s sister, in Luxembourg on the 

Tuesday 15 th . She was very much against us resuming any 

‘relationship’, mostly on the grounds that ‘you are old enough 

to be her father’! Meanwhile Helen’s grandparents continued to 

exude sympathy for my plight whenever I phoned, and seemed 

to understand my continuing deep feelings, especially while 

being constantly reminded of her in that awful place. 

I have written to Helen several times this week, on the 

outside of the envelope ludicrously, because she had told me 

that ‘she had not opened my post for months – ever since my 

latest admission to hospital’. Inverted snobbery from one 

sufferer of a mood disorder to another!? I spoke of the depths 

of my love for her, and how very hurt I am, to have those 

feelings dismissed as ‘male hormones’. “How clinical – worse 

than doctors!” I said. 

Finally I took a huge risk. I sent Helen a second 

envelope-letter saying that last year she ended five days 

increasingly snogging me, disastrously, after ‘climaxing’ that 

amorous behaviour by coming to my room three times in one 

day – breaking all the rules. The very next morning she openly 

snogged her ‘EX’-boyfriend for three whole hours in her room, 

274

which I said ‘broke my mind’ on top of all the other cruel, 

unfair pressure concerning finance. I threw down the challenge 

of calling that ‘slut behaviour’ and giving her the middle name 

‘vamp’ on the envelope-letter. 

On Saturday 19 th July I tried to call Helen’s parents in 

Luxembourg, to be told the reason they were always out, when 

I called her grandfather Mr Whittaker. As they often do at this 

time of the year, the whole family had gone for a three-week 

holiday in Mauritius. So, no further chance of talking to Helen, 

or more particularly now as I really wanted to, her parents, 

about my excruciatingly deep feelings for her, for a while. 

275

Monday 21 st July – Thursday 31 st July 2003 – when I finally ‘got 

out’ of the place! 

I got four hours a day unescorted leave a day, at the ward 

round, with a promise to try to find me a bed as soon as 

possible back ‘upstairs’ on Lea Open Ward. I got a lift home 

from my father, and celebrated my leave at home by doing a 

slightly OTT letter to all of nine psychiatric units in the 

southeast that I knew of, offering my services as a Spiritual 

Healer! Not at all conventional, and this caused ‘waves’ on the 

Friday 25 th July once the long-awaited Care Programme 

Approach (CPA) Meeting came; when I was only let into this an 

hour and a half late, to find there was no meeting! 

Instead, an angry (manic himself?) Dr Mark van der Vyver 

brandished a copy of my OTT letter to the chief executive of 

the very same Unit, and said, “this is manic writing! Dr George 

has cancelled all your unescorted leave at home!” I spent the 

weekend, on just one hour escorted leave a day, very angry 

and upset about all this. There had been no comment at all 

from anyone that I appeared to be at all ‘hypomanic’ all that 

week – until they got that letter – written on Monday! 

In the meantime I sent copies of that letter to Helen and 

her grandparents, and another amorous letter-envelope to 

Helen. I could not seal a proper letter inside the envelopes I 

was sending at this time, as she said she was not opening any 

of my mail! 

At home that week, Monday to Thursday, I had spent two 

hours each day on my new project. To turn the present book 

and the other five into a set of three, one a set of three books 

or a trilogy – as I still hoped against hope to soon be able to 

turn things around. I hoped to ask Helen to finish the set off 

with a seventh and final volume of her own thoughts, and 

probably autobiography! 

Monday 28 th July was the Anniversary of Helen first 

kissing me last year, and I got no leave beyond the hour with a 

nurse escort, that I had kept since Friday. Monday and 

Tuesday came and went, angry and frustrated, and very 

acutely reminded of this time last year on that ward, with 

Helen’s increasing kisses. 

276

Wednesday 30 th July brought a strong hint from Lyn, my 

principal or ‘primary’ nurse, that I would be imminently 

transferred to Lea Ward. It did not happen that day, a letdown 

for myself. Now acutely reminded of Helen by the date, I 

wrote to her two envelope-letters on Wednesday and two more 

on the Thursday. 

The scrabble set that I had vandalised had finally been 

replaced with a luxury set with wooden pieces that week, and I 

won all four games that I played on Wednesday and Thursday. 

At last, about 4pm on Thursday 31 st July, I got the great 

news, while winning the last of these games of scrabble, that I 

was now going up immediately back to Lea ward ‘upstairs’! I 

quickly finished the game of scrabble, and before I knew it, had 

packed and was up there – ‘Out of Africa, oops, Shannon’ for 

the fourth time! 

Thursday 31 st July to Tuesday 9 th September 2003 – nearly six 

weeks torture mostly on leave from Lea Ward, even worse than 

last year for money. Yet two more epic ‘runners’ AWOL – to 

Cambridge once more on the second – when it got too much to 

take! More pain to come? 

I arrived on Lea ward at 4.40pm on Thursday 31 st July, 

just in time for tea. I had to stay on that hot ward all evening, 

getting a few hours leave the following day from Okolie by 

phone – two hours on the grounds unescorted on the Friday 

with more, four hours a day that weekend, acknowledging it 

was even more sterile and boring then. Only John, Brian and 

Tracy – who had spent just over a week on Shannon House a 

few weeks earlier while I was there – remained of the fellow 

patients who had been there before my transfer to Shannon on 

May 18 th . 

On the Friday I typed up ‘healing witness statements’ – 

five of them – for all the people I had healed at the ‘drop in’ on 

their PC, belatedly trying to quench my anger over the 

appallingly biased way this had been handled ‘downstairs’ some 

weeks earlier. As we see, I had nearly complete success in 

finding the people I had healed of ‘voices’ and getting them to 

sign their statements! 

277

That day I also reflected very ruefully, that it was the 

Anniversary of Helen ‘betraying me totally’ the very day after 

‘invading my room’ all of three times in one day, desperate for 

sex which I had to gently rebuff. A year ago that Friday – on 

Saturday 1 st August 2002 – was the day she snogged her ‘EX’- 

boyfriend brazenly for three whole hours immediately after 

seeking sex with me several times. That cruelty of that had 

broken my heart completely, with all the other stress I was 

under while helping her so very much, and caused my second 

ever complete nervous breakdown – over her, lasting two 

weeks or so in August 2002. 

Also on the Friday I wandered round the grounds 

aimlessly, very bored indeed, and went to the pub once, totally 

against the rules! I tried ringing Helen’s grandparents several 

times over the weekend, after some more ‘TLC’ over my 

feelings of desolation over her at this critical time of the 

Anniversary above. It turned out they had gone to Morecombe 

in Lancashire for a few days. 

On the Sunday I got fed up totally, with a heat wave 

predicted to last all week, with temperatures to reach 31C! I 

broke all the rules, and got the bus home for two hours! There 

I did some work on ‘Which Which Doctor?’ – revising that 

earlier volume of this autobiography. I also got two of my 

‘healing witness statements’ signed by John and Brian on Lea 

Ward, that Sunday. I started enquiring about the surnames of 

Steve, Teri and Dennis of Stort Ward, and John of Lea Ward. I 

finally found them out – apart from John, who I had to give up 

on contacting to sign his statement – a few days later. 

However, when I asked the outpatients’ reception to 

forward the statements by post, a few weeks later when they 

had not arrived so not been replied to, they turned out to have 

‘conveniently’ lost them instead! Still, as we see later, there is 

‘more than one way to skin a cat’, and I am now awaiting the 

last of four of these successfully secured witness statements by 

post – from Teri! 

On Monday 4 th August I was finally exasperated at having 

such little time off the awfully constricting, sterile, tiny ward, 

and asked Dave Whelan, the ward manager for more than just 

my two hours leave. I did not hear any response all day, so 

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made do with just two hours off the ward - somehow. I wrote 

another letter-envelope to Helen, saying, “You are all quite 

right! 46/19 will NOT go! But because of my Spiritual 

Experiences 1977-83 being about YOU (before you were born, 

even!) I think that Jesus wants me to remain a father figure 

when next you are over here in Britain! 

I had a visit from my parents – a rare event! – just before 

they left for ten days minding my brother’s huge house in 

Sussex, at 7pm on the Monday. My father had brought in 

seven packs of cigarettes on the Saturday, but I was given 

them all at once by Nurse Sylvia, so ignoring his cruel and 

perverse instruction for ‘them’ to ration me to a pack a day – 

for ‘health’ rather than ‘control freak’ reasons, at least 

ostensibly! He had made such a draconian attempt to 

drastically limit my tobacco intake on Shannon House. Clearly 

blissfully unaware that I had access to money, and did not 

actually live up to the lie that he clearly believed, that I wasted 

it all on trivia, so could afford to top this up. To a much more 

reasonable three packs or so a day – which was so vital in that 

unbelievably tedious environment – with nothing given to us to 

do all day long! 

Now on Monday 4 th August, he added to his unbelievable 

polar opposite to the grovelling apology I still richly deserve, 

for his destroying my career in computer automation, in the 

1980’s, on the telephone the previous week. Then, 

ridiculously, he blamed me not him for ‘losing my next few 

jobs’ when he was entirely to blame, for denying me of any 

new skills, so utterly vital, in a whole eight years 1980-1988 at 

his absurd dinosaur or dragon of a family company. You have 

to continually update your skills in computing, especially back 

in the 1980’s, in the ‘white heat of technology’! 

Now he added insult to injury when, as they were about to 

drive off, I said ‘at least this year in hospital you haven’t 

illegally destroyed my bank account on day one!’ His response 

was chillingly and totally flawed, bizarre even. ‘I was 

protecting you!’ he claimed, so I just stormed off, full of 

memories of the pain of the torture that his illegal so-called 

‘protection’ had caused me for all of five months here in 2002! 

279

I had tried healing a female patient of her ‘voices’ – 

Bernadette, who was a fellow Christian, so it should have been 

easy – on the Sunday and been surprised to have had no 

success at all! This happened again midday Tuesday when an 

acquaintance Jason was in the smoking room with me. At the 

time I was puzzled – and somewhat embarrassed – at my 

sudden loss of healing powers. The answer came in prayer 

that evening, and Stephen, a patient at Shannon House I had 

successfully healed of ‘voices’, and fellow ‘believer’, agreed 

with me. 

It was because I had asked for money for using my Gift of 

Healing – moreover in writing, to ‘The Enemy’ – nine 

Psychiatric Units, rather resembling then, a ‘Nine Nazgul’ of 

JRR Tolkein and the ‘Lord of the Rings’. When I immediately 

prayed for forgiveness for that transgression, I got the answer, 

‘your Gift will come back once you are sufficiently down the 

path of totally revising your books and getting the final editions 

published’! 

I had the ward round on the Tuesday 5 th August, and got 

leave for two nights at home till Thursday, with more from 

Friday assuming the leave ended well on the Thursday. My 

‘Healing letter’ on Shannon House naturally immediately got 

raised, but I was able to produce the two very clear typed and 

signed statements from John and Brian, completely flooring all 

opposition to that letter stopping any leave! Good start! 

I had to wait till, it turned out, as late as 8.45pm for my 

medication “TTA’s” from the hospital pharmacy, so passed 

some of the time at the ‘drop in’ disco that evening. Then I 

packed up everything in a heavy suitcase and holdall, and got 

up to the bus stop to catch the 9.30pm bus home. I bought 

four cans of bitter beer at an off-licence and drank one on the 

bus. After those and the £1.50 bus fare, I had just £11 to last 

two days till Friday morning! I staggered home, did some 

printing on the computer of ‘Spiritual Energy – Second Edition’ 

and fixed the aerial on my radio alarm. So I had some music 

at least, as both my portable hi-fi and my big home hi-fi had 

long since been sold after breaking down! While relaxing to 

music while the printer did its stuff, I drank the last three cans 

of beer. 

280

Terse brief daily diary of my next four weeks or so 

Wednesday 6 th August. Printed off ‘Spiritual Energy’ (2 nd 

Edition), ‘PROESM’, and ‘A Many Threaded Tapestry’. I had 

been given information by Colin of Harlow Advocacy Service, at 

the hospital, about ‘Chipmunka Publishing ltd’, and checked out 

their web-site at www.chipmunkapublishing.com – which as 

expected was ‘for mental health survivors by another mental 

health survivor’! I immediately saw that it was early days for 

his site, but was encouraged to plan to work up all six books I 

now had planned, rather than just the four up to this year. 

Including this one, up to a good enough standard to email 

them to him – his preferred method of communication. 

Thursday 7 th August. Had to go back to the hospital, partly for 

a long-awaited appointment with a Consultant on the general 

side concerning my damaged legs and their awful varicose 

veins. After waiting an hour and a half to see this woman 

Doctor, she told me I would need another operation – but 

scans for such problems were taking two years to come 

through now, not just the year I had been told a year earlier. 

So I have to wait another year just for the scan before any 

operation. I had borrowed some £15 from my mother on 

Tuesday but was now broke, so had to borrow some tobacco till 

being paid on the Friday. Luckily two men, Brian and Roger, 

had some spare that they could spare overnight. VERY boring 

evening – I remember! Had SIX hours ground leave, so plenty 

of time outside. Read the proofs for ‘Spiritual Energy’ which 

required some corrections, and ‘Which Witch Doctor?’, which 

needed lots, which I had brought from home. 

Friday 8 th August. Got paid - £159.50 for two weeks benefit! 

Immediately have to spend over half of it - £7 on tobacco to 

pay back Brian and Roger, £15 on tobacco for me for a day or 

so. £16 on a council tax bill from last year with court action 

threatened – even though I am supposed to pay no council tax, 

being on a low income! £10 on the store card I used to buy 

things for Helen in 2002, plus £35 for a single ‘luxury’ – a 

simple but good, being made by Philips, CD/tape/radio player, 

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to have my first music in all of four months! At last, after 

much pestering of the staff, especially ‘stiff’ Kwadjo, I go on 

leave at 4pm till Tuesday! 

Saturday 9 th -Sunday 10 th August. Very hard work, very 

painful, but finish revising and editing down ‘Which Witch 

Doctor?’ The heat wave has lasted 10 days with record 

temperatures for this country, but it rains at last on the Sunday 

evening so finally the humidity plummets from previously 

unbearable 100% levels! 

Monday 11 th August. Started work on Part Two of this book. 

No money left so borrow £10 from the Rethink club in town. 

Then at 4.30pm speak to Glen at Oxford House SSS, who 

offered me a lift to the ward round the following day at Harlow, 

plus to make lots of phone calls to get £80-90 benefit for leave 

time this week. Ask Mrs Whittaker, Helen’s grandmother, for 

‘souvenir’ photographs of her – she says yes, but as I write this 

on Saturday 6 th September – there is no sign of them arriving 

yet in the post! 

Tuesday 12 th August. Skint! First cigarette at 2pm at Harlow 

Sainsbury’s, when Glen stops off, buys and lends me a packet, 

on the way to the ward round at the hospital! He spends an 

hour on the phone to Social Security, getting a half-promise of 

possibly getting me a giro-cheque by the next day, on which 

grounds I am sent home again – skint! Luckily I don’t have to 

wait for medication, as I have some at home – so Glen gives 

me a lift back at 4pm. Borrow £40 from him, with him 

reassuring me it is OK to buy a vital ink cartridge for £30 with 

it. Buy 40 cigarettes with the rest. Skint again, so worried! 

Sent home to survive with no money guaranteed for the 

foreseeable future! Only get four pages typing done… 

Wednesday 13 th August. Telephone Oxford House lots of 

times, as have no money and no cigarettes. Eventually meet 

an acquaintance from earlier in the year on Lea ward, John, 

who very generously reaches in his pocket – and gives me £5! 

I get to Hertford Benefit Office, but am refused any income 

support or DLA giro! That after a wait of three quarters of an 

hour! Get home with 7p to my name! My father rings up 

angrily, and blatantly lies yet again, this time that I cost him 

£100 a week for 26 weeks in hospital – i.e. £2,600! More like 

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£260 – ten times less – in the real world, ‘father’! Mother 

takes me shopping for food and very reluctantly parts with 

£15! Cuthbert ‘Glyndebourne’ from Oxford House leaves a 

phone message saying he has called twice – typically 

unannounced – to give me an unspecified amount of 

Sainsbury’s vouchers. Finally I have an email from Jason 

Pegler, head of ‘Chipmunka’ saying my books he has seen in 

emails are indeed ‘very interesting’ but he is fully booked up 

with authors till January – ‘resubmit them all by email then!’ I 

plan to do so, but also in the meantime, for security, to print 

them all out and send him and Dick Fitt copies, with CD 

electronic backup. 

Thursday 14 th August. Hertford Benefit Office for third time 

this week! Get crisis loan of £58.50 – to last over a week! Put 

in statement backdating my income support claim to 15 th May, 

when the rules changed, so I may possibly be entitled to 

£42.15 a week from then to now! Also apply for community 

care grant, for leaving hospital, as suggested by Caroline at the 

IEE - NOT the ever-lax Oxford House! Finally ask about 

backdated DLA while on leave, and start a wild goose chase for 

next three weeks after being told to contact their HQ, and also 

Stevenage Benefit Office, the local office handling DLA! 

5.15pm Glen drops off the ‘TTA’ pills from the hospital. 

7.30pm I tried to call Mark, Helen’s father, to try to reason 

with him, after expecting them to have finished their luxurious 

holiday on Mauritius, and them having received all my various 

letters to Helen. He indeed answered, but refused to listen to 

anything I said, and claimed he was now going to call the 

police about all my ‘ridiculous letters’! End of ‘Helen saga?’ 

Friday 15 th August. No money – again! Worry all morning 

about Helen and last night’s abrasive response when I talked to 

her father! Cuthbert Glyndebourne calls in the afternoon, but 

when he calls in it is as ever just to abuse not help me – over 

‘spending £300 in a week’. Throw him out after two minutes of 

this familiar abuse! Finally, for the only time in three weeks, 

his colleague, my only self-proclaimed ‘keyworker and CPN’ 

John Murphy, shamefacedly rings the bell – only to actually 

drop off a wretched mere £10 of Sainsbury’s vouchers. There 

is no Sainsbury’s here, so I have to spend £2.25 and travel 15 

283

miles each way by bus to Harlow even just to be able to spend 

these! That took four lengthy car drives and hours of these 

two ‘mens’ time – Government time and money on four wild 

goose chases! Why on earth did they not just post them under 

the door – the first time? Finally totally desperate, I walk three 

miles to Hertford, with no bus fare, carrying various 

ornaments, to try to sell them at an antique shop. I am 

referred there to an antique clock shop in the town centre, and 

just manage to get £90 for a clock worth about £120-£130 

usually. Desperate measures! Even then, I only get a cheque, 

not cash, so lose £8.80 in cashing it at the town’s ‘cheque 

shop’! 

Saturday 16 th August. For some reason ring Lea ward asking if 

I have any post – I think I was hoping for some response to 

‘healing statements’ posting the previous week. There is 

instead a letter from Luxembourg, they tell me! So I go and 

collect it and spend the wretched £10 vouchers at Sainsbury’s 

on cigarettes. It is from Helen, a copy of a letter to ‘the ward 

manager at Leigh (sic) ward (Shannon House)’ and Harlow 

police! Threatening legal action if I don’t stop ‘harassing her 

by writing to her “continually”’. It doesn’t even mention that 

we had a close relationship, just that ‘we met last year on 

Shannon House ward and I unwisely gave Simon my address 

and that of my grandparents’! Totally dismissive of me, even 

assuming I am ‘semi-permanently resident on Leigh (sic) 

ward’! I worry about this all day and the following morning, 

even though Dave Whelan was to turn out never to receive the 

vital master copy. 

Sunday 17 th – Monday 18 th August. Desperately worried about 

Helen’s letter, wrote twenty pages of reply to Mark, Helen’s 

father – that I never sent! Also wrote two-pager to Okolie at 

2.30am, protesting strongly about lack of support for money. 

Tuesday 19 th August. Woke up with no fresh tobacco, so 

smoked dog ends in my pipe all morning! My father rings up 

and insists they will pick me up ‘at 1.30pm’ for a ‘vital’ meeting 

with John Murphy at 2pm at the hospital ‘about benefits’ prior 

to the latest CPA meeting. I reply in effect, ‘John Murphy? 

Who he? He has not been in touch at all, not phoned for three 

weeks! I have all my benefits organised – by doing an awful 

284

lot of chasing up and running round myself that he should have 

done! Forget this meeting!’ They turn up at 1.40pm, too late 

to get to this meeting, and I then stall it completely by insisting 

that they lend me £3 just to buy 20 cigarettes! We finally get 

to the hospital at about 2.25pm, too late for the insisted-on 

‘meeting’ with this incompetent, judgemental idiot. He, 

however, spends from 2.30pm till all of 3.20pm in a pre-‘CPA’ 

meeting with Okolie, which makes me very angry. So angry, 

that just because of that, when I get in I storm at him that he 

has done the opposite of helping me – principally, with really 

low income – for the last few weeks. Result – I have my depot 

injection frequency upped again, to 150mg three weekly not 

four weekly – and have to have one now! 

As a result, after being sent back on another whole week of 

leave, I spend 12pm to 2am in an agonising ‘drug limbo hell’ in 

my flat that night before at last sleeping. 

Wednesday 20 th August. Increasingly familiar story – on leave 

but SKINT! Do Spiritual Healing on my own head to overcome 

the ‘side’ effects of excess depot injection yesterday. 1pm go 

to ‘Rethink’ drop-in, to ask for financial help. Abuse Paul, the 

leader, when he contradicts himself in one breath in reply, 

laughing about it even! “We are skint! Well, we have money, 

but not in the right places!” After that I stormed out. Finally in 

desperation I go to Cygnet House, down the road from my flat, 

to find Julia Pehrson sitting on a wall, smoking, with her mobile 

phone. To call the plaintive request for ‘a bit of cash!’ that I 

made, ‘intimidating’, as it turned out she had the following day, 

was politically correct paranoia in the extreme – by one of 

‘them’ even! However she did pop round later with £10… 

Thursday 21 st –Monday 25 th August 2003. Two more final 

AWOL ‘runners’ after the official ‘they’ incarcerate me suddenly 

again – solely due to their own paranoia! 

I was still in my dressing gown on Thursday morning, 

ready to have a shower, when the doorbell rang. I opened the 

door, to find John Murphy demanding to come in and see me 

for whatever god-forsaken reason, with ‘someone else’ – who 

turned out later to have been Cuthbert Glyndebourne – lurking 

in hiding behind the wall by my front door! Typical loutish 

285

manners – they had not thought to telephone first – so I 

refused to let them in! Rightly suspecting foul play, I got 

dressed and went down the road, to find them in heated 

discussions with the staff at Cygnet House SSS! I was asked to 

see the Doctor, who immediately asked me to go back to 

hospital – with the police! I immediately surprised him by 

saying ‘I will obviously need to pack some clothes then!’ and 

leaving to go and do just that, before the police arrived to take 

me to the hospital, now with the dignity, enforced by my walkout, 

impossible otherwise, of luggage! 

I kept walking out, about three times, into the grounds 

and back for long periods, and the staff, even amazingly 

Kwadjo, realised I needed these breaks off the ward – to vent 

my anger at the absurd way I was incarcerated once more, 

with no leave. Finally, about 9pm, with 1p in my pocket and 

some postage stamps, I had had quite enough. I walked down 

the riverbank in the near dark along the towpath, and got to 

Roydon. There I took to the road, and got to Stanstead 

Abbotts, and caught the 10:55pm train home from St 

Margarets station. 

Friday 22 nd August. First thing in the morning, I drew out my 

benefit, £150, leaving £9.50 in the bank, which I could not 

draw out from the £10-dispensing ATM, and bought 40 

cigarettes and some milk. I passed a police car on the way 

back to my flat, and was ‘accosted by the rozzer’ – the same 

one as yesterday. 

Soon I was in the back of the police car talking to them, 

then another one arrived, then Ravi arrived, a social worker 

from Cygnet House, who came out with the same usual lying 

platitude ‘they’ always use, ‘you are not well at the moment’! 

So, my second ‘stripy taxi’, back to Lea ward, in two days! 

Back at the hospital I found out the reason for all this 

‘official nonsense’ and having to go back there, after an 

assessment for, of all things, me being re-admitted to Shannon 

House! Luckily Robert, the black nurse assessing me from 

there, realised my only ‘symptom’ was sheer anger and 

outrage, yet again at the appalling way I kept being abused 

throughout my stay in hospital. Especially now! For I caught 

sight of the alleged ‘reasons’ for why I was being assessed for 

286

Shannon House on their official form, in their office. I saw that 

they were so utterly false and especially, totally tenuous, that 

not for the first time, I found my whole confinement this year – 

not to mention last year – totally sinister! 

For the two reasons given were ‘not engaging with social 

services’ (bizarre – they were instead totally failing to help me 

– just the opposite, doing everything in their power to cripple 

me, especially with finances on leave!) Even more sinister, 

straight out of ‘Big Brother’ and 1984, I was alleged to be 

‘making a lot of phone calls’. Well I certainly was not calling 

social services – I had quite given up the ghost of getting any 

help from them. Furthermore I had only made about four 

phone calls all week, so this was blatant ‘spy in the wall’ 

LIES!!! 1984 all over! 

After all day on the ward, I finally slipped out at about 

6.15pm, having money today, this time, different to yesterday, 

and caught the bus home. I quickly packed my books only, for 

reasons we see in a moment, and put on walking boots, as my 

feet were hurting. By 9pm I was in Cambridge, having caught 

the fast train from Ware via Broxbourne. I immediately went 

by bus to Addenbrooke’s hospital, and tried yet again, as on 

18 th May, to admit myself to Fulbourn. 

However, this time was very different, for it was a Friday 

night and there was a two hour queue, so eventually I gave up 

that idea! “The same thing would only happen again and I 

would end up on Shannon again!” I thought to myself… 

It turned out to be too late for any train back that night, 

when I finally walked back to the station at 12.30am. Finally I 

checked into the Mayfair hotel, a small hotel near the station, 

at 1am – luckily they were still up. I paid £30, was given a 

double room with ancient shower, and had a feeble shower 

with just soap, at about 1.30am, getting to sleep about 2am. I 

woke about 8am, had some cereal and coffee, found Helen’s 

grandparents’ house nearby, on a map from reception, and set 

off with my vital parcel of my books, to see if one of them at 

least was in. 

I got to their large house and garden in a leafy Cambridge 

suburb, and Mr Whittaker answered the door, at first reluctant 

to let me in, even just for the coffee I asked for. We chatted 

287

for about ten minutes, before I left the only copies I had of 

‘Spiritual Energy’ and ‘PROESM’, and my poems and “Which 

Witch Doctor?” and the first part of this book, which was as far 

as I had got. He did at least admire the production quality and 

the effort involved in producing these! It was all quite friendly 

really! 

Back to stand outside Addenbrookes again, and once 

more to decide not to admit myself, after some drinks and ice 

cream and cigarettes I walked to nearby shops at Cherry 

Hinton to buy. When I rang my mother, uncertain what to do, 

she said I had better come back. Soon after that I got the bus 

to near the station, and caught the 12.30pm to Stevenage 

after buying two cold drinks. The humidity was appalling! 

Then I got the train to Hatfield, that left in three minutes, and 

the 310 bus to the Galleria near my parents, about 15 minutes 

later, to walk home. 

However they were leaving in an hour to go to my 

brother’s house yet again to ‘house mind’! There was a furious 

argument about them being ‘off another planet’ when it came 

to my real needs in hospital, instead staying in their ‘twee 

paradise compared to the hell they left me in!’ as I rather 

abrasively put it. Finally I spent about an hour in the local 

Galleria shops having stormed out, before walking to the town 

centre and catching the first bus to Hertford, a 341 it was. I 

then got the 310 to Ware at about 4.45pm, and packed a 

plastic shopping bag with just my new CD/radio, and rang my 

sister to ask for help getting back to the hospital. As I was 

talking to her, I saw out of the window a police car arriving 

clearly for me. “Oh, it’s OK, my third stripy taxi in three days 

has turned up!” “What on earth is a stripy taxi?” I laughed 

and told her, then went downstairs just in time to open the 

front door and warmly greet my ‘taxi drivers’ – a male and 

female PC. The only problem with the drive back was that they 

needed some persuasion to take me back to Lea Ward – rather 

than Shannon House! 

Sunday 24 th August. I had no leave for the next two days, not 

surprisingly, so spent the first half of the day annoying the staff 

as much as possible – mostly by leaving the smoking room 

door open, and making a lot of noise! 

288

Monday 25 th August. I had yet again only some loose change, 

and could not get out to the bank to get out my last £9.50, and 

was smoking quite a lot on the ward. I only got two lots of ten 

minutes escorted leave outside all day! By 5pm I had run out 

of tobacco, and Brian kindly bought me a half ounce of rolling 

tobacco, so I gave him some orange juice and bars of chocolate 

in return, that my parents had left me. Another patient gave 

me most of a pack of cigarettes, so that gave me enough till 

the morning. I planned to ring Income Support Benefits as 

soon as possible, as my AWOL trip to Cambridge had as usual 

left me skint! I took some lorazepam at 11pm to help me 

sleep and so prepare for the vital ward round the following 

afternoon, and was asleep by 12pm. 

Tuesday 25 th August 2003. I had finally had enough of being 

‘put away again’, and first got past quite tight security on the 

door between 11 and 12 on the hospital grounds, and then 

again, far easier this time, from 12.15pm to 2.15pm, after 

lunch! I was marked on the notice board as due in the ward 

round at 4.30pm, but my parents arrived, typically totally 

unannounced and with no warning, at 4pm! They went in at 

4.30, had left without any hint of lending me any vital money 

at 5.10pm, and I went in at 5.15pm. It immediately turned out 

that Okolie had unilaterally renewed my Section 3 medication 

order for a further six months, that last Thursday, notably of 

acute ‘them’ subterfuges and paranoia – but nobody had 

thought to tell ME in five whole days since! So I had gone into 

the ward round hoping to have the first section ended, only to 

be told brutally, that it had been been renewed all of five days, 

nearly a week, earlier! I was given four hours a day leave on 

the grounds from then, with the strong possibility of home 

leave from the Friday. I immediately went to the drop-in and 

got help, with a help-line number that I rang, hoping to find 

the renewal of my section 3 was illegal! As Dave Whelan had 

seemed to think that required an Approved Social Worker – 

‘and I cannot imagine any ASW in the country doing so!’ No 

such luck! 

Wednesday 27 th August. No tobacco, so I borrowed some 

money, £5 from Christine, an advocate, £5 from Dave Whelan, 

289

and £3 from a fellow patient. I popped out illicitly to 

Sainsbury’s and bought 2oz of pipe tobacco and 1oz of rolling 

tobacco, with papers – enough. I chatted to Dave, who was 

nearly convinced I was being transferred from the abominable 

Oxford House SSS to a new ‘CAT’ Team – Crisis and 

Assessment of Treatment Team. I knew some of the nurses he 

named in the team, so got quite excited at that news! They 

were ace nurses I had actually been nursed by, in Harlow and 

the QEII! I spoke to Dick Fitt at www.authorsonline.co.uk, who 

said royalty payments were due in the first two weeks of 

September, and to write an email with my books once finished. 

Last night, Friday 5 th September, I finished ‘Father Time’, 

so sent him the first five books in their finalised form, with the 

present one to complete the set once I finish this last week or 

so of diary. I had various conversations with my father about 

benefits, but however much he was trying to help, he just kept 

repeating himself, so in the end I hung up in exasperation! I 

typed statements for Dennis at the drop-in, which he duly 

signed on the spot, and also one for Teri, to try to give to her if 

she turned up for gospel singing. No such luck, so I was left to 

send it off to her again somehow. Finally that night, when I 

rang Helen’s grandfather, he asked me not to ring up so often! 

I have not rung since, ten days later – Saturday 6 th September 

– and am left wondering how that sorry ‘Helen saga’ will end 

up. As ever for poor me, another unrequited love, I fully 

expect! I do plan to send BOTH of them a set of books! 

Thursday 28 th August. I gave my letter with the vital 

statement about healing to the Advocacy Service to see if they 

could get it to her where I had failed by official means. Very 

bored all day, usually off the ward by myself, I asked for leave 

– and got leave till Monday night, at 4.30pm, when my father 

took me home via the John Gilpin pub, and a welcome pint of 

bitter, in Ware. He had brought me some cigarettes, and pipe 

tobacco – and even a pipe, claiming weirdly that I had asked 

him to buy it for me! He left me the remains of £50 he had 

taken out and spent on me that day, that night, adding to £30 

I already owed him. He was so generous, as he seemed to 

believe the version he had got out of Watford Benefit Office, 

that he told me was that I would ‘definitely be getting back-pay 

290

of over £72 a week back-dated to 15 th May’! I found that 

somehow ‘Spiritual Energy’ had got quite badly corrupted 

‘slippages’ in the text as stored in my computer, so that 

evening into the following morning was spent printing it again, 

after corrections. 

Friday 29 th August. I found some similar smaller errors in 

“Which Witch Doctor?” and my poetry, after I had them all 

bound, so these three need the corrected pages rebinding this 

coming Monday 8 th September. Once again, once I have 

enough damned cash…. I telephoned Income Support New 

Claims at Watford after receiving a letter saying they needed a 

letter from the IEE Benevolent Fund confirming my weekly 

grant of £20, as the only thing they needed before giving me 

some money. So I went to a local computer shop with a ‘to 

whom it may concern’ letter to that effect from the IEE that I 

had got in 2001, and they faxed it – without charging me! 

Finally I wrote to the medical records office at the Arundel Unit 

at William Harvey hospital at Ashford, Kent, yet again hunting 

for those elusive CCTV pictures of my HALO or AURA on March 

10 th ! 

Saturday 30 th August. I got this book typed, up to the end of 

chapter four, by about 3pm, then decided to ‘switch horses’ 

from really painful typing I was having to go through. I now 

wanted to have a break, have a more pleasant time, and get 

the whole of ‘The Lord God’s NAME is Father TIME!’ written out 

by the end of this week – which I had indeed managed by 

yesterday at 6pm, Friday 5 th September. The reason for 

switching was that I wanted a break – I was confronted by a 

tatty pile of notes covering my time on Shannon House from 

May 18 th and since then, up to now loosely attached to Lea 

ward, which ended at the above entry on 29 th August. By 

midnight I had got 18 pages typed of the far more enjoyable to 

type “father TIME” book, so easy was it by comparison! 

Sunday 31 st August. I carried on with that book all afternoon, 

until my mother rang to say she could offer me a roast supper 

of lamb and chicken if I got the bus over. I did not have 

enough money to catch the bus, so my sister came and gave 

me a lift – and lent me £5 to buy some cigarettes. I took a 

scarlet coat, which my mother had bought me some months 

291

ago, on which the zip had completely broken. The shop 

assistant in the shop at the Galleria in Hatfield said the 

manager would be in only on the Monday – when my mother 

phoned to say that he had refused to refund the money – it 

was over 28 days since she’d bought it. She was going to get 

a new zip fitted instead. 

Monday 1 st September. I made quite a few phone calls to 

Watford about my long-awaited giro-cheque for backdated 

Income Support, and went and hung around in Hertford until 

3pm, eagerly awaiting the substantial sum my father had led 

me to expect. However instead of £72 x 15 weeks = £1,080 I 

got barely a tenth of that much – £42.15 x 3 weeks = £123.45! 

I paid off some small debts with that, so yet again was skint by 

Thursday morning this week! 

Tuesday 2 nd September 2003. I had got back late to the ward 

on the Monday evening, after a pint in a pub, always a dicey 

thing to do, about 11pm. I had already taken my lithium. Now 

I found, what with the excitement of possibly being discharged 

today, and the strange change of environment yet again, that I 

stayed wide awake till 4am that morning, smoking quite a lot 

to pass the time! The following morning I was rudely awaken 

with a false alarm of ‘medication!’ at 9.20am, when in fact I 

had none to take. I wandered round the hospital on and off, till 

the ward round at 3pm. I was asked to come back once my 

father had turned up, as they had called him in again, and 

remembered it was the first ward round in ages where I was 

not bothered at all by any Ox Ho imposing themselves at the 

meeting, so remained tranquil and calm. My father finally got 

there about 4.30pm and had about twenty minutes with ‘them’ 

– whose main contribution to me when with them was to offer 

further counselling with Consultant Psychologist David 

Rottenburg. He had already seen me for an initial forty-minute 

session back in August when I was on Shannon House. 

However, I was soon enraged again when ushered back into 

the ward round, when Okolie seemed to have been capable of 

learning nothing. He seriously seemed to expect me to blithely 

resume being associated totally with the Oxford House shower, 

knowing full well I had been trying to get away from them for 

over a year, due to their persistent policy of lying both to and 

292

about me! Finally, after I exploded at that mere notion, he 

said he would give me another week’s leave until he could ‘find 

a CPN’ (is it really that hard?) the basic legal requirement prior 

to discharging me, hopefully on Tuesday 9 th September. My 

father drove me home and I carried on working on my book. 

Wednesday 3 rd September. My ex-wife’s 43 rd birthday – but no 

change, we have not exchanged any greetings on such 

occasions in many years! I posted off the ‘backdating claim 

form for Income Support’ that arrived that morning. I made 

quite a few significant phone calls, to them, and to DLA HQ. I 

actually got through, and explained that their Stevenage office 

were being difficult about claiming that I was due no leave 

money for the DLA, and they promised to act. Also picked up 

on getting the security telephone repaired, which let me find 

out who was at the front door of the flats when they called, 

after it had got damaged just before I was admitted. Also rang 

the Social Fund at Stevenage, to get them to add various quite 

substantial items to my claim I had made on the Monday, 

replacing the earlier claim I had made weeks earlier. This was 

done properly at last – with everything I could possibly think 

that I needed replacing, having been put away for so long. TV, 

hi-fi, shoes, luggage, coats, haircut on discharge, you name it, 

you have to think of everything, and put down full replacement 

value, to get a fraction of that money from the precious Fund! 

Thursday 4 th September. Woke up with no money and no 

tobacco, so soon went back to bed till 2pm. Just waking up, 

very stressed by lack of money and tobacco and how to get 

any before being paid in the morning, when I got a surprise 

phone call. Monica from Lea ward and originally Taiwan, long 

since back home in Ware, had decided to try to call me! She 

immediately said yes, she could lend me some cigarettes! I 

went round to her house nearby – to be lent not 20, but a 

whole carton of 200! We had coffee, and later on she lent me 

£10 till Friday. 

Friday 5 th September. In the post – a power adapter that I had 

ordered on Monday from the company making my vital 

computer scanner, as the old one had broken down while left 

powered on while I was in hospital. I went to the bank 

machine, to find my benefit was there, to my relief, but with 

293

£8.25 a week deducted. I recalled that was the maximum 

amount the Benefit Agency had said weeks earlier they would 

deduct to get back about £164 they had overpaid me in 

Income Support early in my admission this year. Went and 

paid Joanie the last £20 I owed her – at last, four months on! 

Went and paid Monica her £10, plus £75 for the carton of 

cigarettes – with two more cartons at £25 each on top! 

Happily replete with tobacco, and some money left over, I 

finished the last nine chapters of translation of the Book of 

Revelation needed to complete ‘The Lord God’s NAME is Father 

TIME!’ by about 6pm. Had supper, and returned once more to 

typing the present book, adding six pages of typing up of my 

diary for my time on Shannon House by bedtime at 10pm or 

so. 

Saturday 6 th September 2003. I had just printed out four 

copies of ‘Father Time’ and got to the last two sides of where I 

had got to in typing my diary – when the black ink finally ran 

out on my printer. So this morning I yet again leant on Monica 

for support, to lend me £20 to buy another ink cartridge, until I 

can cash the income support for the last two weeks of £84.30 

with the new order book I received on Friday, on Monday at the 

post office. Once I get that, I can repay her. 

Tomorrow to see my daughter with my parents. 

Sunday 7 th September 2003. My plans of yesterday have all 

had to be revised! Skint again, I was up till 4am composing a 

two-page fax to Watford Benefit Office making a very clear 

case for receiving my £520 or so of backdated benefit as a 

giro-cheque by Monday at the latest – tomorrow! As a result 

when my mother rang at ten o’clock to invite me to join Jenny 

and the family to go to Whipsnade Zoo for the day, I had to 

decline, on the grounds of being skint – and exhausted from 

trying to rectify that. Instead I will have finished the Appendix 

to this book by 7pm, so am emailing it THEN to both my 

potential publishers, having already emailed the other last 

night. This book is left with the outcome on Tuesday hanging 

in the balance – I do however feel 99.9% certain that I will be 

discharged! 

294

295

APPENDIX 

A report prepared by me with huge labour between 31 st 

January to 10 th February 2003, ostensibly to litigate against the 

Asseretive Outreach Team from Oxford House, Bishop’s 

Stortford, Hertfordshire. For them lying and showing me other 

intense cruelty rather than ‘care for me’ in 2003, especially 

with constant incessant lying about my ability to handle my 

finances. 

The Introduction is substantial and covers my entire last 23 

years’ psychiatric history. It often reproduces material I 

covered earlier in the present book and its predecessor ‘Which 

Witch Doctor?’ but usually takes such material to a much 

greater depth of detail. 

In particular when I wrote this report for Mrs Lorraine 

Summers of solicitors Austin Allen, I was incensed not only at 

the AOT Assertive Outraech Team – but at my parents – 

particularly my father, for destroying my bank account. 

Hence this report presented a huge opportunity to ‘have a go’ 

back at them, for their comparitively huge faults of their own! 

Most of the latter attack appears in the main or first part here. 

296

Introduction 

Detailed background from 1977-2003 – my ‘psychoactive’ time 

I went as a Scholar to King’s College, Cambridge in 

October 1976 to take Natural Sciences, worked hard, and 

thanks to a very high First in chemistry, got a First overall in 

my first year results in 1977. Meanwhile I had very unwisely 

been dating a second time around, a pretty but very dubious 

Medical Undergraduate from my home town – the first girl I 

ever kissed and ‘went out with’. Soon I slept with her and lost 

my virginity, and this sex happened a few times more – always 

with her being about as responsive and passionate as a damp 

piece of haddock! In the end I happened to find out that her 

seemingly ironic occasional remarks about ‘promiscuity’ were 

no joke – she was at the very least two-timing me, and this 

frigid creature was ‘sleeping around’. I felt totally betrayed 

and devastated! 

This seems to have been the first time I started suffering 

‘mood swings’. From my outgoing, witty, confident self, I 

became withdrawn, moody, often very depressed and tearful – 

and lost my confidence in myself. My GP in Cambridge gave 

me a month’s course of ‘stelazine’, now very outmoded but 

then a standard mood stabiliser. That along with a holiday in 

the Dordogne in a ‘gite’ or very old cottage along with a dozen 

college friends, mostly helped me recover. However, when I 

attended lectures in my second year at Cambridge, now just 

maths and physics, for at least the first two weeks I found I 

could not concentrate or absorb anything, even though the 

material followed on naturally and fairly easily from the first 

year. Naturally I found this problem with concentration very 

frightening. Soon, however, everything got back to normal. 

Then on or around the 30 th January 1978, I started all of 

six months getting ever more and more ‘hypomanic’ – although 

as we will see that was very fatefully, and tragically, not how 

the ‘psyche’ folk were to see it that August onwards. The 

trigger for this was actually a very bizarre, even mystical 

experience – that some people would dismiss as “the whole of 

Cambridge city centre stopping stock-still to watch a procession 

297

of five UFO’s”. For I walked out of King’s onto King’s Parade, 

the main street, realised that every one of the five hundred or 

so of my fellow passers-by had stopped and were staring up at 

the sky, so immediately did so too. I saw a stunning sight. A 

series of golden-yellow glowing lights, moving slowly and 

majestically, and far too slowly to be anything man-made, 

about a mile apart, so one after another appearing from the 

south and vanishing over the buildings to the north. I counted 

four – but other people there all told me there had been a total 

of five of these so-called “UFO’s” – I had just missed the first. 

My reaction was in fact not of being party to a ‘UFO 

Experience’, but was instead to feel spiritually moved – I felt 

deeply awed and ‘religious’ by the grandeur of this awesome 

sight. Pretty soon I was reading book after book from various 

religions, instead of attending to my ‘official studies’. Indeed I 

soon stopped doing maths altogether, so barely scraped a Third 

in my exams that summer. Then I read ‘the Tao of physics’ by 

the Austrian physicist Fritjof Capra, then went to a fascinating 

talk he gave in Cambridge, which started a lifelong interest in 

matching up the two apparently very different areas of science 

and religion. I added many more to three papers on this area, 

that I wrote soon after 1978, many years later, from 1995 to 

2001, and finally ended up with having the resulting book 

‘Spiritual Energy’, published in September 2001. 

Meanwhile my studies in physics, having abandoned 

maths for ‘science vs. religion’, were proving a huge, stressful 

challenge. For the two physicists I had to take tutorials with, 

had respectively come first in the exams in the whole 

University, the previous year, and the other, not far behind. 

Finally I fell madly in love with a beautiful yet mysterious 

blonde first year undergraduate. I was only told later that she 

had been badly depressed in the autumn, jumped off a bridge 

to try to take her own life, and been hospitalised in Fulbourn 

mental hospital. My attempts to get past her defences then 

would today land anybody doing anything like it in Court on 

harassment charges. For I sent her sporadic notes, telling her 

how much I liked her, to which I got little or no response. As I 

got increasingly hypomanic, I sometimes put token presents in 

her pigeonhole as well! Finally, when she had German 

298

Measles, I got too bold and went to her room – which she 

called ‘an invasion’ and reported me to the Head Tutor. I was 

asked to see this woman, and was politely asked to leave this 

girl completely alone. Then, three days later, having fully 

agreed as she clearly was not interested, disaster struck. 

I left my room by the river, and saw this same girl – hard 

to avoid in the confines of the college – come out of another 

door with a punt paddle. She immediately ran to the 

riverbank, and plumped down, in floods of tears. Clearly I was 

the cause of this distress, and felt devastated. I was now very 

ill, but with absolutely no intention of ‘suicide’, despite many 

such claims since. It was broad daylight, there were dozens of 

people in boats and punts, and on the paths and bridge - and I 

am a strong swimmer! I calmly walked to King’s bridge feet 

away, took off my shoes so I could swim – and jumped from 

the top, thirty feet into the water, fully clothed! I hit the 

bottom, badly cut my foot, swam to the bank and limped to my 

room to change. The poor girl passed me in the river in a 

punt. The first of only two ever-genuine ‘nervous breakdowns’ 

in my life lasted about two minutes! 

A tutor arrived, very worried, and said “Simon! What on 

earth is going on?” It was impossible to reply! He went away 

and returned with two other staff. “Come on! We will take you 

to hospital!” Then very naïve, I assumed this would be to have 

my wounded foot attended to. So when I arrived at nearby 

Fulbourn with them in a car, it was a total shock to be admitted 

to a psychiatric unit! 

However, it was only to be a fleeting first visit, lasting 

only a few days. For I was not prevented from wandering 

around. On my second day I had a further strange ‘Spiritual 

Experience Three’ that this time I only shared with one very ill 

schizophrenic, who was very moved by it, walking in the 

hospital grounds, rather than the five hundred or so people 

back in January on King’s Parade. I have had a total of twentythree 

other such Spiritual Experiences, of which I have since 

come to make full, totally convincing interpretations. Yet I saw 

all these others by myself. It seems that God, who is clearly 

responsible for all of these, felt that my seeing two with other 

people carried sufficient conviction that I don’t ‘see things’ – 

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‘hallucinations’ as psychiatrists always tell me they were. They 

weren’t. 

That experience was so powerful that I disappeared that 

Sunday to London – and found my way to the offices of the 

Times newspaper. I remember I wanted to have the whole six 

months written up by a journalist! Then on the Monday, I got 

the bus to my college, found the room of my friend open who 

had the keys to my mum’s car I had borrowed, found the keys, 

and set off home. On the back road I recognised my parents’ 

car approaching, they saw me, and we stopped. They soon 

talked the staff at the hospital into letting me go home with 

them, after just three days there. Not before I had been 

branded in a report by the Senior House Officer, not a 

Consultant, without talking to me, an ‘Acute Schizophrenic’! 

It was to take me the whole of the next twenty-three 

years to finally shake off that awful label, or the equally totally 

wrong so very offensive ‘schizo-affective disorder’, as we see 

later. I maintained for all those 23 long years that I purely had 

a mood disorder – an ‘affective disorder’. For the last two 

years, this correct view has at long last prevailed, and I am 

now diagnosed as having ‘Bipolar (I) Affective Disorder’ (B1AD) 

or ‘bipolar affective disorder (hypomania)’ – similar! 

Not only had I missed over half my maths lectures and 

tutorials – I had now had to abort my summer vacation course 

in physics, on microwaves, under Nobel Laureate Tony Hewish. 

I went to Scotland with some school friends for a week – and 

remember sleeping most of the time, totally exhausted by my 

past year. When I got home I looked through the University 

‘Reporter’ just in case I could change to another course now 

that physics no longer seemed feasible. I had previously 

dabbled with the rather impractical notion of combining 

Environmental Biology with Theoretical Physics into a ‘General’ 

Part 2 Final Year. However, the lecture theatres were miles 

apart, and the times of lectures clashed. 

Then I came across the Computer Science Part 2 entry. I 

had toyed with computers a lot at school – and my father’s 

career was based on automation systems using them. I went 

to see Ken Moody, the Computer Science Tutor at King’s. He 

was initially very sceptical, after my recent experiences and 

300

(totally wrong) ‘label’, but eventually agreed, and told me to 

come up just before the Michaelmas or autumn term started, to 

take a two-week crash induction course. Soon I was in the 

thick of the “man-machine only – no human-human 

interaction” syndrome of a very dry induction course, which 

feeling lasted all year. 

Even more than the previous year, having suffered a far 

longer period of stress this time, I found my concentration was 

very poor for lectures for the first month or so. I found the 

material far dryer and often poorly delivered, compared to the 

first-class lectures I’d been used to in physics and maths. On 

top of that, I was now having regular, then quite small, 

injections of modecate, which made me lethargic and my 

muscles twitched, and above all I found waking up very 

difficult. I always have since. Soon all this made me feel that 

I had made a mistake changing subject so drastically, 

particularly as computer science types are always notoriously 

the least sociable of students – seemingly preferring the 

company of machines! All of this resulted in me only doing the 

bare minimum recommended of course modules, so when the 

exams came I only got a II:2, as the ‘wrong questions – for my 

state of learning – came up’. 

Meanwhile the college grapevine had been busy, and my 

false ‘label’ resulted in losing most of my friends, or a least a 

sudden cold distance being placed between us by them. Soon I 

only had one real friend on the Computer Science course, and 

avoided the bad memories and sudden frosty reception at my 

own college. This was Jagdish, an Indian graduate taking the 

course as a postgraduate diploma. We got on really well, and 

he fully expected me to get another First like the first year, so 

when I only got a II:2 he was really surprised. The papers, 

however, were very different to all prior years! 

My only real consolation that year arose from a very sad 

reason, which I have not mentioned had been a major factor in 

my becoming ill in the spring of 1978, the previous year. For 

my grandfather, to whom I felt very close even though he lived 

a hundred miles away in a cottage in a village in 

Gloucestershire, my father now informed me, had left me 

£600 in his will. At his current place of work there was a young 

301

guy offering an old Triumph Spitfire for sale at that price. Was 

I interested in owning a sports car? I immediately said yes, 

even though it was to turn out to be so old it had lots of often 

irritating faults, and above all my father’s colleagues there said 

he had been completely conned – it was only worth just £100! 

However, for that summer I had a means to get to and from 

Hatfield and in and around Cambridge and the surrounding 

pubs – even though that meant being very discreet, as 

students were not allowed cars. That car survived, especially 

pleasant in the summer with the hard top off, until I got a 

company car in 1982, and gave it to my brother. The locks 

had always been extremely unreliable, and it ended up being 

stolen and set fire to – on Brighton beach! 

Towards spring 1979, my last term at Cambridge 

approached, and so the ‘job round’. I was eventually offered 

£4,000 to start as a graduate programmer by two companies. 

As a wind tunnel engineer for British Aerospace in my 

hometown, Hatfield, and also software engineer for a medical 

instruments company. I soon realised that the latter, being 

based at Park Royal in West London, was impossible to 

commute to from my parents’ home in Hatfield. The prospect 

of wind tunnels did not appeal either. Meanwhile, my year 

before college and all my vacations while there had been spent 

as a contract programmer working for the automation section 

at ICI Plastics at nearby Welwyn Garden City. I rang up just in 

case, and to my astonishment was told by the personnel 

manager for the section, “As you are now a graduate we will 

pay you £6,000 a year. We have a suitable project in the ICI 

language RTL/2, working on a graphical project-costing 

system!” This was 50% higher than the other two far less 

attractive offers, in a familiar company where my work had 

always been greatly respected, and where they had not even 

blinked to learn of my ‘problems’ of the previous year. So for a 

year until summer 1980, I first learned RTL/2, then wrote and 

exhaustively debugged and tested all of over one megabyte of 

code in it for eleven systems. I have never achieved such a 

high productivity level since, which caused many of my 

colleagues then to embarrass me by calling me a ‘genius (at 

programming)’. The section was friendly and supportive, and 

302

my only medical problem at the time to cause any comment 

from the section manager, was that I found it difficult to get to 

work on time. Several times he got annoyed and insisted that 

as a contractor I really had to get there at or before 9am, not 

9.30am! So, everything apart from that one slight problem 

looked very rosy for me at ICI – I might have had a long 

successful career, with my known skills rapidly producing 

steady promotion. Had I stayed on, I would almost certainly 

be a senior manager today. 

However, in the summer of 1980, a year into my career, 

first a very good development occurred, immediately followed 

by an appalling one, that has very badly affected the rest of my 

life till now. The good news was that I got fed up with monthly 

tedious journeys forty miles to Cambridge, then back, just to 

see a po-faced Consultant who never said much, a Dr Jonathon 

Dowson. Even worse, I had to face having an injection at the 

same time, that I really hated. So I transferred to the Queen 

Elizabeth II hospital at nearby Welwyn Garden City. 

The Consultant Psychiatrist was a Derek Gander, who my 

mother knew as a colleague and even a family friend, as she 

was then Nursing Manager at Hatfield Polytechnic (now the 

University of Hertfordshire). He rapidly added lithium 

carbonate (‘priadel’) at night to my tranquilliser, which 

however despite him trying others over the next few years, 

including ‘orap’, remained problematical and full of side effects 

until 1983. The lithium helped, although for the first six 

months I suffered bad liquid retention, with a stomach like a 

camel’s hump in that time! 

I asked him after some time on lithium, what his own 

diagnosis was, and he was tragically always to be rather too 

vague to be very helpful about that. “You suffer from either an 

‘affective disorder’ (he never would commit to ‘bipolar’!) or a 

‘schizo-affective disorder’. It doesn’t matter which you tell 

people – the treatment for both is exactly the same.” 

The second major development totally destroyed my 

career – and my own father was totally, 100% to blame – all in 

the name of a grandiose delusion of ‘making us all millionaires 

through his brilliant ideas for world-beating software’. 

303

Since the 1950’s, his own career had focussed on 

developing a series of several software languages based not on 

conventional code, but on simulating and interpreting building 

blocks from diagrams of such blocks. He had started on this 

idea by simulating early analogue computers in this way, on 

the digital computers that superseded them, and in 1970 

started his own company with two other colleagues also 

originally from the huge GEC. The idea here was to simulate 

signal flow diagrams on minicomputers – these diagrams are 

used in automation to represent processes in plants like 

chemical plants and paper mills. By 1977 they had sold over 

40 systems, and specialising in paper mills, were rivalling the 

American world leaders in sales. 

He told the family at that time, that his shares were then 

worth over £1,000,000 – on paper. Unfortunately for him he 

had not done enough legal homework, for the parent company 

which owned his, could not fail to spot a golden opportunity, 

and easily took them over 100%. He was given just a tiny 

£7,000, rather than the £1,000,000 he thought he was worth. 

That much on paper had been worthless, as he had not paid a 

lawyer to heavily scrutinise his agreement with the parent 

company when he started out back in 1970! 

Between 1977, after that fiasco, to 1979, he worked as a 

freelance process control consultant, still determined to ‘take 

the world of software by storm with his brilliant ideas’ – now to 

become “automated flowchart diagrams”. These rather than 

the high-level languages that the whole software world has 

always used, for very good reasons! In 1979 he was very 

impressed at my speed at identifying and fixing the last 30 or 

so bugs in his prototype such ‘automatic flowchart system’ in 

just a few weeks, when he and his only colleague on the 

project had only managed about a tenth of that productivity. 

This system was in machine code, on an ancient Ferranti 

Argus, incidentally at the works where he bought my sports car 

at a hugely inflated price. Very importantly to what comes 

next, he now got very taken that this Argus had a method 

called ‘bank-switching’ to enable it to use much more memory 

than the basic limit imposed by the processor. He seems to 

have had a fixation that this was essential to his ultimate 

304

target, getting me to help him to enter into a new project on 

‘automatic flowcharts’ funded by an industrial partner. Using 

the new microcomputers just emerging in 1979–1980. 

Naturally for the next year, especially as I was living with 

them as I could not yet afford to buy or even rent my own flat, 

he received a steady flow of reports from my colleagues and 

above all myself, about my much-admired work at ICI. 

Meanwhile he finally secured the industrial partner he needed 

for his new ‘Microfast’ product development – a paper company 

based 50 miles away in rural Beaconsfield. After that the 

pressure was on for me to throw up a likely very bright future 

at the blue chip, highly prestigious ICI, and become his 

software manager in his company ‘Lee Micromatics limited’. 

So that summer I finally succumbed, and the whole family 

immediately flew out to the USA. Initially to stay with my 

Godfather, my mother’s cousin, outside New York City, for a 

few days. Then my father and I joined two salesmen from the 

only supplier of ‘Xycom’ computers in the UK. These two were 

based beyond Guildford, which in those days before the M25 

orbital around London, took an impossibly long three hours or 

more each way to drive. We flew on to Detroit, and after a 

long drive found ourselves apparently in the middle of 

nowhere. For the small factory, the only one Xycom ever 

owned while we knew them, was in a tiny hamlet somewhere 

near the town of Ann Arbor, somewhere in Michigan, so very 

typically parochial like most of the USA. 

That was a bad enough start, and it soon got drastically 

worse! My father, so used to taking all his own decisions while 

a consultant, had fallen out completely with the partner 

company’s team of four highly experienced experts on 

microcomputers, certainly compared to me at that point, as yet 

to learn anything about them. For they refused point-blank to 

come on the course we were going on at Xycom, on the ‘180 

series’ hardware and the ‘UCSD Pascal’ programming language 

Xycom offered. They said they were already very familiar with 

a far superior, much faster, more flexible version of Pascal, 

being compiled not interpreted like ‘UCSD’ – and flatly refused 

to consider the Xycom ‘Racpac’ development system my father 

had already gone ahead and ordered and paid for – for a vastly 

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overpriced £30,000. They told him they were completely 

happy with the Hewlett-Packard equipment at a similar price 

that they already used. 

Not only was that very worrying, but he had completely 

failed to involve me in that discussion, merely saying to me on 

the plane ‘I am just going to have to FORCE them to buy a 

Xycom system’. Over the course of the next month, every one 

of the technical decisions about the project that he had made 

turned out to be drastically misguided! Not only did he 

completely defy all the knowledgeable advice of a whole very 

experienced team at the partner company, while expecting 

them to completely fund the project, but completely failed to 

involve me at all. 

Not only was I the person he intended to do all the 

technical work, initially at least apparently straightforward but 

which rapidly revealed itself to be vastly different and far 

harder than he had led me to believe, as we see now. I was 

his own son – yet he now condemned me to a life of purgatory 

for eight whole years, totally destroying my career, dragging 

me down after he ended up redundant until 1990, apparently 

as nobody was prepared to employ such a maverick! His 

‘decisions’ were all so disastrous that I am still aghast at my 

ever trusting him to have made them behind my back with no 

consultation. Also how there was no escape route out of that 

diabolical company, for all of eight years, as he was my own 

father. Every time I tried to leave, my parents emotionally 

blackmailed me to stay there, without mentioning a pay rise, to 

‘save him’. So to the ‘decisions’: - 

The overriding, paramount reason why my father had got us 

all to go to Xycom turned out to be solely his absolute 

conviction, based only on his experience of the obsolete 

Ferranti Argus, that ‘bank-switching’ was absolutely vital. 

He had scoured the world of microcomputers as a result, and 

only found Xycom supplying it. So we now found ourselves 

in their small, bleak, window-less factory in the middle of 

nowhere near the Great Lakes in the USA, all of 5,000 miles 

and the Atlantic Ocean from our tiny offices in Welwyn 

Garden City. We were about to find out that all his other 

supplementary decisions involved in choosing Xycom, as we 

306

see next, were just as flawed as this initial obsession. For 

within just twelve months much more powerful processors 

started replacing the early 1979 8-bit Intel 8080, and the 

Zilog Z80 based on it, which was the basis of the Xycom 

range we were about to study. Immediately the whole issue 

of bank-switching became wholly irrelevant, for these new 

chips were able to address much bigger memories, at least 

ten times the size of Xycom Z80’s, with no bank-switching. 

By 1982 the IBM PC appeared, standardised the market for 

whole computers based on these new bigger processors, and 

soon prices plummeted. To the point that Xycom prices 

were totally extortionate even by 1982, yet never dropped 

even by 1988, when Lee Micromatics finally had to be wound 

up after very few sales. My father had set us – especially 

me as the software man – on a disaster course for the next 

eight years that destroyed both our careers. He should have 

been patient – and far less obsessive and dogmatic about 

‘bank-switching’ – like other decisions: - 

The Z80 used by all Xycom computers was a slight 

improvement, but basically a pure copy of, the rival Intel 

8080 – designed by Zilog, a company formed by disgruntled 

former employees of that Intel. Yet Zilog never developed 

it, and the only more ‘advanced’ processors like the Z8000 

they produced later only ever appealed to a distinctive 

minority – mostly in defence work. Certainly Xycom only 

gave the Z8000 token, minimal support, not enough for us 

to use. Meanwhile of course, Intel have ever since gone 

from strength to strength, the hardware world leader, now 

up to the Pentium IV, with rivals, especially AMD, only able 

to clone the Pentium. The Z80 was obsolete as soon as 

1981 – yet I was forced to still program it, on now 

impossibly expensive and obsolete Xycom equipment, as 

much later as the end of LML in 1988! 

My father had either been totally conned by a Xycom 

salesman, or had deluded himself out of pig-ignorance, that 

to program Xycom computers you ‘naturally’ needed a 

Xycom development system. As well as the bank-switching 

issue, a secondary reason for choosing Xycom over the main 

rival to the Zilog Z80, Intel, was that the Xycom 

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development system ‘only’ cost £30,000 – much cheaper 

than the alternative. To put that in perspective, Sir Clive 

Sinclair used the Z80 in his ZX80 home computer just two 

years later, which was more powerful than either Xycom or 

Intel development system – and cost just £80! As we see 

below, the final nail in the coffin for me in having had all 

these terrible career-destroying decisions being made with 

no reference to me, the most affected person as his 

‘technical man’, by my own father, came when we got home. 

When I saw the state-of-the-art Hewlett-Packard systems 

our partners were using, at a similar price, I felt devastated. 

We see then, they really were about a million times as costeffective 

as Xycom! 

So much for my initial dismayed reactions to my father’s 

secretive choices about HARDWARE – that mostly affected 

ME as the system designer – with no reference having been 

taken to me beforehand at all by him! We settled into the 

course on UCSD Pascal, with some at the end on the 

hardware, over the next two weeks. I found the Pascal very 

pedantic and ‘klunky’ – it is German in origin – and 

demanding a lot of rather mechanical thinking in order to get 

programs to compile. Certainly compared to the very 

flexible RTL/2 I had just been using, and even older 

languages I had programmed in. Meanwhile the other three 

all struggled, so the course was nearly over before we got 

down to questions about Xycom’s UCSD Pascal, and finally a 

brief look at their hardware. This used a number of 

computer boards in one ‘chassis’, with the Pascal program 

on the main board driving ‘secondary’ or ‘slave’ computer 

cards to handle communications to other computers, 

instruments, printers and monitors etc. Then LOTS of 

problems emerged: - 

‣ We had planned to write our ‘flowchart interpreter’ in UCSD 

Pascal on the Xycom computers. This combination of 

‘writing an interpreter using an interpreted language – 

especially on such slow machines’ was not feasible! 

‣ Even if the machines had been fast enough, the UCSD Pascal 

‘interpreter’ took up nearly all the tiny 64 kilobyte memory, 

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not leaving enough to hold both our own program and the 

database holding the ‘flowchart blocks’. 

‣ Because of this tiny memory, and because there was no hard 

disk, I was to be a ‘slave to the machine’ – forced to 

constantly ‘watch over it’ to respond to requests every few 

minutes, to ‘take out one floppy disk and insert another’! 

‣ Above all, to my utter dismay, we had come all the way to 

the USA and done this course without my father ever asking 

one simple question, so vital to his misguided conviction that 

‘bank-switching’ was vital. UCSD Pascal did not even 

attempt to support it! 

‣ I immediately enquired frantically about any alternatives 

that Xycom offered to this, obviously for us, hopeless 

offering of just one high-level language. It turned out that 

there was only one alternative – the machine code, the most 

basic assembler language, that I had always loathed! 

‣ They offered two varieties of ‘assembler language’. One was 

immediately obviously totally unfeasible. It only allowed one 

big module of assembler code to be worked on at a time, 

and the ‘editing’ facilities – used to create and change the 

text of the single program module – were hopeless! 

‣ That at length left the assembler and editor offered under 

the UCSD operating system itself, and luckily that had about 

80% of what we needed. I only found that the last 20% was 

actually missing months later, deep into development – and 

had to wait vital months more until this vital ‘linker’ program 

was finally developed, free of all lingering bugs, by Xycom. 

‣ Without being able to use Pascal, I had to replace all the 

comprehensive, fully-tested suite of Pascal programs that 

vitally provided all the support for the ‘slave’ boards 

mentioned above. This would involve a lot of extra and very 

gory work with assembler language programs instead – 

starting from scratch! 

‣ We never did get any sort of support in the UK while I got 

stuck into the horrible task of developing on an obsolete 

Racpac development system, not even with a hard disk, and 

very limited memory indeed, so which required frequent 

changes of 8” disk (tiny – 128 kilobyte!) I felt like a slave 

servicing this awful box, which every other programmer we 

309

employed refused point-blank to touch, for the whole of the 

next eight awful years. Stopping me from learning anything 

more up to date than vintage 1980 even by as late as 1988! 

‣ Every self-respecting microcomputer engineer was then 

already equipped with a vital technology called ‘In-Circuit 

Emulation’ which our industrial partner’s alternative to the 

Xycom ‘Racpac’ development system was entirely based on. 

Despite this being essential to what we (I!) were about to try 

to do technically, my father never allowed me to hire such a 

facility for more than an incredibly tiny TWO DAYS in the 

next eight whole yawning years. He always made out that a 

day’s hire for a few tens of pounds of even a simple 

‘emulator’ was ‘too much’! Instead I found myself having to 

put up with the unbelievably totally primitive Xycom 

‘monitor’ for the next eight whole years 1980-1988. That 

meant having full listings of every line of the code I was 

‘debugging and testing’, in conjunction with complex, very 

error-prone calculations, not in decimal, but HEXADECIMAL, 

on a calculator! 

‣ Once I got back to England, there were absolutely no books 

available on techniques for writing in Z80 assembler 

language, especially the esoteric ‘UCSD’ version I had been 

condemned to write all my software in for eight years. I had 

always avoided such machine code like the plague! It was to 

take me many months before I got Xycom to reluctantly 

release their listings of very professionally worked ‘examples 

from their own work’. At length, these gave me enough 

basic hints, and finally taught me sufficiently advanced 

techniques, to actually start our own very much bigger and 

more complex programs! 

My father and I flew back to rejoin my mother and sister 

in New York, while the two others on the course went back to 

the UK. They tried hard to sell the obsolete, seemingly 

increasingly overpriced Xycom equipment as the only ‘one man 

and his dog’ UK suppliers for some years. However, the 

cutthroat PC market that soon emerged led to ever fewer sales, 

and they, our only UK supplier, went bust about 1985. The 

more technical man actually tried to sell the Xycom ‘Industrial 

310

Basic’ system after joining our company after that, but after 

selling about two in a year, went off elsewhere. 

So for the whole next eight years, my only technical 

support was from the tiny Xycom, Michigan – five hours behind 

on very expensive telephone calls, plus a substantial problem 

with the so-called ‘division by a common language’ – in 

particular their American jargon and accents were totally 

different to mine! This led to many, many anti-social hours in 

the evenings, often very late, just to get a technical problem 

resolved the same day, not the following afternoon. 

The rest of my family were extremely surprised I 

absolutely refused to join them for the next two weeks, 

spending even more of the limited company funds on a lavish 

holiday on a luxury Caribbean resort island! I could not start to 

explain how utterly devastated and betrayed I felt to have 

discovered that all the above decisions, taken behind my back 

AND in defiance of the entire company supposed to provide the 

MONEY, revealed my father was a complete maverick! So 

while they went off and ‘blew’ over £10,000, as I later 

discovered, on pure self-indulgence, “celebrating my father’s 

‘brilliance’ in being about to make them all millionaires” I flew 

home a few days later, deeply depressed. They then 

‘celebrated winning the jackpot on the lottery – even before 

the actual draw’! 

Back at the office, I found that the Z80 assembler 

language book I had got from Xycom simply gave a bare-bones 

alphabetic list of the instruction set, with nothing at all about 

writing even the simplest programme using those instructions. 

The two weeks passed, and then when my family returned, all 

sun-tanned, at long last I was taken down to Beaconsfield to 

actually meet this mysterious team of four from the partner 

company. Suddenly the above set of disastrous decisions by 

my father appeared vastly worse, once we met and I finally 

saw the unbelievably advanced and ‘state of the art’ equipment 

they had chosen instead of the ‘Racpac’. Which my father 

chose – for me to ‘become a slave to’ for eight endless years of 

‘torture’ – until our (his) company finally had to wind up! 

So, at last I met the team and was immediately given a 

guided tour of their ‘Hewlett-Packard 64000 development 

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stations’ – they had several, not just my one! These 

immediately made the Xycom ‘Racpac’ seem totally obsolete – 

like comparing a Sinclair ZX80 to a modern Personal Computer! 

In a nutshell: - 

They had bought four such stations. However, these were 

not built around early, primitive 8-bit microprocessors like 

the Z80 used by Xycom, so which were extremely slow, with 

a really tiny memory compared to modern PC’s! No, their 

machines were based on powerful 32-bit minicomputers, so 

were literally about ONE THOUSAND times faster than the 

‘Racpac’ – with a huge amount more memory as well – 

comparable to a PC of 20 years later! 

The problem of hard disks being expensive in those days 

was easy for Hewlett-Packard to get around, for their ‘HPIB’ 

network was fast, powerful, simple, and above all remained 

the ‘industry standard’ – the most common network in use 

world-wide by far – for years afterwards. So the four 

stations this partner’s team were using, kept costs down by 

sharing a huge disk - on this fast network. 

They also had access to fast tape drives, so could readily 

back up and exchange data. Even the tiny amount of Z80 

assembler code that they finally produced for the project on 

their HP 64000’s, proved extremely difficult to ‘share’ with 

the ‘Racpac’ – and vice versa, my far higher amount. For 

the Racpac only had two rudimentary, tiny, 128 kilobyte, 

obsolete, very unreliable, 8” floppy disks, over the all of 

eight years I had to use them, even though obsolete back in 

1980. (Today, the 1.44MB 3½” floppy disks on PC’s are 

hopelessly tiny, yet were all of TWELVE times the size I had 

to put up with!) The only way we ever found to transfer 

programs between these two vastly different HP 64000 and 

Racpac systems – was ludicrous. Storing the program text 

in microchips! 

Hewlett-Packard was the biggest instrument manufacturer in 

the world, so the provision of programming facilities on the 

HP 64000 was totally comprehensive, and indeed utterly 

lavish compared to the crummy ‘Racpac’: - 

‣ Every single microprocessor then available, and every one 

that was coming out at that ever-changing, most intensive, 

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period of the ‘white heat of technology’ of microprocessor 

technology in the 1980’s, was fully supported. Not just with 

a powerful ‘assembler language’ like I had been consigned to 

put up with (despite knowing nothing about programming in 

it as yet!) 

‣ Furthermore, every single high-level language then, or that 

was to become available, was fully supported by powerful 

optimising compilers, that could readily ‘link’ such code to 

modules of the faster, yet harder to write and test, 

assembler code, where top speed was required. Finally, one 

could even mix such modules of high-level languages, so a 

program could have some modules of Basic, PL/M, Fortran, 

or Pascal, etc., like we had planned to use. 

‣ The HP Pascal was far superior to the Xycom ‘UCSD’ Pascal 

we had had to abandon as above. It was, above all, turned 

into machine code by a powerful, clever, optimising 

compiler, so was vastly faster than the UCSD ‘interpreter’. 

‣ Had we developed the new ‘Microfast’ system using such an 

amazing HP 64000, furthermore, it would have turned out to 

be extremely quick and easy to convert programs written in 

these high-level languages like Pascal, to run on newer, 

faster, processors. From, say the Z80 we used then, to the 

Intel 8086, far faster, being a 16-bit processor, which 

appeared just the next year. And so on right up to the Intel 

Pentium in use today. In fact that conversion process would 

have taken just an amazing one hour of computer time on a 

64000! Instead I ended up writing nearly everything in 

obsolete Z80 machine code or assembler language, which 

was thenceforward totally ‘cast in stone’! 

‣ I was just reeling with shock from the unbelievable power 

and state-of-the–art technology of these machines, when I 

was finally told about the final, crucial superb feature, which 

no self-respecting microcomputer engineer, even back then 

in 1980, would be without. For the HP 64000 was totally 

designed around providing the vital ‘In-Circuit Emulation’ 

that was so vital to producing microprocessor programs – 

not only that, once more it supported every micro then 

available, with ongoing support from the huge HP for all 

future micros! 

313

‣ With emulation this powerful, you could “watch your (Pascal, 

other high-level language, OR assembler language) program 

run!” - at the level of the source text, but constantly able to 

monitor memory, and the ‘registers’ so vital to computers. 

This was fantastic compared to what I had to use! 

‣ For it was far from the “Charles Babbage Calculating Engine 

circa 1880” vintage ‘method’ I was to have to put up with. 

Where, as I said, I always had to take a fresh listing of any 

module of assembler language program I had changed, in 

order to have accurate addresses – to cross-refer to other 

such listings like a 19 th century clerk, but needing to 

constantly use a ‘hex’ calculator! 

‣ Above all, the support for these machines was huge, and as 

they were very popular, not surprisingly, the price fell 

steadily as more were sold worldwide. We would never have 

had any problems with technical support or upgrades, with 

the huge HP representation in the UK! Instead I had just 

met the two ‘man and his dog’ men supplying XYCOM in the 

UK, and realised they were technically totally incompetent to 

help me with more than the most basic support for 

developing in assembler language on the ‘Racpac’! I had to 

put up with telephone and fax support from a backwater in 

the USA, 5 hours behind! 

Naturally I asked the price of one of these machines, with 

a hard disk, expecting it to be £100,000 or so – to be 

astonished and appalled, in fact, to be told that that basic 

essential set-up for one programmer like me, cost hardly more 

than the ‘Racpac’. Just two years later, Clive Sinclair 

introduced a Z80-based ‘ZX80’ computer faster and bigger than 

the Racpac, for just £80 not £30,000! 

In fact the price of the lovely Hewlett-Packard 64000 was 

to fall steadily, in line with volume sold, as computer prices fell 

steadily, and competition arose. By contrast, the prices at the 

tiny, very soon obsolete Xycom, if anything were always 

absolutely ludicrous, yet kept rising throughout those eight 

years! 

By 1983 Xycom had at last brought out a hard disk – of 

just 10 megabytes. Yet it was ugly and black like everything 

they made - vast, covering half a desk, and a foot high – and 

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above all cost a ludicrous £10,000+! Totally absurd - for you 

could buy fifteen IBM PC’s WITH 20MB hard disk at that price! 

Again, in 1988 their complex, totally unreliable memory 

boards still only held a minuscule 64 kilobytes yet cost a vast 

£1,000. Yet single, so very reliable, tiny chips holding 200 

times that much memory, of one megabyte – cost only about 

£100 at that time. They were all of 2,000 times better value 

than Xycom! 

So, at long last, very reluctantly, it seemed, my father 

introduced me to this team of experts, relatively speaking, on 

micros. At that stage I had found out to my horror, that my 

father had already not only ordered, but fully paid for, a 

Racpac machine from the absurdly unheard-of, totally obscure 

Xycom, for all the wrong reasons, in Michigan, USA. Rather 

than the mighty HP 64000 at the same price, that was about 

30 years more advanced in rough comparison! 

I had felt my career immediately being threatened by 

every single one of my father’s secretive, behind my back, yet 

all bizarrely crazy, technical decisions. The final nail in the 

coffin for me of the past four weeks was that now I felt 

UTTERLY betrayed by his lavishness. He ‘put the cart 

completely before the horse’ by trying to impose a £30,000 

machine less powerful than an £80 ZX80 – on not only the 

partner providing all the funding, in defiance of their superior 

knowledge – and so infinitely superior and professional 

equipment. 

He had also done the dirty on his own son, supposedly the 

‘technical expert’, even before taking me on a course at 

Xycom, that was all a huge waste of time and money, and only 

revealed that purchase to be disastrous! Above all, he had 

finally, completely ludicrously taken the entire family – apart 

from me refusing point-blank on principle after that! – and 

blown £15,000 in 1980 terms, on a lavish, self-indulgent 

holiday for two weeks in a Caribbean resort! 

So I was astonished at his sheer hypocrisy when he asked 

Bryan, the “other side’s” team leader to buy us an HP 64000! 

To receive a shrewd, cynical laugh from Bryan, and the reply, 

“You buy one!” Knowing he – and his wife and daughter in a 

ludicrous “let us celebrate Dad making us lottery millionaires 

315

even before the lottery is drawn!” – had blown vital money that 

could have bought one! Not to mention that my father could 

have bought one instead of the Xycom crap! 

Now, of course, the boot was entirely on the other foot – 

as the partner’s team now revealed my father to be a complete 

maverick, who was obsessed that ‘only he in the entire wide 

world of computers knew the only way to program them – 

“simulation of (1950’s vintage!) flowcharts”! So only he – in 

secret, furtively – could make decisions’! The meeting 

continued, and got worse if anything! For they pointed out 

numerous ugly ‘bugs’ – fixes to the design with dangling bits of 

wire! – on most of the Xycom boards they had so far received 

– and said ‘that was appalling!’ Yet another very bad piece of 

writing on the wall... 

As we see later, my problems of the next eight years (if 

not the next 23 years 1980-2003!) all arose from my father’s 

initial arrogant, furtive and secretive even, yet to prove totally 

disastrous set of decisions that I have deliberately spent many 

pages, going into. I was completely betrayed by my own 

father, yet for some time stayed loyal – just because he was 

my father. 

For any software engineer who was not the “boss’s son” 

and moreover, had to live with him for over a year from then, 

would have left straight away and ‘dumped the dinosaur’ I was 

now imposed with by him. Decided behind my back, with no 

consultation with his own son – and supposedly his ‘technical 

guru’! 

Then when I did often ‘try to get out and escape’ – my 

mother and father ‘emotionally blackmailed’ me to stay. ‘To 

save my own father’ (i.e. from himself!) 

The UTTER HYPOCRISY after all THAT - of my father smearing 

me totally to all the nurses, and social services, while I was in 

Harlow hospital last year. Over completely non-existent ‘lavish 

overspending’ – of £1.40/day i.e. 6 cigarettes a day! 

I have gone into such great detail to now, because yet 

again, on 11 th June last year, my father tried to destroy me by 

316

going behind my back, and destroying my bank account, as 

soon as I was admitted to Harlow hospital’s psychiatric wing, 

yet only achieved that totally illegally! For that vicious act was 

done by him and the Bank Manager acting in total violation of 

the Law – both the Data Protection Act AND basic legal 

requirements for a Deed of Attorney for their actions! 

Yet he lied about me in doing so, to justify his sheer 

‘control freak’ megalomania, that ‘I needed protecting from 

myself!’ All done while I was powerless, being on my second 

day in mental hospital, to stop him only doing that to me by 

breaking the law and so inflicting his own son with totally 

unnecessary and vast problems, lasting five months at least, 

and increasing mental torture. 

This has a huge bearing on the parallel ‘mental torture’ by 

the ‘Assertive Outreach Team’, that this led to, as we now see. 

For they ruthlessly exploited the way he broke the law – to join 

him in mentally torturing and abusing his own son, for months 

of my stay in Harlow Hospital! For after my admission on 10 th 

June: - 

1. He saw my Bank Manager, one Zoe Harrison of the Woolwich 

plc, 7 Maidenhead Street, Hertford, who gave him a 

complete print-out of the whole history of my then three 

years of my account there. Not only that, complete 

printouts of my transactions for the next four or five months. 

He still ludicrously crows about and boasts about all this, 

which completely violated the Data Protection Act!!! 

2. Between them, Harrison and he then acted without seeking 

any legally minimum requirement of a Power of Attorney, 

cancelling my 100% essential Electron bank card, without 

which the account was inoperable for the next four whole 

months (in a locked Psychiatric ward, above all, so it 

tortured me!) 

3. She gave my father, totally illegally, control over my 

chequebook, only allowing me to pay cheques to him. About 

a month later, the bank even stopped that cheque book. I 

had to endure half-hour trips to the branch in Harlow, on 

odd days I was allowed out within office times, to attempt to 

run that account – with just my only ID – an out-of-date 

317

driving licence, on which luckily the photo-card is valid ten 

years! Otherwise I had to make expensive ‘telephone 

banking’ calls to get balances and other essential 

information. 

4. Despite doing all this, he told all the control freak nurses 

AND the Assertive Outreach Team that I was ‘lavishly 

overspending’. Soon the nurses were echoing this 

COMPLETE LIE and totally censoring my access to the 

Woolwich branch, as a result, and constantly intrusively 

demanding to know about my allegedly ‘vastly overspent’ 

bank account. Yet in those over four months, it never once 

passed its overdraft limit, despite my precious father and my 

bank manager trying to completely destroy it, and a ‘signal’ 

being put on it after I phoned the bank’s fraud squad about 

their illegally savaging my account. Some two months later, 

I finally got my bank card back, and after three whole times 

of the cheque book being mysteriously made invalid then reinstated 

at my request, the cheque book finally seemed to 

be useable again. So, after four whole months of sheer 

torture due to my father’s totally illegal actions, above all in 

such a dreadful confinement, I got my account back. 

5. The ‘lavish overspending’ turned out, over all of twenty 

weeks, to be at most about £400, according to my Father. 

That is only about £2 a day i.e. eight cigarettes a day! That 

only after my father wrecked my bank account – I had no 

trouble with banking in the year 2000, trapped on the same 

locked ward! 

6. The way that the Assertive Outreach Team commenced to 

smear me after my father acted so illegally, basing their lies 

solely on his lies about ‘vast lavish overspending’ of in reality 

£1.40 a day, was deeply sinister. I requested an Appeal 

over my ‘Section 3’ to the Hospital Managers, and the 

reports from them, the doctor and my nurse mysteriously 

only arrived ten minutes beforehand. When I saw the 

literally pages of lies about my alleged ‘lavish overspending’ 

I naturally exploded with fury, especially as unlike all other 

such appeals I had attended, the reports had nothing good 

to say about me. When Cuthbert Glyndebourne, the 

manager of the Aggressive Out-retch Team, sat in the 

318

Appeal and spouted all these lies for all of ten minutes, 

meanwhile my parents sat there, and nodded like lap-dogs 

at his ‘wisdom’. I felt so sick and betrayed by them, I had to 

physically block my ears and cover my eyes from hearing 

this sheer unmitigated rubbish! 

7. I complained bitterly to the bank several times, and only 

months later, got the first of three letters apologising, the 

last one unreservedly, and a meagre £125 ‘compensation’! 

My father and the bank need to be ‘hauled over the coals’ 

over all this abuse of me – by breaking the law! Was it in 

any way criminal? 

319

Back to 1980-1988 and the nightmare I endured that now 

wrecked my career completely – thanks to my Father’s 

breathtaking yet imbecilic ARROGANCE! 

After that first terrifying meeting in Beaconsfield with the 

industrial partner, the project already seemed to be doomed. 

The problem of total incompatibility between the appalling 

Racpac my own father had doomed me to slave over for the 

next eight years, and the comparatively sophisticated, 

lightning-fast HP 64000, was to prove insurmountable. I was 

left feeling desperate - totally trapped in an unbelievable 

nightmare, thanks to my own father, who as we have just seen 

was still recently prepared to completely bypass the law to try 

to destroy me; while totally falsely claiming that ‘I needed 

protecting from myself’! 

So we returned to our tiny offices above a shop in Welwyn 

Garden City, to work on a functional specification for the 

proposed system. My father had, as I mentioned some pages 

back, got me to get the last 30 or so bugs out of the machine 

code for the prototype for this venture – at a plant in 

Stevenage. Now I finally saw the full, detailed design for that 

‘SAFE’ system of his, which stood for ‘Software for Automatic 

Flowchart Execution’. I could see that turning it into the vastly 

more ambitious ‘Microfast’ (‘Microcomputer Flowchart 

Automation System Technology’) would have been difficult 

even had we bought an HP 64000. With only the dreadful 

Racpac, and my steep learning curve ahead with Z80 

assembler language, it looked like a horror story! 

For it now turned out that developing something as unique 

and maverick as a ‘flowchart diagram interpreter’ was 

massively compounded, as we see below, by the fact that 

virtually every single small feature of the ‘SAFE’ design 

contained equally bizarre quirks. These appeared to be 

‘different to the way the entire rest of the software world would 

do it, for bizarre reasons, known only to my father in his now 

very tarnished “brilliance”!’ I’ll try as briefly as possible to 

convey the sheer nightmare of the ‘system’ I was to spend 

working on, like an absolute Trojan slave, under impossible 

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technical conditions, and a ‘career’ doomed by my own father 

1980-1988, and indeed 1988-2003, in the next few pages: - 

Many ‘quirky pieces’ needed redesigning in what the whole 

software world, nearly without exception, even our 

customers, came to see as a ‘maverick system’. Certainly 

never a contender to challenge ‘high level languages’! My 

father and I fought huge battles even over providing the 

simplest features of any conventional language – ‘assembler’ 

or ‘high-level’. Yet I never did get him to fully accept that 

because absolutely every other language did something a 

simple way, we should do so too rather than his 

‘mysteriously “clever” way’! 

1. Even the most simplistic ‘assignment’ or ‘move’ operations 

had to be added! Quite unbelievably, it took me ages to 

persuade my father that the simplest and commonest 

operation of all to any computer language, ‘flowchart 

interpreted’ included, was the simple operation of copying a 

number or other data from one location to another. His 

‘SAFE’ system had, incredibly, somehow coped without one - 

seemingly by carrying out a ‘dummy, add to zero’ operation, 

which was very wasteful! As I expected, the vast majority of 

programs we wrote with the ‘Microfast’ used the resulting 

‘transfer block’ most frequently of all the ‘flowchart block 

macros’ in the eventual suite of about 20. 

2. ‘SAFE’ had only one type of number – and a very ‘quirky, Bill 

Lee special’ oddball ‘fixed point’ type at that! I had to force 

him to accept that to match other ‘languages’, we needed 

others, as on even any self-respecting calculator! Once 

again, the provision by the prototype ‘SAFE’ system, of 

numbers, was bizarre. They were all held as a ‘whole 

number with three fixed places of decimals’ – ‘fixed point’ – 

which my father was absolutely adamant we retain, however 

much I extolled the virtues of standard ‘floating-point’ 

instead! Finally we compromised, and I ‘designed in’ both – 

as well as straightforward integer, and ‘hex’ (integers shown 

and handled as a hexadecimal or micro-computer number). 

The provision of all these was essential – yet as expected, 

321

his ‘fixed point’ was always ‘oddball’ and against the grain of 

modern computers. What with the vastly more flexible 

floating-point being available, it was cumbersome, totally 

inflexible, and really unnecessary. Yet he insisted! 

3. Lists and Tables. These were to prove absolutely vital to the 

– limited – success of the Microfast product. Yet again, they 

– and the data structures they could contain – despite being 

about ‘half the story of any high-level language’ – had again 

mysteriously, ‘been done a special, allegedly clever’ way in 

my father’s ‘SAFE’ prototype! There had been a special 

assembler language ‘flowchart block’ that did all such list 

handling – hidden in the depths of a program written in 

assembler. So I immediately designed a way of handling 

large areas of consecutive memory, as such ‘lists’ or ‘tables’, 

as well as putting data in them and getting it out, by 

specifying a row and/or column, which became a crucial part 

of the design. 

4. Fundamentally simple, obvious ‘calculator’ operations (add, 

subtract, multiply and divide) always remained apparently 

complete anathema to my father! He refused point-blank, 

after giving way so reluctantly on all the above points, to 

build a simple ‘calculator block’ into the design as I wanted – 

and every single other programmer in the world, without 

exception would have done! The system design already 

allowed four ‘operational options’ or ‘algorithms’ for each 

type of functional building block, so having just one type 

with ‘add, subtract, multiply, and divide’ as its options would 

have been delightfully elegant and simple! Yet he insisted 

yet again, on his own vastly more complex set of no less 

than three ‘functional blocks’ instead, for reasons that still 

remain mysterious today, yet he still claimed to me just 

months ago, were ‘somehow’ clever – as they were his idea? 

These were straight out of the ‘SAFE’ design, of which he 

seemed to want to retain at least some of ‘his “special” 

quirky bits’. They were much more complex than a 

straightforward ‘calculator block’ as above, and nearly 

everybody forced to use them, found them vastly harder to 

‘get their heads around’! They would never have featured in 

any conventional, compiled high-level language for that 

322

eason! The ‘operations’ were: - ‘Add/subtract’ (a + b - c); 

‘Multiply/divide’ (a x b / c); and most bizarre of all – ‘Linear’ 

( a x b + c)! There never was any provision to do a simple 

isolated ‘calculator-like’ addition, subtraction, multiplication 

or division in the ‘SAFE’ system, which my father pigheadedly 

now made me perpetuate into the new ‘Microfast’. 

The system could have been about ten time faster, literally, 

at doing such simple sums, had he listened to me, and had I 

been able to get past his dogmatic insistence that his again 

‘quirky’ method was somehow ‘special, clever and superior’ – 

for he alone was going to pioneer it! 

5. Textual information. The really immense problems start 

here! In the SAFE system, there had only been the need for 

programs to send simple messages to a line printer, so a 

simple way to print out text, with numbers embedded, was 

all that was needed. The Microfast was to have colour semigraphic 

screens, in quantity, as well as just printers. So I 

devised a simple ‘hypertext’ language to handle either, that 

fairly naturally, resembled a cut-down version of the modern 

‘HTML’ language universally used today for Web pages on 

the Internet. That was about the closest we ever got to 

doing anything in a relatively ‘conventional’ way, i.e. familiar 

and so acceptable to the market. 

6. The editing function was only ever achieved at single block 

level, not the obvious one of a ‘whole flowchart’. Graphics 

were also used in a second ‘mode’ on the VDU of the 

prototype – to do ‘editor’ functions i.e. creating, changing 

and just looking at the flowchart blocks, or a section of the 

above ‘text string library’. Finally, to look at ‘memory maps’ 

showing how the system’s ‘pigeonholes’ had been used up – 

as my father insisted on mystifyingly calling ‘absolute 

memory locations’ - as far as any normal compute-literate 

person would be concerned! Once again, he just had to 

make everything ‘clever’ and ‘different’, even when anyone 

with just a day’s basic training about computers would not 

be fooled at all! Following Fison’s take-over of the struggling 

LML in 1983, as we see below, we employed a very cranky, 

secretive programmer who was supposed to do a 

‘generalised port’ of this editing function - from the Xycom 

323

system, to a PC connected to it by a serial line. He finally 

left shortly after finishing this, saying he was ‘deserting the 

sinking ship’ and incidentally – to my utter horror! – he said 

as an aside, “I’ve put no comments anywhere! UCSD Pascal 

documents itself!” which could not be further from the truth! 

His ‘design’ was so utterly rigid, only partly due to the 

cumbersome nature of the Pascal, partly due to lack of any 

comments, but mostly because it was an unbelievably literal 

‘clone’ of my own design – which had been done in 

assembler language! Neither I nor a succession of bright 

programmers later on, could get near to trying to change it – 

hardly in any way at all! It certainly totally failed in its 

objective – of enabling me to start getting ‘programming in 

pictures’ up to the ‘flowchart level’ on a powerful PC, from 

the ‘block at a time’, very limited way we always had to 

work! With just thirty-two kilobytes maximum, absolutely 

microscopic by the standards of the many megabytes of 

modern PC software, that was always inevitable. I was very 

disappointed when that guy failed dismally to even port my 

existing assembler program, produced to my own extremely 

high standards of commenting, to the PC, in any way that 

anybody else at all could even understand any of his work! 

One of the two bright young Indians we employed in 1987, 

did manage to get a program to work that took a finished 

database of ‘building blocks’ and ‘text strings’ from a 

machine and printed it all out. However, he never did 

manage to ‘reverse-engineer’ the flowchart tasks into the 

‘natural, across the page, two-dimensional flowcharts’ I had 

hoped for. Instead the result was a compromise between a 

traditional ‘listing of program code’ and a ‘flowchart’ without 

‘branches to the side’ – which just appeared in a ‘dump’ at 

the end of each flowchart task! Perhaps unbelievably, for all 

the years till then, we had to draw out each ‘flowchart’ 

laboriously and painstakingly – by hand, in pencil on paper. 

Hardly ‘automatic flowcharts’! 

7. Data entry, communications and networking. Once again, 

worse by far than anything we have yet seen, my father 

made a supposedly ‘clever’ decision – overriding me 

completely! – which completely sabotaged any attempt at 

324

easonable provision by our system of any of these areas, all 

vital to modern computers! For he deliberately prevented 

‘end users’ or ‘operators’ from having any way to enter 

textual information into these systems. Simply by only 

providing ‘numerical keys’, and ‘soft keys’, but no alphabetic 

or other ‘symbol’ keys like ‘%’, even! So, although I had 

provided a full semi-graphic language, and in the prototype 

‘Microfast I’ of 1981-1982, a way to manipulate text strings 

by providing a set of ‘text string manipulation functional 

blocks’, the other half of the story was never allowed. 

Because of yet another of my father’s quirky “decisions”! 

Those string manipulation blocks had soon to be sacrificed to 

save space, anyway, after our second, and largest customer, 

who was to buy four systems, demanded a far faster 

communications interface than on the prototype. We had 

just about managed to use these blocks to abominably 

slowly, interface using the flowchart blocks, to the TCS 

instruments, so disastrously chosen yet again with no advice 

by my father, on the prototype system. So, this ‘TCS 

interface’ had to be recast into ‘assembler language stone’ at 

vast difficulty, not even with any ability to debug the 

program in this case, by yours truly as ever – for my father 

refused to let me hire a vital emulator yet again! Indeed, 

firstly because of my father imposing a total inability to let 

users input textual data, and secondly because of the 

abominable slow speed of ‘flowchart blocks’, we never did 

‘communications’ apart from me carving it out of assembler 

language. The ‘flowchart system’ was vastly too slow, 

especially on such obsolete computers we always used, even 

eight years on, compared to other much more conventional 

languages. As communications with flowchart blocks proved 

impossible for those two reasons, both it and networking 

Microfast systems together, and to other ‘different’ systems, 

also proved impossible. This was for a further reason on top 

of the two that I have already mentioned. This was my 

father’s unbelievable over-blown ‘hype’ – which I often 

cringed to hear him try to con experienced computer experts 

with, at exhibitions especially – about his precious so-called 

‘pigeonholes’. ‘Sequentially numbered absolute memory 

325

locations, each comprising 64 bits, organised by a computer 

program that only ran on a very slow 8-bit microcomputer’ 

would be more acceptable ‘jargon’ to most computer literate 

people. Every single conventional language – not just ‘highlevel’ 

but even assembler - had painstakingly been made 

‘relocatable’ for DECADES by using a powerful ‘linker’ 

program which was fully automatic – freeing programmers 

from such dreadfully limiting concepts as these precious 

‘pigeonholes’! Yet my father, once again, considered 

something so utterly fundamental and old a ‘system’ as 

‘absolute memory’ as somehow ‘his unique invention’! 

(Charles Babbage invented them back in 1880 in his 

‘calculating engine’, and John Turing re-used the idea in the 

first modern computers, in the 1930’s!) In a nutshell, the 

total dependence of his design on these, not only made 

‘automatic linking’ of ‘program modules’ impossible – we had 

to force ‘system engineers’ to ‘stitch together his equivalent 

of lines of code’ by hand. That, in turn, meant providing 

elaborate ways for ‘system engineers’ on the Microfast to 

‘search for empty pigeonholes, or groups of them’, and even 

incredibly crude and archaic ‘memory maps’ I mentioned 

before. This was superseded by ‘linking’ as long ago as the 

1950’s, in ‘conventional’ systems! Finally, this huge problem 

was to completely prevent me implementing any attempt at 

normal general-purpose data entry, communications, or 

networking! 

8. The biggest headache of all! After the Xycom fiasco, my 

father did it yet again! He doomed us to ‘odd pickings’ of 

sales of the Microfast system, employing yet competing with 

another ‘quirky’, minority supplier – the British ‘TCS’, the 

only instrument supplier he considered we should ever work 

with, rather than the market leaders such as the huge 

multinationals, Honeywell and Leeboro! 

‣ My expertise was in ‘algorithmic programming languages’ 

rather than the specialised area of such ‘process control 

instruments’, so I was not consulted! 

‣ However, having already committed us to an obscure 

supplier of overpriced, obsolete computer equipment, my 

326

father’s choice of ‘Turnbull Control Systems’ Instruments 

(TCS) was just as much a choice of a relative unknown! 

‣ From then on, not only were we, on top of only offering 

obscure, obviously overpriced computer equipment – those 

sales could only be to existing, or likely, TCS customers. Yet 

they had their own supervisory systems for their own range 

of instruments, so we constantly competed with our own 

supplier! 

‣ My father was delighted when a very underhand TCS 

salesman, who had apparently fallen out with them, sneakily 

gave him a list of their customers! Not for the first time, 

and as we just saw in 2002, not the last, he was devious! 

‣ He never in eight years thought to change his initial 

dogmatic decision, so never considered we should offer 

interfaces to instruments from world leaders! 

1980-1981. We (mostly I!) finished the functional 

specification for the (prototype, as it turned out) ‘Microfast’ 

system, which filled two whole A4 loose-leaf files, in about 

two months. In those days there were no word-processors 

yet – so we had to write and draw everything out, to be 

typed up by an agency typist. The partner team mostly 

commented on my apparently excessive use of acronyms 

(the project manager over their whole section, called me ‘the 

Silly Idiot who Must Originate Names’ as a result!) They 

asked me to come down to work with them from a nearby 

‘bed and breakfast’, every working day, so I could use their 

HP 64000 systems, rather than the Xycom Racpac. I 

refused on two grounds, both strong. Firstly, why should I 

have to sacrifice the few home comforts I then had, to live in 

the bleak, lonely hostelry they proposed, simply because my 

father had screwed everything up? Secondly, far more 

important, I could tell they wanted to use me as a pawn in 

the ‘chess game’ then starting between them and him! That 

was so very obvious, that I refused point-blank! From that 

point, despite monthly, increasingly acrimonious meetings, 

we were on ‘two separate planets’. Despite all the problems 

with being stuck with a crap Xycom development system, in 

the next year, often working very long hours with no 

overtime pay from my precious father, and even doing eight 

327

‘stints’ of twenty-four hours of work overnight, I had written 

about 90% of the final system! That was about 60 kilobytes 

of assembler code – working very much harder, only about 

5% of what I had managed with the superb facilities for 

‘RTL/2’ at ICI in 1979-80. What on earth could I have 

achieved with decent, modern facilities, like the partner’s HP 

64000, instead of my father’s curse on me – the Xycom 

Racpac? Much of the reason for working many, many ‘out of 

normal hours’ was simple. The printer that we had been 

supplied with was unbelievably noisy – yet I simply 

desperately had to print out a fresh listing of each module 

after I made any change – otherwise it was simply 

impossible to test, given the crudity of my obsolete 

development system! Meanwhile my father never wrote a 

single line of this ‘code’ – it struck me afterwards he simply 

regarded himself as ‘above’ such a ‘conventional’ language – 

and had even proven dismally unable to program in UCSD 

Pascal on the course at Xycom! Even worse, despite their 

unbelievably superior HP 64000 equipment, the partners 

never wrote more than a few kilobytes – tiny! – of useable 

code for the project, despite my regularly feeding them my 

own tested programs. Soon it was clear that they were 

simply no longer interested, and in mid-1981, they suddenly 

pulled out of the project – leaving us high and dry! My 

father has always covered himself for his ‘decisions’ without 

consulting them – or even his own son, his so-called 

‘technical guru’ - by claiming that ‘they ran out of money 

because of the recession that year’! We have seen the 

peculiar, megalomaniac nature of his ‘decision’-making 

processes, taken totally in isolation, far too much for comfort 

for me, already! So, what did HE do all that year, if he was 

no use at all in the crucial development of the precious 

‘system’ that he forced me to do alone – often with long 

extra, yet totally unpaid hours? Until 1983, as we see soon, 

he remained totally furtive and secretive about all the 

financial and marketing activities he undertook as ‘his job’ – 

especially salaries! 

1981. My father’s extremely dubious and megalomaniac 

control of ‘finance and marketing’ in the company as 

328

managing director – especially salaries! So, just what was 

my father’s role, if it did not help with actual system 

development, supposedly the main activity of the company, 

in any way? Well, he was constantly either making long 

telephone calls to potential customers, or producing 

elaborate, expensive literature, or indulging in endless, 

massive, expensive, ‘mail-shots’ to prospective customers. 

All trying to convince them that ‘his superb, unique idea’ was 

literally ‘the best thing since sliced bread’! Finally, in mid- 

1981, he got us a customer. On the strength of both the 

fact that the ‘SAFE’ system was temporarily still in use, so he 

could demonstrate it. Also that, despite no longer having 

our backer around, I had somehow struggled to produce a 

semi-demonstrable Microfast system – just using the Racpac 

crap. This customer was called ‘FBC’ – ‘Fison’s–Boot’s 

Consortium’ – and had a chemical plant based at what I 

came to call ‘romantic, sunny Widnes’, which was to say the 

least totally ironic and flattering! He immediately took on a 

friend and colleague from his previous venture 1970-77, 

Mike. When Mike immediately firmly required a company car 

– I was offered one too. Yet when Mike chose the ‘Renault 

Fuego’, mostly it turned out solely for its good looks, I was 

virtually required to have one too. Yet again I was given no 

say in the matter! Certainly, I was dismayed to find my car 

rusting inside a year, along with a huge series of faults with 

interior fittings. These cars were far cheaper than the topof-the-range 

BMW company car my father was driving 

around in all this time, and turned out to be notorious – they 

had been designed by the Renault ‘novice team’ and were 

soon discontinued. One of the seats in Mike’s car completely 

snapped off its mounting and had to be welded down in a 

fixed position! Whether having a company car was a spur, 

by mid-1981 I had finally had enough of working with my 

father in the same tiny office – and having to live in the 

same house as him at the same time. However, he was only 

paying me £8,000 a year, one-bedroom flats even ten miles 

further north were costing around £25,000, and one could 

only get twice your salary as mortgage at that time. Finally 

after a lot of argument, he finally gave a pay rise to £10,000 

329

a year, but no more – not quite enough? Then, I finally 

spotted just one one-bedroom flat, on the outskirts of bleak, 

new town, Stevenage, fifteen miles up the motorway from 

work, at £20,500. I could only just manage it, yet 

everything else was so much more expensive, that I quickly 

put in an offer – and had it accepted – at £20,100 including 

the carpet. You could get 100% mortgages as a first-time 

buyer in those days, which was essential, as on the low 

salary my father was paying me, I could not possibly save a 

deposit. After all this discussion just to get up to a measly 

salary of £10,000, soon overtaken by then rapidly escalating 

salaries for software experts like me, I finally found out in 

1983 what my father’s relatively huge salary had been set 

by him, in secrecy from me. Along with his tiny mortgage in 

comparison. I was naturally horrified at him – again! The 

flat, as you’d probably expect at that price, had a lot of 

problems. It was literally miles from any decent shops – the 

local ones were heavily vandalised, often raided by burglars, 

and low quality. Above all, I was surrounded by very 

‘snooty’ neighbours, had no friends in the area, and so this 

was to be like all my homes since – very lonely. Until my 

future wife, Helen, came to live in another of the flats, all of 

four years later, in 1985, as we see below… 

1981-1982. The FBC ‘Microfast I’ Prototype Project. Mike 

was mainly a hardware specialist that my father had 

especially taken on to handle the TCS instruments on the 

FBC project, and ‘interface’ to them (read information from 

them and send updated information). However, he had 

been both a friend and colleague in 1970-1977 at my 

father’s previous venture, so knew about his ‘quirky’ 

approach to software – and so soon adapted to this new 

variation, done with ‘flowchart blocks’. Finally, he knew 

something about machine code, so as the development 

project neared completion in mid-1982, at long last I had 

somebody with some knowledge, to ‘bounce ideas about 

problems off – especially concerning “bugs”’. Finally we 

were laboriously constructing the tasks and ‘subtasks’ 

containing flowchart blocks, when we hit a major problem. 

Yet again, my father had insisted that the incredibly 

330

udimentary ‘operating system’ that scheduled the timing of 

when these flowchart tasks started to ‘execute’, which was 

copied from a very old, very elementary 1950’s operating 

system he had come across, was ‘perfectly adequate – and 

indeed, so “different” it is brilliant!’ Basically it only allowed 

just four groups or ‘levels’ of programs or tasks, which each 

ran in a ‘chain’, a strict sequence. Typically, ‘level 1’ was 

run once a second, ‘level 2’ ran once every 5 or 10 seconds, 

‘level 3’ ran every minute, and ‘level 4’ every hour. 

However, all these timings were completely changeable to 

suit the particular project, under the control of the system 

engineer or system programmer. The huge problem with 

this turned out to be the incredibly slow speed of the 

system, even though I had slaved like a Trojan, with rubbish 

facilities, to “carve it out of ‘fast’ machine code ‘stone’”. For 

many tasks were taking so much time, they exceeded the 

time allocated to their ‘level’, so throwing out the timing of 

all the other flowchart tasks. So at last, my father had to 

rouse himself to actually roll his sleeves up, and get involved 

in the development. He now had to spend about four 

months, to develop a ‘scheduler’ in flowchart language that 

dealt with this problem. For the first month he asked some 

incredibly naïve questions, baffled by some of the simplest 

‘high-level language’ features I had insisted on. Yet in 

hindsight, as we have so often seen, his ideas about 

computer software are always bizarrely unique to ‘clever’ 

him – in the whole world! Naturally, the overhead of this 

rather large scheduler, all required because the underlying 

‘operating system’ he had insisted was so very ‘brilliantly 

simple’ – and was totally inadequate. Typically, he spent 

four months instead of the expected one month to complete 

this, which was to drastically slow system operations down 

still further, to a snail’s pace! Meanwhile Mike had been 

completing the ‘TCS interface’ – which, as I have mentioned, 

was only to last for that one, prototype FBC system, again 

because it was incredibly slow. All of four yawning years 

later, when my father finally found only our second 

customer, they took one look at this interface, and 

demanded that it be re-written in assembler code. This was 

331

a familiar scenario – the ‘flowchart language’, run on that 

obsolete Xycom hardware, was always incredibly slow, 

despite me writing the system in incredibly tightly-written 

assembler code. We ended up making all communications 

software ‘bespoke’ – carved out of assembler language by 

Muggins, here. Finally, in autumn 1982, the FBC system 

was fully installed, all the last few ‘bugs’ removed in both my 

assembler code and the flowchart tasks that code 

‘interpreted’, and declared to be fully commissioned and 

working. Almost immediately, as I still remember seemed 

very cruel and callous indeed, to a one-time close family 

friend, my Father suddenly said that ‘for financial reasons’, 

Mike had to be made redundant! Mike was very upset and 

stunned – having been taken on by my father just a year 

earlier, like me on a ‘promise of huge rewards’, he was out 

of a job just a year later! Dumped for no good reason, as 

we see next! No wonder he has never spoken to my family, 

especially my father, since! 

Mid-1982 to mid-1983. The utterly appalling, even spooky, 

reasons for my father’s total secrecy and furtiveness over his 

absolute control of finances, marketing, and salaries, finally 

emerge, once more showing he is a maverick! After the FBC 

project ended, and Mike Stone was brutally disposed of by 

my father, we suddenly found ourselves with no further 

customers. Despite my father continually badgering away 

on the telephone and with ‘mail-shots’, as we are coming to 

see, clearly obsessed with imposing his ‘quirky’ ideas on an 

entire world that had devised other, better technology 

decades before – and yet he would never give up with what 

was clearly an obsession. Then, one evening that autumn, I 

was finally able to get past all his furtive secrecy and 

megalomania about ‘company finances’. I popped in to see 

my family, and found my mother and father rowing 

furiously, with her in floods of tears. He desperately tried to 

shut her up about what was wrong, but when she told me I 

was totally horrified. For that afternoon he had taken her on 

a mysterious trip to their bank. There, in the bank 

manager’s office, he had casually tried to con her into simply 

signing what was, to her immediately suspicious mind, 

332

clearly a legal document! She was aghast when she actually 

read it, which he tried to prevent! They had bought their 

present large house, which has four bedrooms, and all of 

four large reception rooms, in one of the two ‘more select’ 

areas of Hatfield, in the early 1960’s for a mere £7,000, 

when house prices were cheap. They always have had a 

lovely garden. However this deed my father tried to get her 

to sign, would have not only re-mortgaged the house, then 

worth over £150,000. It would also have assigned all the 

capital resulting from that to my father alone, not to them 

jointly, which was the basis of the mortgage they then had, 

which with not one but both salaries being at least several 

times that much, was very easy to afford. Meanwhile of 

course, as I said, my father expected me to pay a mortgage 

of £20,000 with just my mere £10,000 salary – barely more 

than that of a programmer, yet I was supposed to be his 

software manager! The reason for this sneakily attempted, 

yet botched, attempt to con my mother out of all the capital 

in their house, now came out. For the first time, I was 

finally allowed to learn the current state of his company 

LML’s bank balance. We were a staggering £220,000+ in 

debt, despite just having banked substantial profits from the 

FBC project, and substantial other income over the first two 

years of operation 1980-1982 of the company. The quick 

analysis of how the money was spent, reveals how utterly 

hypocritical and indeed sinister, was my father’s action in 

2002, now nearly 70 and retired for the last five years. In 

firstly destroying my bank account, then claiming that 

without that, my spending just £1.40 a day of ‘his precious 

money’ over my tiny benefit of £7.10 while in a very 

expensive hospital, was somehow ‘lavish overspending’. 

£8.50/day in total is clearly a tiny budget! In the ‘balance 

sheet’ below, we first see that the money spent by the 

company in two years 1980-82, was in total far higher than 

this figure of £220,000 of debt, clearly appalling enough in 

itself. It is once I analyse where that money was spent 

1980-82 that the full disgustingly obscene truth comes out 

at the end! 

333

INITIAL CAPITAL Company funds just after totally wasted 

‘course’ at Xycom, disastrous purchase of their Racpac, and 

lavish Caribbean holiday which I refused on principle to 

accompany my family on £10k 

INCOME FROM ‘INDUSTRIAL PARTNER’ (50% 

government funded) 1980-1981. Vitally, they continued 

to pay up correct ‘tranches’. £90k 

PROFITS FROM FBC PROJECT 1982 (approximate 

estimate) £30k 

DEBT AT BANK 

£220k 

TOTAL EXPENDITURE 1980-1981 

£350k 

OUTGOINGS 

Rent, rates, heating, lighting, cleaning, etc. 1980-1982 

(approx.) £20k 

Secretary’s salary, typewriter, photocopier hire, 

consumables ~ £20k 

DEPARTMENTAL EXPENDITURE 

Development (me). Salary 1980-82 (£18k); car HP, 

running costs etc. 1981-82 (£4k); revenue budget - paper, 

ribbons, floppy disks, ‘EPROM’ memory chips (£2k). 

Telephone/fax to Xycom for support (£2k). ZERO capital 

budget – I was never allowed one, and spent no capital in 

this time! £25k 

Hardware (Mike). Salary 1981-1982 (£12k?); car HP, 

running costs etc. 1981-82 (£4k); revenue budget – 

hardware consumables (

and behind my back! Some burning, obvious questions arise, 

which I simply don’t have most of the answers to: - 

1. Are these unbelievable figures really accurate? I have 

double-checked them, and they are wholly plausible from 

the information I have – to the nearest £1,000 i.e. ‘£1k’ or 

so at most! 

2. Why was my father running a company supposedly 

principally dedicated to development, with a marketing 

budget of over TEN TIMES what he allowed me, struggling 

with HIS appalling choices of ‘everything’ technical, doing 

the actual development, and winning a heroic struggle 

against ‘impossible odds’? 

3. If the marketing budget was so unbelievably vast, why did 

he only secure one sale in the first year, and the second one, 

all of a yawning four years later in 1985? Then why did he 

only find three more customers by 1988 – with only the first 

customer of these buying three further systems? Two of 

these precious few seven systems, he wantonly gave away 

at cost price or only slightly more, for once more he was 

desperate just to get income! 

4. Where did that enormous figure of £265,000 go in just about 

two elapsed years? Taking it in broad terms, at 365x2 = 

730 days, that means he was secretly watching the overdraft 

at the bank shoot up – with rapidly increasing interest 

charges – while spending a vast £363 a day! On his salary, 

car running costs and fuel (it was paid for in full, there was 

no HP), phone calls (£1 an hour for eight hours a day, even, 

would be just £8 a day!) Also, mail-shots and literature, 

which could have cost no more than a few thousands a year 

– say at most £10,000. Finally just one lavishly ‘hyped’ – as 

ever – exhibition then, costing him about £30,000 to pay a 

local, extortionate marketing company! 

5. That does not explain where all the money went, even when 

it meant going overdrawn. He was asked, finally in front of 

me, in 1983 by one of our then new directors from Fison’s, 

as we see in a moment, what his salary had been. He 

replied, “£32,000” which shocked me, as he had started me 

on a QUARTER of that, despite being his ‘software manager’, 

and had shown vast reluctance to raise it even to £10,000 

335

y 1983, despite even programmers’ salaries having already 

far exceeded that figure! SO, WAS HE LYING? 

6. For, we keep seeing just how megalomaniac, devious, and 

downright deceitful he can be – even to his own wife, and his 

own eldest son! All through the 1980’s my parents had a 

very lavish life-style, and even now, as pensioners in their 

70’s, he still eats lavish expensive cheeses, they still buy 

expensive wines, and take frequent caravan and some 

foreign holidays. My mother until very recently tried to get 

me to believe that ‘if only I gave up smoking, I could have a 

car, lavish food and holidays like us. For the total of our 

pensions are about the same as your benefit!’ Then, the 

other week, my father gave the complete lie to that 

breathtaking claim, by admitting that his own pension alone, 

with a bit of tax to deduct, was over twice my benefits! 

(Then, was that the full story?) 

My father, at the time of the row with my mother I had 

walked in on at their home, after his dismally failed attempt to 

completely con his own wife out of everything, totally failed to 

be at all remorseful. As ever, he refused to be drawn on just 

how he had let the company get so incredibly overdrawn, while 

insisting on total financial control (£2,000,000 or so by 2003 

standards?) Not for the first time and not for the last, I 

immediately responded by trying to resign. As ever, my 

mother promptly forgot what he had just tried to do to her, and 

sided with him in emotionally blackmailing me to stay. Now we 

had to find yet another backer, which with such massive debts 

for a company of now only two employees, was next to 

hopeless. 

However, my father’s dogmatic belief in ‘his ideas alone 

being the only possible way forward for the entire software 

world’ yet again got him on the telephone all day. Now talking 

endlessly to a few possible suitable industrial partners – but 

mostly focussing on the hard-nosed world of venture capitalists 

and bankers. I can quite imagine what some of their 

objections on the phone immediately were, just one of which 

was to bring the conversation to an abrupt end once my 

father’s answer failed to fully satisfy them. For we did get in to 

see two or three venture capitalist consultants, after my father 

336

had exhaustively worked through the entire list. Typical showstopping 

questions were as follows, which from such hardnosed 

men, showed they were both knowledgeable, and very 

hard to ‘take in’. Such questions also often came up at 

exhibitions later: - 

How come a company of just two people has in two years 

acquired a vast debt of £220,000? (As I said above, 

equivalent to £2,000,000 today!) Do you seriously expect 

us to underwrite or even pay it off? This was the usual 

immediate showstopper, obviously the ‘bottom line’ pair of 

questions! 

Flowcharts have been replaced by high-level languages since 

the early 1950’s, when flowcharts were only used for dataprocessing! 

Do you seriously intend to try to persuade the 

entire software world to take a massive ‘backward step’? 

If your ‘flowchart simulation’ is so ‘clever’, why do you not 

have any way to represent a complete flowchart on the 

screen, just one ‘element’? Why have you not already 

ported your ‘flowchart editing and creation functions’ to the 

latest UNIX ‘Work-station’ or indeed, the recently launched 

IBM 386 PC? 

Just why are you running this system on such obsolete, 

obscure, poorly supported hardware? Furthermore, as your 

main market is process control, why do you only interface to 

the relatively obscure TCS, by the same token? 

You say it is a very powerful feature of your system that at 

any time an engineer can change any program – even while 

it is running. This seems to me to actually be a highly 

dangerous feature – conventional software prevents it! 

These questions, and other similar, ‘thorny’ and largely 

unanswerable ones, kept on flooring us into January 1983, and 

a while longer we just kept banging our heads against a brick 

wall. Then that January I was in the office, and answered the 

phone to hear the ‘well-spoken, cultured tones’ of a man who 

said he was called Michael, he was the new head of Fison’s 

‘Scientific Equipment Division’ (FSED), and to hold everything, 

he could help us out of our problems! I told my father, whose 

reaction I distinctly recall, was one of cynicism, and disbelief – 

337

he clearly felt totally disillusioned by this recent totally 

frustrating milk round of venture capitalists. Indeed, it took 

him till March to finally stop the fruitless chase for other 

backers, and only then we took on expensive London lawyers 

(which FSED had to pay for, as the company bank account was 

now frozen) about the legal agreement. This was curious – 

Fison’s would only underwrite our overdraft at the bank, rather 

than pay off the vast debt; and it was not a typical ‘take-over’ 

– they were taking a 50% stake in the company’s shares! 

Everything went quiet till 1 st July, which happened to be 

my mother’s birthday, and that day we all, including her as 

notionally at least, one of the company directors till that day, 

went to Fison’s lawyers’ offices in London to sign the deal. 

Michael, as FSED managing director, John, a ‘company doctor’ 

from a firm in FSED (who turned out to be typically cold – 

ruthless even) and Andrew, a new technical man from Oxford, 

at FSED, joined our board. Michael was made chairman, and I 

was pleased to be told that my salary as now a full director, 

was now to be put up £5,000 to £15,000. Suddenly I had 

some spare cash at last! 

However, as we saw, my father would only admit to 

having been paying himself £32,000 salary, yet I now suspect 

that had often been a lot higher, as we just discussed. That 

put the dampers on my initial happiness, for even now, he as 

managing director was getting over double my new salary, 

even after it had been put up all of 50%! I never did get 

anything like the proper rate for somebody supposed to be a 

‘director’ – or even ‘technical director’ as my father used to, 

typically grandly, introduce me to business contacts. 

At once Andrew insisted that there be a ‘technical audit’ of 

our product and company, by a company of consultants he 

knew personally, Imperial Systems Technology. He was always 

to remain dubious about the Microfast, and indeed in pubs with 

us after meetings there later that year, blatantly accused my 

father of having conned Fison’s completely. This was rather 

like ‘the pot calling the kettle black’, for inside a year he was 

sacked. He himself had shown no imagination in his own little 

sales ‘empire’ at FSED, and sold hardly anything – which 

338

mostly focussed on Sinclair products, on which software 

development was very limited! 

July 1 st 1983 – December 31 st 1983. Momentous events in my 

personal life! 

Obviously, the last three years had been increasingly 

stressful, largely due to my father’s peculiar habit of taking 

monstrous decisions behind my back. After being dumped on 

completely technically, right from the outset, I could see I was 

trapped in a company where I was learning nothing new, and 

constantly having to fight totally unnecessary insuperable odds, 

to do the simplest development task! Not surprisingly, I found 

the job awful, and had to put up with frequent abrasive 

comments from my father about time keeping, which was all 

due to always hating the work. Time and again, as increasingly 

the straitjacket of only ever having obscure skills of no use at 

all to any other employer, remained as the obsolete Z80 

assembler, and the quaint, soon obsolete UCSD Pascal, and 

there was never any budget for training from my father, I tried 

to leave. Each time my parents emotionally blackmailed me 

from doing so, on the grounds that, “You cannot ‘betray’ your 

own father - he needs you! If you leave he will be made 

redundant!” 

Not only was the technical environment that my father 

had imposed behind my back soon to prove completely career 

limiting, when it never changed by all of 1988, eight years 

later. His mysterious and monstrous accumulation of vast 

debts, seemingly by him alone, nobody else in the company, 

was nearly the bitter end. It was only after the most stressful 

year of all, that on July 1 st 1983, FSED saved him! 

Meanwhile, that June 1983, I had finally, in parallel to all 

this, felt totally at my wits’ end about the side effects of the 

dreadful tranquillisers that I had been forced to take – as 

injections – since as long ago as August 1978. I suddenly 

stopped all my medication, including the lithium carbonate. 

Determined to become ‘non-toxic’, I also incredibly enough 

stopped smoking in one day – 60 a day to nothing – and about 

a month later felt no more ‘side effects’ of either nicotine 

withdrawal – or the dreaded medication. Indeed, for many 

339

months my mother, initially concerned that I had stopped my 

medication, as a Nursing Sister observed that in fact I seemed 

to get better and brighter in myself. 

Company activity at that time, from the acquisition by 

FSED to the start of November, was mostly involved with 

talking to Andrew and IST about the possible future of the 

product, now planned as a new mark two ‘Microfast 2’. There 

were regular board meetings, initially in Griffin and George’s 

boardroom – the company in FSED we were most connected 

with, as John was the managing director and employed Andrew 

as a sales manager. Then we started looking for bigger offices, 

still in Welwyn Garden City – and found some much larger 

ones, since taken over, appropriately by ‘The Bridge’ Mental 

Health Unit! 

My father kept trying to retain his precious ‘inspired’ 

choice of the obsolete, totally obscure, now increasingly vastly 

overpriced Xycom, in these discussions with IST and FSED. We 

were taken by Andrew to their offices and given tantalising 

glimpses of the power of UNIX graphical work-stations – yet 

there were never to be any clearly decisive, inspired decisions 

made by IST or FSED about those, or any other computer 

platform. Or indeed, change to any software language better 

than the abysmal Z80 assembler I had to ‘carve out of stone’ 

on the appalling, completely obsolete Xycom Racpac. So we 

drifted aimlessly into November, with the report expected from 

IST, due in January. 

On the evening of Wednesday 9 th November 1983, I 

remember sitting in my flat, as ever lonely and dejected, 

mulling over my appalling career since leaving ICI to join my 

father – as we have seen, on totally false pretences. I had a 

couple of beers, paced up and down a lot, very depressed 

about my own father and his family firm. It got late into the 

night, with me going over my past three and a half years of 

‘hell’ – seeing all the bad side. Then at 1am or so, still wide 

awake, I decided to go outside – whether to get ten minutes of 

the brisk night November air that morning, in the small hours 

of Thursday 10 th November, or even to go for a walk, I don’t 

remember. I just felt that I had to get out of my isolated flat. 

340

Then, once outside, I realised that I had left my keys on 

the table – and was locked out! I could not exactly phone my 

family at 1am or so, to bring a spare set. So I set off to go for 

a walk, vaguely thinking I might reach Hatfield by the morning, 

and so my parents’ house, if I needed to. You might have 

thought my description way back in this history, of ‘a 

procession of five bright golden-yellow lights’ in the night sky 

over Cambridge back in 1978 was very strange and perhaps 

‘psychotic’ – even though there were at least six hundred other 

onlookers! 

So the fact that something along the same lines happened 

again in 1983, as I walked out with no particular direction, will 

seem equally strange! Until the end of this description, when I 

point out the links involved between these two similar 

experiences, another at 1am on 30 th January 1983, earlier the 

same year – and a beautiful 18 year-old woman I met in 

hospital last year, and am still in touch with! I will leave you 

mystified about all that till we have described my ‘walk’… 

I walked quickly down the hill, to the nearby Roebuck pub, 

and turned left onto the road from Stevenage towards 

Knebworth, the original Great North Road. I distinctly 

remember thinking, “It is Remembrance Day tomorrow, Friday. 

I want to be somewhere really quiet at 11am then!” I was 

warmly dressed against the cold night air, and there were mist 

patches around, that sometimes made the neon street lights 

look quite eery. Then, suddenly, I was aware of ‘something 

strange’ to my right and behind – and up in the air. I looked, 

and there, approaching on a course so as to intersect my walk 

nearly due south, about three hundred feet up, heading from 

due north-west, was a golden-yellow light, just like the ones I 

had seen in Cambridge, that I saw along with six hundred other 

people! 

However, like all my other many such strange ‘Spiritual 

Experiences’ since, I was not to be aware throughout what 

followed, of anybody else also witnessing this clearly 

‘supernatural heavenly body’. Nor have I ever thought of 

either this Experience, in the small hours of the morning of 

Thursday 10 th November 1983, or my previous similar one on 

30 th January 1978, as being of a ‘UFO Experience’. The 

341

immediate reaction was that this new, exciting Spiritual 

Experience, alone instead of in a huge crowd like the latter one 

in 1978, was just as ‘spiritual’ – ‘holy’ even! 

Immediately I found that this ‘star’ was ahead of me, and 

just over my right shoulder! Soon I – and ‘it’, leading – passed 

through Knebworth, famous for rock concerts in the grounds of 

Knebworth Park each summer. Off to our right, though I had 

no way of knowing that then, and in parallel, ran the road that 

contained the house I bought for my fiancee and I as a marital 

home, when I finally sold my flat in Stevenage, in December 

1986. The ‘star’ led me on down the winding road to Wattonat-Stone, 

then before the bypass was built. Suddenly it 

turned, leading me onto the road towards Ware. After going 

up the hill over the roundabout there, where the right turn 

went to Hertford North Station, and past the boarding school 

on the right, ‘it’ led me down the hill – now travelling further to 

my right, still 300 feet up or so, over the trees there. 

About when I passed the turning sharp left for Dane End, 

as if by magic, because I had heard of that village, but 

completely missing the turning in the pitch dark, I started 

getting a strange feeling that “I must reach Dane End!” 

Indeed, after moving to Knebworth in 1986, in 1989 my wife 

was to turn out to want to move nearer to her new job as a Vet 

in Hertford. Strangely, the only suitably near and sufficiently 

low-priced house we saw advertised then, was in Dane End. 

So I had now passed in turn the only two houses we bought 

while married, on this strange experience of ‘following a star’! 

Two miles further on, I came to the village of Tonwell, 

which in those days had no bypass, so on walking through, I 

noticed it was about 7.15am, and also came across the first 

person I had met on my all-night walk. This milkman took it in 

his stride, perhaps thinking I was a well-dressed tramp, when I 

asked him, “Can you tell me the way to Dane End?” He 

replied, totally unabashed at such a question from somebody 

who was clearly on foot walking from the direction of 

Stevenage, “Oh, you’ve missed it by miles, mate. It is way 

back from here!” 

Just a few hundred yards after leaving Tonwell, I came to 

a roundabout that had four exits. To the right was the road to 

342

Bengeo, a suburb on the East of nearby Hertford. Yet again, 

years later, my first solo home after my terrible divorce in 

1995, was a cottage I rented from May 1997 to September 

1999. So I had now passed my third future home – in the 

order of living in, even though I turned out to have very little 

choice over that! Ahead lay the road to Ware, but the ‘star’ 

now turned East, towards the A10 and the village of Wadesmill. 

As dawn light grew into a bright, clear day, the ‘star’ climbed 

into the eastern, dawn sky, then as the light grew steadily 

stronger, slowly faded away. I turned towards that direction, 

heading towards Wadesmill, with a sudden strange feeling of 

‘loss’! 

I had soon walked to the A10, and remembered that LML’s 

financial advisers worked by the river bridge in Ware. So I 

headed South, reached the outskirts of Ware after passing the 

various hamlets on the way, then cut across a large field to the 

East, arriving by a street on the northern edge. I walked down 

this, soon found the offices of their company, and as it was just 

after 9am now, I was just in time to catch them opening. So to 

my final ‘future home’ – I have lived in Ware since being rehoused 

here after eviction from Hertford in 1999. 

I don’t think that even then I was particularly ‘mentally 

ill’. However, after a miserable evening I had just had a 

stunning encounter with what could only be described as ‘the 

star from the East’ – where ‘it’ had returned at dawn. The 

Morning Star! Jesus Christ! OF COURSE I was quite elated! 

Naturally, also, having been up all night with no sleep, I was 

overtired, particularly having walked about 15 miles in that 

time, so appeared even more elated, being light-headed! 

However, that was too hard to explain to either Frank or 

Jean, the very down-to-earth, financially oriented proprietors! 

They just saw an elated Simon, and promptly called my father 

to get him to drive over there as fast as possible. So I sat on a 

bench watching them in their office across the river by the road 

bridge, and they kept peering out at me, looking baffled! 

Having refused to go with my father in his car, Jean and I 

headed for the nearby railway station. A train pulled out, and I 

wrenched the door open and climbed in, without a ticket, 

leaving her stranded on the platform, while I got to the next 

343

station, the terminus at Hertford East Station. Then I started 

walking again, and reached Hatfield, ten or so miles away, 

about 5pm, and went to my parents’ house. There was a huge 

argument, and after they tried to make me stay the night, I 

refused. Bizarrely, and rather cruelly, they ended up making 

me spend the night on the floor of the garden shed! Naturally 

I could not sleep. 

The following morning, Friday 11 th November 1983, at 

about 5am, I found a weak point in the hedge, so got through, 

despite cutting my leg on a branch. I walked down to the main 

road for St. Albans, and managed to hitchhike to the edge of 

that town, about five miles away. Then I started walking 

onwards yet again – now on my quest of the day before to be 

‘somewhere quiet’ on this Remembrance Day at 11am. Indeed 

at 11am I found a small garden next to the road, somewhere 

near Watford, about ten miles on. However, there was a 

railway cutting just beyond it. At 11am exactly an express 

train thundered past… 

By 3pm or so I was somewhere approaching Uxbridge, 

when finally, having walked about 40 miles in ordinary shoes in 

two days, I could walk no more, for my feet were cut to pieces. 

Hoping to get an ambulance called, and now totally exhausted, 

having missed two nights of sleep, I simply lay down in a gap 

in the traffic in the busy road. The traffic ground to a halt, and 

inside ten minutes I found myself not in an ambulance, but a 

police car on the way to Uxbridge police station. They locked 

me in ‘cell one’ for about half an hour, then realised I was 

completely non-violent, so they put me in a cell with the door 

open, guarded by a very cheerful police sergeant, who I recall 

was called Peter – and cracked jokes. 

At about 8pm my parents arrived, together with a 

neighbour, Don, who immediately commented that ‘I seemed 

perfectly normal to him!’ However, my father and he sat either 

side of me in the back, while my mother drove the car to the 

Queen Elizabeth II Hospital at Welwyn Garden City – to admit 

me voluntarily to the, even then, grim ‘Welwyn’ Acute 

Admissions Psychiatric Ward. 

After my mere skirmish with a relatively relaxed ward at 

Fulbourn, for some part of a mere three days, back in 1978, 

344

the next six weeks were my first ‘real’ admission – although 

they seemed to last forever! I was immediately given a depot 

of haloperidol, a tranquilliser my Consultant, Derek Gander, 

had wanted to try for some time, and re-started on lithium. 

Then the boredom started, as ever in such places, and – 

disaster! – I joined nearly all the other patients – and started 

up smoking again, never to stop since! After two more equally 

grim weeks, Derek now tried a two-week course of a depixol 

depot, the standard alternative to the haloperidol, while 

keeping up the lithium. Finally, two weeks later, he had 

decided haloperidol with some orphenadrine suited me better. 

I was discharged just before Christmas Eve, just in time to do 

my Christmas shopping. The experience was shattering for me 

– yet compared to five whole years ‘locked up’ in the nine 

years to come 1993-2004, as we see eventually - it was 

‘nothing’! 

I ‘found’ the key to having seen all of twenty-four 

‘symbolic spiritual visionary premonitions’ since January 1978 

(25 years) while, perhaps appropriately, in a locked ward, 

Shannon House, during over four months at Princess Alexandra 

Hospital, Harlow, from 10 th June to 29 th October 2002. Or 

rather, MET HER on 25 th July 2002! She was just 18 and 

incredibly beautiful. We kissed, increasingly passionately, 

despite me being 45, from Tuesday 30 th July for just a few 

days… 

I was admitted to Stort Ward at Harlow Hospital’s 

Psychiatric Unit on 10 th June 2002, and on Friday 28 th June was 

– to my utter dismay and astonishment – placed on a Section 3 

– then kept in for five whole days, confined to the ward. 

Meanwhile, I had a premonition on Thursday 27 th June, and 

again one the next evening, 28 th June, both showing rather 

cryptic images – of a woman dancing. At dawn on Tuesday 2 nd 

July, finally exasperated at being so completely confined to a 

dreadful ward, I escaped, armed with a week’s benefit giro, got 

to Ware and cashed it. I spent some time in York after getting 

all the way there by train, then got back the same evening – all 

without any police involvement! The next day, naturally, I was 

transferred to the basement Shannon House Ward. I had been 

345

there twice before, so ‘knew the ropes’ and the staff, so was 

not too concerned. 

Helen, the vital key to HALF of my twenty-four Spiritual 

Experiences, was admitted for her first experience of psychiatry 

on Thursday 25 th July, exactly four weeks after my above two 

premonitions – what an introduction was Shannon House, poor 

girl! She was ‘high’ on LSD so was immediately injected with a 

strong sedative, slept the next 24 hours, and clearly needed 

protection and help, and as a kindly ‘old hand’ I helped her 

‘find the ropes’. However, after getting over the vicious 

injection in just a few days, she found me, over twice her age, 

very attractive, and we are both ‘Oxbridge types’ and I found 

her irresistibly beautiful! 

So on 30 th July 2002 she started kissing me, naturally I 

responded, and we kissed increasingly passionately all that 

week, until we had a row, despite all the attempts by the staff 

to censure us! At that stage I realised that not only was she 

the ‘splitting image’ of the women dancing of my above two 

premonitions – but her ‘trance dance’ was identical to the 

strange posture of the woman dancing in my first such Spiritual 

Experience. Bizarrely, that had shown the woman smoking a 

pipe – but Helen had immediately asked me to try my own pipe 

as soon as she saw me smoking it! 

Finally the ‘cosmic links’ between her and other Spiritual 

Experiences – especially my ‘Meeting and Meander with the 

Morning Star – from the East’ above that started on 

Wednesday 9 th November 1983 in Stevenage – were made 

astonishingly concrete. For that turned out to be the very 

night she was born, around 8.30pm, in Coventry in the 

Midlands – exactly the direction the Morning Star came from! 

The principal Spiritual Experiences involved in my ‘cosmic links’ 

now revealed to be to her, who I only met last year but have 

obviously gone to great lengths to keep in touch with, only 

further reinforce this sense of ‘compelling conviction – through 

precise timing’: - 

My second Spiritual Experience that I shared with 600 

people in Cambridge on 30 th January 1978, of FIVE lights, 

346

was exactly FIVE years before my Spiritual Experience Five 

on 30 th January 1983. 

That Spiritual Experience in turn, was exactly nine months 

ten days i.e. 284 days before 9 th November 1983, her date 

of birth. That is, 30 th January 1983 was the clinical date of 

Helen’s conception, because the human gestation period is 

284 days! 

Even the date of our first kiss and embrace, on 30 th July, is 

the very half anniversary, six months from that 30 th January! 

Hence when I said on pages 67-68 at the start of this long 

discussion, that 30 th January 2003 had seen quite a few 

coincidences, I had yet to get around to these final three! 

347

Phew! Into the infamous 1984 that George Orwell wrote 

about! This account of LML and surrounding events from 1984, 

up to the liquidation of LML in April 1988 can at last be finished 

quite quickly as a result… 

At last, with my father accountable to a whole shrewd board 

of directors, two of them, Michael and John, even being on 

Fison’s main board, his financial furtiveness and secrecy 

were now supplanted by having to provide regular reports 

that even I saw! So I can at last stop describing his careerlimiting 

backstabbing of me, his own son, in 1980 – and his 

attempt to stab my mother in the back in 1982! For even 

when Michael left FSED under rather a cloud, and all his 

more ‘esoteric’ ventures including LML, were rapidly 

discarded by his successor, the ultra-conservative John, the 

archetypal fish-like ‘company doctor’ – I still had director’s 

rights! So never again did my father try to conceal dodgy 

financial facts… 

I was devastated by my last eighteen months, especially the 

horrendous six weeks before Christmas 1983 in a psychiatric 

unit. Even though I needed time off to recover my badly 

affected concentration, I was ruthlessly prevented – and was 

made to go straight back to work, immediately after the New 

Year 1984. At the board meeting held immediately, I was 

welcomed back, mostly sincerely, despite the stigma of 

mental illness, even stronger then than now. 

The IST report duly appeared. It held, to my great 

astonishment, no breathtaking solutions to developing a 

‘world-beating product’. Not even a hint of suggesting we 

change to a superior hardware platform, such as were now 

increasingly appearing, ever faster. Not even a change from 

Xycom! So, there could be no change from Z80 assembler 

language to a more modern, by far, high-level language – 

even the then rapidly becoming ever more popular ‘C’ hardly 

got a mention. Still less using it on something with much 

more powerful graphical capability, like a UNIX workstation, 

which Andrew had pushed hard at us. It was, all in all, a 

total letdown of a report! 

348

From that IST report finally appearing in January 1984, I 

worked harder than ever before on turning the ‘Microfast I’ 

into what I hoped would be a much more powerful product. 

They had come up merely with my father’s ideal, 

disastrously, just a further Xycom-based system! Very 

reluctantly indeed, I duly worked on, and nearly finished 

this, by mid-1985. As we saw, the ‘help’ I got from one 

programmer offered much hope, but as I said, this ‘quirky’ 

programmer was yet another massive letdown – his 

programs were unable to be understood by anybody else 

who ever worked there! After mid-1985, ‘Xycom’ 

development effort rapidly ended, and soon I was 

programming far more in ‘flowcharts’ on site, than 

developing it. Apart from odd ‘upgrades’, and the need to 

support users, and occasionally fix problems or ‘bugs’… 

‣ Xycom had at last recently brought out a more powerful 

main computer board. It had a 50% faster Z80, similarly a 

50% faster arithmetic chip, enough much faster memory to 

replace seven of my father’s ‘special’ banks of memory on 

memory boards, so also improving speed. All in all, once I 

got it to take my ‘flowchart interpreter’ programs, they 

proved to be overall, twice as fast as the ‘Microfast I’ 

system. However, that was the first Xycom ‘upgrade’ in the 

last three years since 1980 - and proved to be the last. 

Meanwhile, in the real, outside world, personal computers 

were vastly cheaper yet offering a lightning-fast rate of 

improvement of system performance. All that was denied to 

me… 

‣ During 1984, the ‘quirky’ programmer I mentioned before 

worked very secretively away, flourished his resulting 

version of the ‘flowchart creation and editing program’ now 

ported to a PC – then promptly left! While no doubt it 

actually ‘worked’ – nobody could follow a line of his code! 

There were no essential comments, his way of working was 

very idiosyncratic, and above all, it totally failed in its 

objective. To provide a basis, on Personal Computers, to 

‘break out of the Xycom mould’ and develop a much more 

powerful ‘editor’. 

349

‣ I changed the basic two-computer design of the prototype, 

into one with the above faster main board, and up to the 

Xycom theoretical maximum of six ‘slave’ or ‘secondary’ 

computers. Immediately I added a facility for the new 

system to operate up to seven serial devices, not just a VDU 

and printer as at FBC. These could be either the colour 

semi-graphical VDU’s we offered, or printers, by using two of 

the standard Xycom board products for that purpose. 

‣ Likewise, Xycom now offered a similar computer ‘slave’ 

board that could operate with the two leading American 

brands of ‘PLC’ (Programmable Logic Controllers). These are 

computers that run simple ‘digital’ programs very quickly, 

replacing old-fashioned, conventional ‘switch-banks’ of 

relays. The latter used to take a lot more physical space and 

were a lot more unreliable. 

‣ The first sale in 1985 immediately involved converting the 

extremely slow TCS interface on the prototype, yet again for 

speed, to the much faster assembler language, and so I 

produced another ‘slave’ card holding this program. By 1987 

this was extended so much that we could interface to the 

whole range. 

‣ Handling all these ‘slave’ cards, developed with no emulator, 

was a nightmare! 

‣ At long last, early in 1985, after intense pressure to ‘get a 

sale or we’ll shut you down’ from John of FSED, as we see 

below, my father finally sold one of these new systems! 

That was all of two years after FSED got involved, and a 

yawning four years since the initial FBC prototype system 

sale. So, for the next six months I had a massive struggle 

to produce the ‘TCS interface slave card’ they insisted on 

having, as far faster than any ‘flowchart language’ 

alternative. This was perhaps the most difficult piece of 

work I had to do the whole time there, but afterwards, as we 

see next, I started to increasingly rapidly move away from 

solitary development work. To supervising a succession of 

younger programmers we came to employ, to work for me 

on later developments. However, the eighteen months of 

the hardest ever graft I did at LML, in producing all the 

above, from leaving hospital to installing only our second 

350

system ever since 1980, took from 1984 to mid-1985. That 

meant that I had little time to try to supervise the ‘maverick, 

quirky’ chap above while he worked away on the ‘PC editor’. 

Anyway, he was always incredibly difficult to attempt to 

supervise, for he was incredibly tight-lipped about his 

‘special’ work, finally proudly unveiling a finished ‘pride and 

joy’ only for me to immediately point out that literally 

dozens of important features were missing! As I have said, 

his final such ‘pride and joy’ was totally uncommented, an 

essential feature of computer programs in any language, 

whether assembler language or his use of UCSD Pascal! 

Secondly, the code itself bore so little relation to anything a 

reasonable programmer would have done, and finally even 

though it was simply a ‘clone’ of my assembler language 

version, even I never understood it! As I said, this weirdo 

‘abandoned the sinking ship’ in 1985! 

‣ However, later programmers that came to work for me were 

far more open and communicative, ‘conventional not quirky’ 

– and they all produced good work. Ballitch, from Sri Lanka, 

joined us early in 1985, and soon, working with me as he 

completely turned his nose up at working on the Racpac, for 

obvious reasons, helped me develop a second vital 

requirement of our first customer. This was to allow the PC 

‘editor’ to copy tables of data to and from the Xycom 

computer, in order for it in turn to be passed on to bigger 

computers. In this case, DEC VAX computers. Then in late 

1985, he was joined by the Indian Nitin, in his industrial 

placement year while at college, who initially fumbled a bit, 

but a year later had managed to complete the ‘Documentor’ 

program I have mentioned already. So having been bitterly 

disappointed at finding further development, now it was 

written in a high-level language, of the ‘editor’ program, as 

‘cloned’ by the ‘maverick’ who had since abruptly left, any 

change was horrific. So when Ballitch turned his hand to 

adding a simple facility to display and change our lists and 

tables, he had to copy a section of code into a second new 

piece of program, alongside the original, than ‘carve the 

array-handling out of stone’. He left soon after that. My 

final employee, in 1987, was a New Zealander on contract, 

351

with the simple task of slightly changing the Xycom PLC code 

to produce a variant that could interface instead to German 

Siemens PLC’s. He took one look at the Racpac I had to use, 

shook his head in horror – and proceeded to do the whole 

job at the most basic level of all – binary in the ‘EPROM’ 

chips! Till 1987, when he left, I was also very involved in 

training and work with the new ‘hardware man’ Peter, Mike’s 

replacement. 

A major development took place in my private life, from 

mid-1985, just as our first such ‘Microfast 2’ system was 

installed. I met my future wife, Helen, as well as her black 

Labrador, Gemma - and her entire money-oriented family! 

Since 1980 I had belonged to a rather eccentric social club 

for ‘under-40’s’ called the IVC, desperate for social life. As 

well as regularly taking people with learning difficulties to 

and from their own special social club in Hatfield from 

nearby St. Albans, then ‘mingling’ and interacting with them 

there, every week. When I was 24 I met a divorced 26-year 

old fellow helper there called Glenda, who was on benefit, so 

when I had a passionate nine-month affair with her, got my 

first taste of ‘life on the breadline’ which has really helped 

these past nine years! We only split after firstly, when I 

took her on her first ever trip abroad, a holiday to Crete, she 

said she found it boring – not like the holiday camps with 

slot machines in England! Finally, she confessed to not just 

one but two earlier marriages – the first to a bisexual, even! 

Then, years later, in July 1985, I went down the road from 

my flat to the nearby house of a friend in the IVC, to a 

typically bizarre ‘cake party’. I was delighted to see a tall, 

attractive, then still slim, and buxom girl, looking at me, and 

thought of an opening line appropriate to the venue. “Hello! 

I have ‘cake-crashed this cake party’, because I’ve come 

without a cake!” She immediately realised I had a bizarre 

sense of humour, we got talking, and it turned out she was 

25, to my 28, and had just started work at the small Vet’s 

surgery visible opposite my lounge across the road. For she 

had just finished training to be a Vet at Bristol University, 

which happens to be where my father went as a scholar to 

352

take physics in the early 1950’s, and has always been 

incredibly proud to be a Vet! Finally, she turned out to have 

taken the ground-floor flat in the very same block as my 

own first-floor flat, used by Vets at that practice, so here 

was a golden opportunity to continue the budding friendship 

after the party ended! I remember thinking to myself, “if 

this turns into any sort of relationship, I can be open about 

my alleged ‘schizo’ label, even if I think it is wrong! For as a 

medical person, she is bound to understand!” I don’t think I 

have ever had a more naïve, hopelessly optimistic and 

totally misplaced hope, in my entire life, as we see later. In 

the hideous way she sided with doctors giving me poisonous 

drugs because of a totally wrong diagnosis, then ruthlessly 

dumped and evicted me, to promptly divorce me, in 1995! A 

few days after that cake-party, I went round the corner to 

Helen’s flat, and she asked me in for a cup of tea. I then 

first met her black Labrador dog, then as I recall just two 

years old, called Gemma, who was slightly temperamental, 

and could ‘snap’ if upset. The following day she came round 

for me to return the favours, and one thing led to another, 

and soon we were having our first kiss and embrace, and 

going to pubs, and also driving with Gemma to take her for a 

walk in a nearby large park in Stevenage. Within the first 

week I discovered that she was from Cheshire, and her 

father had retired after being the manager of the salt mine 

there owned by ICI, to their marital home in a village called 

Sandiway. She had two sisters, both older, with boyfriends. 

Even though she was all of 24 – I was her first ever 

boyfriend of any substance! Looking back, I should have 

been very wary to learn that – but was actually curious 

about her – the ‘fatal attraction of a virgin’? Soon, just a 

week after knowing her, naturally enough, our rapidly 

increasing passion soon ended that state of over-ripe 

virginity! Indeed, we soon had a very regular love life – 

which perhaps astonishingly, gave not just me but also her, 

total, 100% satisfaction absolutely every time we made love 

from then on! She seems when she divorced me to have 

casually and naively assumed that every lover would 

naturally be just as passionate and satisfying. After that, my 

353

family heard reliable rumours that she spent many evenings 

for several years, going to pubs despite then being ‘sole 

parent’ of our vulnerable young daughter, obviously ‘manhunting’. 

Finally, when she employed a builder to do some 

work, he ended up going out with her and then moved in – 

to the house largely provided for her by me! Yet he is about 

20 years older than her – nearly 60 to her 42 - as I write! 

However, he has really helped me to wrest adequate contact 

out of her with my lovely daughter Jenny – for he is also 

divorced, with a daughter he is hardly ever allowed to see! 

By the Autumn things had really moved on – and after 

proposing three times, which now seems disastrously 

premature! – Helen accepted my proposal in her Mini on the 

way to a pub outside Stevenage! My parents were initially 

delighted for us, but there was an unexpected sour reaction 

when we soon drove to Cheshire to tell Helen’s parents the 

‘good news’! For they had a furious row with her, and 

eventually told us to leave, with Helen in tears. The reason 

finally emerged years later. For Helen’s mother, before 

becoming a housewife, had worked in her native Belfast, for 

some time, in a hostel for ‘schizophrenics’. It turned out 

that my own vague and totally wrong label of 

‘schizophrenic’, or even worse ‘schizo-affective disorder’, 

was total anathema to her mother, when Helen had 

innocently mentioned it to her. For my medication was even 

then very effective, and there were no obvious signs of 

illness. The next time we went up, there was no mention of 

any of this upset, and indeed they started getting excited 

about the ‘top hat and tails, white wedding’ which the family 

insisted on laying on, which immediately put me off. I would 

still have preferred something much more informal. The 

date had to be before my 30 th birthday on 30 th March 1987, I 

said, so 28 th March 1987 became the due date. It was to be 

held in St. John the Baptist Church, their local parish church, 

in that extremely wealthy area of mid-Cheshire. Finally, 

when that ‘great day’ came in 1987, there were the first of 

two infamous hurricane-strength gales that year – the other 

that October. Helen and I drove up to Cheshire the day 

before on the motorway, and counted 13 overturned 

354

articulated lorries by the side of the road! ‘Someone up 

there’ was displeased! Meanwhile in December 1986 I sold 

my flat for £37,000 to take a £56,000 mortgage on a threebed 

marital home in Knebworth. My father gave me my only 

pay rise between 1983-1988, of just £2,000, to help. As we 

see next, I always did get a very raw deal on salary – even 

when a Director, for he was then on £32,000 with a 

mortgage of just a tiny £7,000! The wedding was duly ‘iced 

cake’ and we actually managed to get through the entire 

service without ‘muffing’ a single word! So to the 

honeymoon, for which I had managed to save £3,000. We 

spent the first night at a ‘mystery location’ known only to me 

in advance, in a hotel right in the middle of Dovedale, in the 

Peak District. Then, next day to Heathrow airport, and an 

immensely long flight to Kuala Lumpar in Malaysia for a few 

nights. Then some days in Thailand, much more thrilling, 

then four days on a beach on Penang island, back in 

Malaysia. Finally, a disappointingly long and ‘sterile’ five 

days in Singapore. We never had found out the customs 

limit, but got loads over the limit, through customs on our 

return – even camera equipment and a video recorder! 

Meanwhile, just before we left, Helen had found a new job, 

which was to prove vastly better paid, being on commission, 

in Hertford rather than Stevenage. Rather, I saw the advert 

in her magazine, then twisted her arm to take the job, which 

was to involve her doing work with horses, as well as her 

previous small animal work. Once we got back, she was 

immediately diagnosed as having glandular fever, yet had to 

work, or lose this promising job. For the next three months 

she only worked and ate, then slept the rest of the time, 

then finally recovered. She never did work on horses again, 

though! 

My father recruits a series of sales and marketing men, only 

to ‘dispose of’ the first as abruptly and savagely as he had 

Mike, and the other two soon find it unbelievable graft to 

help him at last make our few sales 1984-1987, and leave. 

That, despite a Mark 2 product having been produced by 

1985 after huge graft by my new development team, as 

355

above. Even then, as he had absolutely insisted, still based 

on now totally obsolete Xycom computers, and 100% 

matching his requirements! Above all, despite his perennial 

bizarre and maverick claims that, ‘his “special flowchart 

interpretation methods” are – still now, in 2003 even! - the 

only possible way forward in the future - for the entire world 

of software engineering!’ From 1984 he was under 

increasing pressure to make just one new sale since as long 

ago as 1981, and then in the Autumn of 1984, the principal 

engineer of the entire take-over by FSED, Michael, fell out 

with them. He left to join a Management Consulting firm in 

the city, under rather a cloud. From then on, John the pofaced, 

cold-blooded ‘company doctor’ in charge of Griffin and 

George, now also ran Michael’s old job, in charge of FSED. 

Typically, he immediately began to purge the company of 

‘acquisitions’ by Michael that were ‘esoteric or bizarre’, of 

which there had been quite a few. We soon found ourselves 

at or near the top of the hit-list – especially with them still 

underwriting our huge £220,000 bank overdraft that my 

father had let accrue – yet again behind my back – 1980- 

1982. Yet again back in 1983, he had gone behind my back, 

and brought a possible candidate to be a sales and 

marketing man to meet me – even though I was then in a 

dreadful place – the acute psychiatric ward at QEII Hospital, 

Welwyn Garden City. It was somebody I knew well – called 

David – for he had been a long-term employee at ICI and 

supervised myself and a part-time colleague called Janet. 

She had much admired my speed and accuracy – and ended 

up, starry-eyed even, calling me regularly ‘that genius’’! I 

was now told he had been made an offer, and had accepted 

it, to work for our company, without any discussion with me! 

All we had to do was decide on actual salary. The ‘backstabbing’ 

had gone on beyond that, when I was there when 

he came to discuss salary with the board. He asked for all of 

£19,000 plus a much better car than my own Fuego, even 

though I had only just been put up to £15,000 in 1983 – 

supposedly a salary befitting a director! So when my father 

and Michael went off for just five minutes, then returned and 

promptly agreed, yet again I felt stabbed in the back! For 

356

the very appointment, which I would have told them all if 

asked was inevitably going to be a disaster, and now a much 

higher salary and better car, had been given to somebody in 

principle very junior to myself! My salary had been a bone 

of contention in that company for years. Even when he 

grandly called me a ‘technical director’ to all and sundry, my 

salary was always under half of his, to support a mortgage 

many times bigger than their trivial £7,000! On top of the 

injury of only using totally career-destroying obsolete 

hardware and software for all of eight years, in which time 

the ‘real, outside world’ went marching by at a huge rate, 

while I learned NOTHING NEW there! There was the final 

insult, that he only ever gave me two £2,000 increments to 

my final £17,000 in 1988, then barely more than senior 

programmers got! He did not even give me a pay rise ever, 

to keep me there, instead used emotional blackmail along 

with my mother, on the many occasions I tried to escape 

from his dreadful LML during those long eight years. During 

1985 this David and he were often at loggerheads as I had 

fully expected, as David wanted an ‘empire’ like at ICI, a 

‘large company’ by comparison. Soon David found a crony 

in the ‘quirky’ programmer I employed – and soon they were 

trying to set me along with them, against my father. That 

Christmas we had a meal out for the company – which they 

refused to drive the fifteen miles to, allegedly on ‘ecological 

grounds’. Instead they caught a bus, and arrived extremely 

late, giggling at their disdain for the rest of the company! A 

few months later, my father finally lost patience with David 

trying to lead my father’s own ‘empire’, and made him 

redundant. Meanwhile, late in 1985, he finally won our first 

sale in four years and the first of the Mark 2 system – yet as 

we see, there were never enough sales like it, especially with 

our now much higher costs, what with having actual staff 

now. This sale was to Commonwealth Smelting, a large Zinc 

and Lead Smelting blast furnace operation at Avonmouth, 

near Bristol. I always thought their site resembled “Dante’s 

inferno”! However, as eventually they were to order another 

three systems from LML, which for a while kept it going, I 

was to become very familiar with that huge, bleak complex, 

357

with lead and zinc dust a constant poisonous danger, all over 

the site. This first customer for the new ‘Microfast 2’ system 

was the one who had asked for a dedicated TCS interface 

computer, and support for the PLC’s I also mentioned above 

in discussing the new features added laboriously by mid 

1985. They were always basically very happy with the 

adequate speed and flexibility of my software. However, the 

cumbersome, contrived and incredibly slow method we were 

forced to use to transfer information between the Xycom, 

then our personal Computer, and finally the other computer 

involved, horrified them immediately. Indeed we have seen 

the two main reasons why such ‘communication’ and so the 

even more sophisticated networking were atrocious on our 

systems, all the time. For way, back in 1980, my father had 

obstinately made two decisions that between them 

completely put a stop to such bog-standard technology on 

any other system in the world at that time. Firstly, there 

simply were never any alphabetic or symbolic keys on the 

keyboards he insisted were ‘perfectly adequate for end 

users, or operators’ – only numbers and ‘soft keys’. Even 

more fundamentally, was the by now utterly obsolete Xycom 

equipment he had gone behind everybody’s backs to impose, 

in two companies, so stabbing me in the back in his own 

company. To do communications and above all networking 

requires vastly bigger programs, and much faster computers 

running it, than the tiny 'ZX80-like’ Xycom hardware could 

ever provide! That system was up and running by the end 

of 1985, while their very computer literate team watched us 

working and learned a lot, quietly from a distance. So even 

when they ordered two more systems the next year, 1986, 

there was hardly any lucrative profit for us – for they proved 

fully able to do all the expensive part, the development and 

commissioning, themselves. John, the FSED ‘company 

doctor’ finally lost patience with LML, and rapidly pulled out 

of the joint venture, yet did not write off our debts to them, 

now nearly £300,000! Meanwhile, we put on a small stand 

at the ‘Control and Instrumentation’ exhibition at Harrogate 

that autumn, where my mother and fiancee Helen enjoyed 

themselves as ‘stand-in salesladies’. Indeed, another 

358

potential customer, from Halifax making non-woven textiles 

at the bottom of a deep Yorkshire valley, chose that occasion 

to give us another order. That was the only such actual 

success I remember about such exhibitions – more on my 

attitude to them in a bit. Then in 1986 we got a second 

order from a chemical company, south of the Thames at 

Belvedere. I spent a brief month, at most, commissioning 

that system, after Peter wired up the TCS instruments, then 

became the latest disgruntled employee to leave for ‘greener 

pastures’. In 1987, my father had a long argument about 

our Smelting Customer at Avonmouth seemingly wanting to 

‘jump ship’ for the fourth and final system they needed to 

order – to the latest system from TCS, our instrument 

supplier – yet constant rival. Finally, in desperation, he sold 

them a system at just barely over cost price – just to get 

some income. Around then we sold our last system of all to 

an apparently unusual client – the Tate Gallery in London, 

which they used to monitor temperature and humidity, and 

provide elaborate control of the blinds, for their collection of 

Turner paintings. Another salesman, Dave, joined us for a 

year, but left months later, in total frustration at never 

getting near selling a single system. By now it was proving 

impossible for anybody to sell, at that price and the everincreasing 

performance of the competition, constantly 

upgrading their already vastly superior computers. In 1986, 

I think, the only suppliers of Xycom equipment in the UK 

finally wound up, and their salesman Phil joined us for us for 

a while, yet even he never touched selling the ‘Microfast 2’, 

instead only selling several Xycom ‘Industrial Basic’ systems. 

Finally he saw the writing was on the wall for both Xycom in 

the UK, and LML, and went off to find easier, modern 

computers to sell. 

My anathema at the utterly absurd hype of our stands at 

exhibitions at LML. The sheer absurdity of proclaiming ‘One 

small step. One giant leap’ about that dinosaur of a system 

– as if it was remotely capable of ‘man on the moon’! My 

father criticised me heavily for showing no interest at all in 

our stand at our very first exhibition in 1982, of the 

prototype system, instead looking round the other firms’ 

359

stands, or going outside for a smoke. But then, once more 

he totally failed to consult me when he employed, for utterly 

lavish fees, a firm of Marketing Consultants near us. Once 

they came up with the utterly preposterous ‘hype’ for our 

stand, a large three-dimensional banner proclaiming as if my 

father was head of NASA, ‘One small step. One giant leap’ I 

gave up all hope! I was actually too embarrassed to sit on 

our stand at that and the couple of other exhibitions we had 

such a stand on, years later. 

The most vehemently anti-smoking firm in the whole world? 

I started smoking 40 a day plus back in 1978, and as we 

have seen, apart from giving up for six months in 1983, 

have always smoked so heavily since. My parents constantly 

criticise me for this, and my father never let me smoke in 

the office. Yet, unlike any other firm I have ever known, 

even today, he never dreamed of being kind enough to 

provide a smoking room, so I stood in rain, hail, snow, ice, 

and howling gales outside. Yet as we have seen, he – and 

my mother in emotional blackmail sessions – were largely 

responsible for all the stress of that awful job, making me 

have to relax by smoking! Hypocrisy again! 

The dreadful last year at LML with just my father and I left, 

1987-1988. So, my marriage year soon turned rather sour. 

My father finally had to plead with John of FSED to write off 

our debt to them, once we had lost all the staff, and finally 

stopped trying to sell any more systems. Finally he was 

reprieved by a very generous FSED. Even though he had 

tried everybody conceivable in the field of venture capital 

back in 1982, briefly he tried again, even though the product 

was scarcely different to them – it was obsolete! Finally in 

April 1988, the inevitable happened. The bank called in 

liquidators. The last straw came when my father went skiing, 

hit a pylon on his first run, broke eight ribs, and was 

taken by helicopter to a French ski clinic. So I took the 

liquidation meeting instead of him that April, although it was 

not so bad. So we both ended up being made redundant, 

with no redundancy pay, and had to find new jobs. It was 

not to prove easy for either of us after eight whole years 

there! 

360

April 1988. Suddenly my father and I find the going gets even 

tougher! Thrown out of the LML ‘1980 time warp’ solely caused 

by him making a completely secretive, and totally wrong set of 

decisions then to use Xycom. Meanwhile the ‘real, outside’ 

world of computers – especially the job market – has required 

one to re-train at least every six months to keep up with the 

‘white heat of technology’! 

As you will have noticed, I had been increasingly aware 

that while I worked on just process control skills, and 

embedded assembler language, then only Z80 assembler, 

which had become obsolete years ago, everybody else in the 

job market had acquired a succession of ever more advanced 

and varied skills. So my CV looked very bleak – especially 

trying to explain just what this peculiar ‘flowchart building 

block language’ was – and what were the advantages over the 

alternatives that absolutely everybody else used! 

Furthermore, ICI Plastics at Welwyn Garden City had shut 

down, moved up north, and the site was given over to acres of 

modern factories. Likewise, Kent Systems, a process control 

company I had dealt with at ICI, were no longer in the area, at 

nearby Hitchin. So there was no process control job market 

left nearby. Not surprisingly, from late 1987, anticipating 

redundancy, when I started to send out CV’s to companies and 

many agencies I found in the computer press, there very few 

acknowledgements even, let alone any positive responses at 

all! 

Finally, in May 1988, in my first month out of work, I had 

a stroke of luck – by reading, not the national computer press, 

but the local newspaper – with obviously, a far smaller 

audience likely to be interested. Digitron, an instrument 

company based at Hertford, was looking for a ‘software 

manager’ to develop their first microprocessor-based 

instruments, which had previously all been ‘analogue’ i.e. nonintelligent. 

I applied, had an interview with Ian Pointer, the 

managing director, and he promptly offered me the job – at 

£20,000 a year, with a Cavalier Estate company car, which I 

chose to carry several dogs, as we see next. I was due to start 

in June – for back in Knebworth, Gemma was expecting in May! 

361

The previous autumn, Helen and I had decided, partly to 

alleviate the stress on me due to the immense problems at 

work, to get Gemma mated with another pedigree Labrador. 

Then to let family members – and perhaps us – keep one, and 

sell the others to pay for the stud fees – and a Welsh dresser 

we wanted. So we went all the way over to Bicester, near 

Oxford, to a gun-dog breeder there, with Gemma, had the 

choice to mate her with a yellow ‘experienced’ dog or the 

‘untried’ black Henry – and both chose Henry. He ended up in 

the top national team of four gun dogs, no less. However, the 

first mating did not ‘take’. So I went all the way back in the 

spring with Gemma, this time she got pregnant, and I said to 

Helen, ‘both parents are black, yet may both have the yellow 

gene. If Gemma has a yellow female puppy, let’s keep her!’ 

She laughed and agreed. 

So I was at home, ready for this, when the puppies 

started being born – and we nearly lost the first one, who 

became ‘Flash’, Helen’s parents’ dog, when Gemma promptly 

panicked, ran upstairs and ‘dropped’ him under our bed, 

frightening our two cats! I soon got him out of the bag, after 

phoning Helen, and soon there were seven little puppies, all 

suckling Gemma, who looked baffled, and cuddling for warmth! 

That day, 8 th May 1988, the fifth puppy indeed turned out to be 

both yellow – and female – the only yellow one. We called her 

Josie, and she was a constant companion for her mother for 

many years. Luckily for her we kept her, for after three 

months she got a bad kidney infection, and could have died 

had Helen not been a Vet – and taken prompt action! So to my 

new job starting in June, after taking Gemma and her litter to 

live in a special heated pen at Helen’s parents’ house in 

Cheshire. Our house was just too small! 

Meanwhile my father was to have absolutely no such 

similar luck in securing a new job – for the whole next three 

yawning years, he remained redundant! He never deigned to 

show me his CV, but no doubt compared to mine, it was even 

worse to try to get interviews with. Especially as for nearly all 

that huge three years, naturally he arrogantly never 

condescended to apply for jobs less than senior manager. 

Even then, for most of that time ‘in the wilderness’, he even 

362

tried to couple that grandiose demand, with an insistence that 

the company concerned also only take him on to yet again, to 

be the ‘supremo’ for his ‘still going to beat the world 

eventually, flowchart interpreter system’! I can just imagine 

the sort of completely undermining questions that would have 

been fired at him in any interviews with even a fairly shrewd 

interviewer: - 

You are applying for a senior management post. Why is it 

you left a top job as a managing director of your own 

company in 1970-77, to become just a freelance consultant 

until 1980, when you started another company? 

That company was taken over in 1983, and that was 

effectively its first liquidation with the second and final one 

in 1988. That is three companies you have lost in the last 

ten years. How do you justify trying to become a senior 

manager with us, when you have such a dismal track 

record? 

Please explain your insistence on only working on the 

‘flowchart interpreter language’ that second company 

pioneered, yet only sold eight systems in all of eight years. 

Why are you so fanatical about flowcharts? They have not 

been used, and then in a limited way, certainly not in 

engineering, since about 1950? 

Even those three ‘humdingers’ would have resulted in a 

short interview! Finally, after three years living on my 

mother’s income only, luckily for them with their £7,000 

mortgage soon completely paid off, my father had simply, at 

long last, to swallow his pride. He needed to get some kind of 

job, to finance a decent pension. For by 1991 he was nearing 

retirement, and so then, reluctantly, took a position as a mere 

‘sales consultant’ at Honeywell at Bracknell. That meant a 50- 

mile round trip mostly along the notorious, treacherous M25 

then the M4, twice a day. He soon found it was a very 

‘sidelines’ job, but had to stick with it for financial reasons. 

Unbelievably, even then he seemed not to have got the 

message about his bizarre claims that ‘his unique flowchart 

language approach would be a world beater’ despite the 

conventional wisdom of the entire remaining ‘big, cut-throat 

software world’. So, a few years later, when he told me, after 

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he destroyed my career in 1980, that he had named me in yet 

another ‘plot and plan’ to get Honeywell to do it all over again, 

I was stunned! I remembered nodding to humour him, and 

saying just, ‘Yes Dad!’ Naturally it never happened, before he 

finally retired to relative complete ‘lavish living’ as a pensioner, 

in 1997. 

June 1988. From now on I am at last free of the straitjacket of 

my father’s career-limiting influence, for at least some years. 

So my account of my next five years takes only a handful of 

pages, not the huge fifty it has taken to describe 1980-88! 

On my first day at my first new job in eight years, Digitron 

gave me my own office, which soon doubled as a computer 

laboratory, for there was just enough room for a bench with PC 

and circuits, as well as my desk. Within the first week, I 

realised just how little computer knowledge there was in the 

company, for apart from me virtually nobody knew anything at 

all about programming. There were some very old PC’s in 

sales and accounting, and a slow, obsolete Commodore home 

computer was used to print out labels for serial numbers and 

date of manufacture, on the shop floor. I remember putting in 

small changes to this program in BASIC, and finally in despair 

totally rewriting it, removing the awful succession of ‘fixes’ in 

the original, clearly done by amateurs. 

I reported to the managing director, who proved very 

hard to get to see, as he was incredibly busy, really largely 

holding the company together as only he knew enough about 

everything going on. Immediately I realised that yet again, 

like at LML, I was to have no development budget, and he 

wished to control all my purchases, however small! So I often 

found myself waiting hours, sometimes all day, to get five 

minutes with him to get clearance to buy the smallest thing, 

after often fierce questioning! Not surprisingly, this soon 

became immensely wearisome and tiresome. However, that, 

and only paying minimal salaries, was how he single-handedly 

kept costs to a bare minimum. Most of the 40 or so production 

staff on the shop floor, were married women happy to earn 

even such a low second wage. 

364

Meanwhile, the products were vastly simpler and cheaper 

than at LML, and even though the range was extremely 

idiosyncratic, the marketing budget required was tiny by 

comparison. Simply by having a catalogue, and taking regular 

stands at exhibitions, mostly to launch new products, with 

none of the endless beating of his head against a brick wall 

trying to sell his single very expensive Microfast product by my 

father. Finally, the main reason for this firm’s success was that 

this managing director was a past master at seeing niches for 

new products in the market for such instruments, which cost 

from £100 up to about £1,000 for the most complex. They 

only had one UK competitor, ‘Kane-May’. 

I soon found out that this managing director, Ian Pointer, 

was on his way to his second million pounds, and gave himself 

and his other two directors, in marketing and finance, big 

salaries and expensive company cars. He himself ran around 

in a top-of-the-range white Porsche sports car, with the 

personalised number plate ‘DIL 111’! Soon, they were all 

starting to tempt me with the prospect that ‘once you have 

proven yourself – the position of Technical Director remains 

unfilled!’ Once that proved to be a completely groundless con 

and sham of a come-on, it was a principal reason why I was to 

leave fairly soon. 

These directors immediately told me they were very taken 

by the then market-leading Personal Organiser from the 

Cambridge electronics company Psion. My first job was to 

evaluate and test an ‘add-on’ for this, developed by a single 

engineer in his back room at home! He had also written 

software that enabled the Psion Organiser to measure up to 

four temperatures or voltages, through the sensors in this 

‘add-on’. After I gave it the thumbs up, with comments about 

how to make a production version for our own company, a deal 

was signed and Digitron acquired the rights to this. 

Almost inevitably, I was soon given as my first full project 

there, the task of producing an equivalent to the Psion 

Organiser – which incorporated the equivalent of that ‘add-on’. 

I soon found that not only did a recent Hitachi chip provide all 

that I would need. It achieved that by containing a fast 

processor with, crucially, the familiar Z80 instruction set, plus 

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vitally, a very relevant selection of Z80 peripherals, all held in 

one chip, providing ‘interfacing’ to the circuit. 

In the next two months I first designed the circuit for this, 

which was a thing I had never done before. Even when pruned 

right down, there were I think all of about 37 chips. Then 

something even more unfamiliar. I had to produce a ‘wirewrap’ 

prototype to get ready to test the circuit, once I had 

written some software. 

Then, about November 1988, I realised that the task of 

reproducing something as complex and powerful as the Psion 

Organiser, particularly as I had to design a database for it, with 

very limited knowledge of such techniques, would require use 

of a high-level language. Trying to achieve it in assembler 

language would be an even taller order, probably, than the 

‘Microfast’ had been! 

Then Ian finally saw my prototype board, asked just how 

many components there were, and said, ‘you are going to have 

to drastically reduce that count!’ So, yet again I, allegedly the 

‘software manager’ had to get involved in further ‘hardware’ 

investigations. Until the next January 1989, I experimented 

with Programmable Array Logic chips (PAL’s), in my office, and 

managed to produce some considerable reductions in the 

component count – for these PAL’s could replace several 

‘conventional’ chips. 

Then going even further, I investigated the much more 

sophisticated ASIC’s. To discover that the development 

equipment and above all expertise needed to design them was 

so prohibitively expensive, that virtually all companies needing 

ASIC’s – even far bigger than Digitron – normally paid a 

specialist ASIC design company to do this for them – costing 

nearly £10,000 just for one chip design! Naturally Ian 

eventually totally dismissed that as far too expensive. Then he 

also ruled out PALs, as he said even using microcomputers in 

his company’s instruments was a huge step forward – and he 

could not risk going even further with PAL chips in the first 

design. So it was promptly scrapped. However, within a week 

he had already come up with a five-line specification for a far 

simpler product, yet for which he had seen a huge opportunity 

emerge recently. Following the introduction of new laws about 

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food temperatures in chiller and freezer compartments in shops 

and supermarkets. 

Meanwhile, shortly after I started at Digitron, we had 

started house-hunting as well. Not only did I now work in 

Hertford, but my wife Helen had worked there since 1987, and 

soon wanted to live nearer her workplace. Her salary had risen 

very quickly, as she learned to work very quickly, to earn the 

maximum from being on a ‘commission-only’ basis for her job. 

So we could afford quite a large mortgage, for the value of our 

house in Knebworth had risen quite a lot since 1986. However, 

at first, despite looking at several houses, nothing appealed, 

until one day a flyer from the Halifax Building Society arrived. 

We had mostly been looking at slightly bigger, more expensive 

three-bedroom houses like our own. Yet here was a detached 

house, with four bedrooms, at an apparently very affordable 

price, in the village of Dane End. I vaguely remembered that 

name from 1983… 

We should really have been put off by the extreme 

isolation of that tiny village, with just a Church, a primary 

school, one pub, and a tiny post office with equally tiny range 

of goods, all expensive, in its shop. Also we were to find the 

bedrooms soon seemed extremely cramped – the fourth one 

was indeed far too small to be a bedroom, so became my 

study. Finally the ‘DIY’ of the previous owner, turned out to be 

on its last legs. We soon had loans of nearly £20,000, having 

had to replace his ‘DIY double glazing’ – after it collapsed! 

Equally, the kitchen proved to be impossible to work in, so we 

had to buy a new one. It was to take years to make any 

friends among the neighbours then, apart from fellow dogowners 

we met on walks, who then were only acquaintances. 

In particular, there were two particularly hide-bound cliques, 

bitterly opposed – ‘church’ and ‘pub’! 

Meanwhile at Digitron in early spring, for the only time in 

my entire career, from just about five lines of the most outline 

specification, Ian Pointer briefly gave me complete carte 

blanche over the design. Even at ICI I had never been given 

that luxury, and was in a matter of months to produce a ‘data 

logger’ that was to produce vast profits for that company! With 

me having only cost them less than £25,000 for salary, car and 

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capital expenditure, over that year I was there! For after 

leaving, it was years later that I saw the resulting ‘SP25’ 

product in its finished form, and asked the price and about 

sales. “Oh, we have sold several thousand to all the major 

supermarkets, at about £850 each!” I was stunned! For the 

cost of the components in such quantities, was only about £75, 

and labour on the new, much simpler circuit I designed in 

1989, about the same. So the profit per SP25 was a huge 

£700 – multiply that by say 4,000 - and my logger made them 

£3,000,000 profit in a few years. No wonder Ian Pointer sold 

up and retired early a few years later. We see in a moment 

just why I left in the end, now wondering whether if I had 

stayed, I would actually had had any share at all of that profit! 

I spent the next two months choosing components, and 

the only requirement from Ian was to include his choice of a 

cheap, new, yet incredibly accurate so slow, ‘dual-slope 

analogue/digital converter chip’. This was to be used to 

convert the ‘analogue’ voltage produced by thermocouples, 

measuring temperature, to binary numbers that the computer 

could read in – ‘digital’. I had a free choice of computer to use, 

and chose the Motorola 68HC11 micro-controller, which as such 

had ‘digital inputs and outputs’ that let it control the rest of the 

circuit. I chose this for several reasons: - 

It had just the right number of such inputs and outputs for 

my circuit design, compared to any other micro-controller 

then available. 

For a trivial £100 Motorola sold a simple emulator card, 

which moreover could be driven by the slowest personal 

computer. So the latter I could borrow from the sales 

department. Ian naturally had no objections. So at long 

last, after eight whole years, I could make full use of In 

Circuit Emulation! 

There was a ‘C’ compiler available for this micro, and when 

Ian naturally baulked heavily when I told him it cost about 

£400 to buy, I had to really put my foot down and insist that 

it was essential! He finally reluctantly let me buy it, so I 

spent some weeks, reading the manual to teach myself this 

new language. At last, I learned some new skills in 

programming, for the first time since 1980! I knew he would 

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never agree to a training course costing several thousand 

pounds, as even the £400 to buy the compiler obviously 

gave him nightmares! He simply never got used to the cost 

of anything computer-based! 

After two months I had selected the components, bought 

them, designed the circuit, and – much more quickly this 

second time around, with now only 17 components not 37 – 

built a breadboard prototype. Then I started writing about 12 

kilobytes of code to drive the board, and finally had it all tested 

and working after four months. Massively higher productivity, 

mostly by using emulation of a language as modern and 

powerful as ‘C’, than on the Microfast up till then! Soon the 

sales director, then Ian, admired my working prototype, which 

featured: - 

A simple ‘up-down-select’ menu system to set up ‘logging 

sessions’ operated with a minimal set of about nine ‘soft 

keys’. 

When you had programmed which of four inputs was to 

measure temperature and which milli-volts, and the 

frequency of printing values, a tiny printer printed out the 

results. The logger was powered by a rechargeable battery. 

The circuit was very simple, so easy to manufacture, and 

with only 17 components, Ian found a mass-produced case 

that was ideal. That saved a huge cost of setting up an 

injection-moulding machine to make a special one. 

The crucial feature was that whereas all the competition also 

displayed and printed temperatures to 0.1C, they were only 

able to measure it accurate to +0.5C. I carefully wrote 

special software to take advantage of the A/D converter to 

make my own design accurate to 0.1C. So when it said, for 

instance ‘5.8C’, it was completely accurate, over the entire 

range of temperatures measured with those thermocouples 

– about –40C to 800C! 

No wonder they sold thousands. Yet as we see now, I left 

without seeing a penny of their millions of pounds of profits! 

Then just as I finished the testing, and was demonstrating 

the new logger, to add to an already long list of grievances, 

came the complete last straw! I was introduced to the new 

‘systems manager’, who had been brought in to manage me, 

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even though I was never given even one employee to manage, 

not even a hardware expert, which had meant a huge learningcurve 

for me! Nearly everybody there took an immediate 

dislike to him, for he was cocky, looked down his nose, and 

was very smarmy! So, I had overwhelming reasons to leave: - 

I had never been trusted with the tiniest budget 

Every decision I had taken had had to get past Ian Pointer. 

Now disastrously, I had to report to this smarmy newcomer, 

apparently. He immediately started to scoff at my SP25 

design – but could only suggest one tiny improvement to the 

circuit, by replacing two small chips by one. 

Now I would never have people working for me. They’d all 

report to him. 

I had recently had an annual pay rise – but only in line with 

inflation from £20,000 to £21,000. Even now, Ian claimed “I 

can’t yet fully assess you!” 

The endless tempting suggestions about ‘eventually 

becoming technical director’ from the existing directors were 

now proven groundless and a con! 

I could add little from that year at Digitron of use to the 

main computer market, for embedded computer systems, and 

the other techniques I had learned there briefly related to 

them, are a tiny part of the whole computer world. Even my 

tiny amount of ‘C’ language programming, did not use many of 

the features of that language, being embedded ‘C’ on that 

project. Finally, three months of ‘C’ compared to the many 

years then of other programmers I competed with. So yet 

again, my CV got hardly any acknowledgements, let alone 

interest, from May to June 1989. Then I suddenly remembered 

that my former colleague at LML had gone off to work for a 

firm of management consultants at Stevenage, called PA 

Consulting Group. I applied there, and got an interview 

immediately! 

The interview must have been in June, and it turned out 

that they wanted to recruit some people for what they said was 

a rapidly growing ‘process control section’. The interviewer had 

read my CV, and after a few questions, seemed satisfied that I 

was suitable. Then I was asked to take three tests, two of half 

an hour, and the third ‘as long as you need’. The first two 

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were on literacy and numeracy, and when they marked them, 

were delighted to see I had scored nearly top marks on each – 

32/35 and 33/35 – I forget which was which! 

The third test was my first exposure to their ‘psychometric 

testing’, frequently used and highly thought of as a way 

to measure different attributes of personality. After that, the 

Scots site manager came in, and his only significant comment 

on the latter, was “You don’t seem to like hard work much!” 

He seemed to like my reply, completely off the top of my head, 

“I prefer to work smart than work hard!” He repeated it to 

others there several times, in years to come, much to their 

annoyance! He then got down to business, and asked me what 

salary I required. Desperate to get out of Digitron, as we have 

seen, for this apparently much more with-it and prestigious 

company, I merely added another £1,000 to my existing 

£21,000, and said ‘£22,000 with car’. He immediately 

accepted that, and I was told to start in July, after my month’s 

notice at Digitron. 

There was one final hurdle, which seemed very daunting. 

I have not mentioned my mental health since 1983, you may 

have noticed. Indeed despite all the stresses at both LML since 

then, then redundancy, finally at Digitron, it had been 

remarkably robust. Now I had to face the Company Doctor for 

a medical, and went along worried about the inevitable stigma 

of my ‘affective disorder’. I need not have worried, for he 

actually said straight away, “that is nothing to worry about!” 

In the years since 1983, as it happens, my only ‘blips’ of 

feeling at all hypomanic, were nearly all when I accompanied 

Helen to annual conferences. After this happened several 

times, she got fed up with this ‘interference with her 

professional development’, for each time we had to cut the trip 

short, so went alone from then on. As we will see in due 

course, I only had two brief such ‘blips’ while at PA, which I 

worked through with not much difficulty. 

About a year later, I happened to be discussing my salary 

with Dick, my initial interviewer, who I first worked for, having 

started to realise that even people with the same rank of basic 

‘Consultant’ seemed to get much more than me. He told me 

that “yes, most Consultants of your calibre get around 

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£35,000!” I remember I had assumed that there must be a 

pay scale of some sort, which I had happened to fit into. 

Nothing of the sort! It was a case of “Demand what you can!” 

Unfortunately, years of being totally behind the times had 

demoralised me! 

I duly resigned from Digitron, whereupon Ian Pointer said, 

“I think I know why you are going!” but refused to be drawn on 

that mysterious comment. Likewise, I offered no reasons. So, 

a month later, I collected my few books and other things, 

handed in my car keys, and left with their parting typically 

miserly criticism, “you should not have spent all of £30 on 

having your car valeted!” So full of hope to pastures new, to 

get a lift to my new office the very next day from Helen, where 

I had been told I would be given a hire car, before ordering my 

company car there, which was to be a more modern cavalier 

than at Digitron. 

So at 9am I arrived full of hope. To have it immediately 

completely dashed, with the first of mounting shocks at that 

‘most prestigious company in the south east’ as several job 

agencies were to describe it later. I obviously asked for Dick, 

who had interviewed me, who I had been told was to be my 

team leader on my first project. “Oh, he had too many drinks 

at a dinner last night and mixed them! He might be well 

enough to come in tomorrow!” When I asked whether anybody 

else could help me instead, apparently only Dick knew anything 

about it! So my first day there was spent wandering aimlessly 

around, reading a few of their rather peculiarly-worded 

brochures, and taking a long lunch break, before getting home 

early, totally bewildered! It soon turned out that a lot of very 

heavy drinking was done by employees at PA, and apparently 

most such management consultants. Is it the way they drive 

their staff so hard, to get the maximum huge ‘fees’ from clients 

for their graft, that causes the stress? Or is it the rather 

maverick nature of most such Consultants, which leads to such 

wild living? 

The next day, there came an even worse short, sharp 

shock. Dick finally arrived, still looking rather dishevelled, 

apologised profusely, then showed me round the system I 

would be working on, called ‘Escort’, the only prototype of 

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which had been commissioned for BP Chemicals at 

Grangemouth. This tried to use elaborate ‘artificial intelligence’ 

to predict dangerous situations before they arose, and before 

the plant operators realised there might be a problem. Then I 

had several shocks. Firstly, this one elaborate system, based 

on obscure hardware, and totally specialised, was the only 

project of the process control section. Furthermore, it was 

nearly as specialised as the ‘Microfast’, so nearly as much of a 

‘dinosaur’. Above all, as I knew nothing about the software, 

written in an artificial intelligence language called ‘Lisp’, and 

my old colleague Peter was doing the only development work I 

could have done on it already, I was not to do any 

development. Nothing so ‘glamorous’ or interesting! 

Now I finally realised I had ‘jumped from the frying pan 

into the fire’. For I found myself consigned for the next four 

horrible months, to the most utter tedium, with as at LML, 

obsolete facilities. Until November, I spent every day in a tiny 

office with no windows, consigned to the dullest, most tedious 

work imaginable in computers. For I was now to become a 

mere technical author, mostly editing and keeping up to date, 

only sometimes writing afresh, a huge set of documentation for 

the forthcoming final system testing of the Escort at BP! Even 

then, all the wording and layout had to conform strictly to the 

‘company house style’, which I had to learn every little boring 

feature of! 

Above all, the only word-processors at the site were 

obsolete machines from Wang, which only secretaries were 

allowed to use. So every slightest change to a document had 

to be carefully and painstakingly written on it, which the 

secretaries often infuriatingly found difficult to read, especially 

being about such a highly technical system. So often it took an 

infuriating several attempts to get a document finished to the 

pedantically high standards of perfection demanded. Finally, 

the Wang’s could not even hold pictures – so space had to be 

reserved for these to be literally glued on the page! So when 

the site finally bought the first batch of Apple Macintosh word 

processors, there was a huge queue of consultants trying to 

get time on these state-of-the-art machines! 

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At last in November, the work on that system was 

finished, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief when it went to 

BP for the final testing. Soon I was at a loss as to what to do 

next, for I had had no hint of the sales force finding me any 

‘real’ work. Then I did some brief work helping to test another 

system. This was the computer PA had installed to control the 

pay booths on the Severn Bridge. As soon as I learned that 

the micros in the tollbooths themselves, were Motorola 6809 

very similar to the 68HC11 I had used at Digitron, I asked to 

see the listing of the code. Immediately I could see that it was 

much in need of reworking! 

The code was often uncommented, and large sections of it 

were clearly written by a whole variety of programmers, so had 

very variable ‘style’, and totally inconsistent and often 

atrocious programming style! A nightmare to maintain! I 

immediately asked Dick if I could spend a few weeks rewriting 

it to be ‘elegant’ and ‘consistent’, with consistent, full 

comments, from that rat’s nest. He promptly agreed, so I 

spent the time around Christmas 1989 working on it, even 

though there was no way to test it till the next time we came 

to upgrade the toll booths. He was delighted with the result, 

so I got top marks for both effort and quality of work on his 

assessment of that mini-project. I never got above ‘average’ – 

sometimes below, for any of the other projects I was involved 

with there! 

In New Year 1990 I got a further shock. BP had soon 

found that this elaborate Escort system was vastly slower than 

their own plant operators at ‘seeing problems arising’ and also 

was far from always accurate about its predictions. They had 

rejected the final system, and there were no other likely orders 

– or even products or other work in the Process Control 

Section. The Section Leader and several others then not ‘on 

fees’ were immediately made redundant, and the section closed 

down. I had only earned minimal fees for four months of being 

a technical author, and since only done a small project for no 

fees i.e. ‘internal’. So I seemed to face my second redundancy 

in eighteen months, having been told that that section was 

rapidly growing and recruiting, when I joined. However, at 

that very time I had finally been found ‘fee-paid work’ in 

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London, so was told to start work there the following Monday. 

It turned out to be a horrible alternative to being made 

redundant just then, and further projects were equally awful! 

For all of the next eight eighteen months, then, I worked 

in a large project team for the system being developed by a 

software house called SD-Scicon, for the National Grid 

Company headquarters. To handle the database and software 

required to handle the ‘Settlement’ of all monies after the 

imminent privatisation of the National Grid. I knew nothing 

about large ‘databases’ such as the one from ‘Oracle’, then the 

leading brand, used on this system, but had used a much 

earlier version of the ‘Fortran’ software language being used. 

The system was run on a powerful collection or ‘cluster’ of 

powerful computers, DEC VAX, and again, as ever, I knew 

nothing about these either. 

However, it turned out I did not need to, for the role of 

our small section was to be to verify calculation results, using 

Lotus ‘1-2-3’ spreadsheets on personal computers. Although 

PA consultants vastly outnumbered the actual NGC staff, there 

were a few consultants from other companies. The project was 

crawling with consultants, all charged out at huge fees – a very 

expensive project! 

Initially I found myself with a section leader who had been 

there some time, so turned out to have got plenty of work 

attending meetings and so forth, always denied to the team, 

from Coopers Lybrand Deloitte. Unlike the rest of us, this Neil 

always managed to stay busy. There was also Brenda, an 

American girl from the same company, and a month after I 

started, another Neil, from my PA site at Stevenage, made up 

the team for some months. We had all soon read and asked 

enough questions about, to understand the specification for 

these ‘calculations’ for the Settlement System, which took 

about two weeks. I was very surprised and disillusioned to see 

that they were not very complex – indeed involved nothing as 

hard as A level maths, just GCSE! As a result I was always 

amazed at the size and cost of that project team! After that 

two weeks of reading, we then found ourselves, for months 

until about April, with very little work to do. 

375

Yet we were not allowed to take time off, despite turning 

out that there would be several more such utterly tedious 

periods of nothing to do. For weeks turning into months, 

several times, we had to turn up, and try to appear busy, even 

doing nothing! Even the ever-enthusiastic team leader, himself 

always busy, eventually ran out of so-called ‘work’ which he 

could invent for the team. The reason for having to turn up 

with so little to do was simple, brutal and obvious. Simply by 

turning up, PA could ask for all £800 a day for me, of which I 

got paid just £100 a day to sit around utterly bored for months. 

More senior people were charged at even much higher fees! 

So all the team members, above all Neil, my colleague from 

PA, were complaining ever more bitterly about this. Neil was 

the worst, and soon found this the last straw with his total 

disgust with PA. He left in the summer to take a new job in his 

native Scotland, eventually to be replaced by a young, bright 

Jewish consultant from PA, called David. For a while I was very 

friendly with him, for he had a great sense of humour and liked 

my own, and even went out with him and friends after work for 

some months after that. 

So at long last the testing work started in the summer on 

‘Phase 2’ of the several ‘Phases’ of that project. The work was 

soon easy, as we were well prepared after months to prepare 

for it as above, and as expected very tedious. Mostly we 

simply cross-checked the printouts of results against our own 

printouts of our own calculations we did just on our small 

Personal Computers. So after two months, we had found very 

few things that needed any correction – and then a few of 

those were ‘spurious’ and due to mistakes in our own 

spreadsheets. 

So back to the horror of several more months, in the heat 

of summer, endlessly waiting for the next Phase of work to be 

produced by the supplier. My journey to work involved driving 

ten miles to Stevenage Railway Station, parking the car before 

a five-minute walk to the platform, and catching a fast train to 

King’s Cross in London. Then a five–minute walk to the nearby 

Thameslink station, which I soon nearly always avoided by 

catching a bus instead. For that stopped over Blackfriars 

Bridge, so avoiding the often bleak winds and rain in the 

376

Winter, and also allowed for a less boring journey than the 

Thameslink train, as at least you had a view of some sort out 

of the window. Finally there was a further five-minute walk to 

the headquarters building of NGC, and the lift to, as I recall the 

fourth floor and the project office. I remember the surrounding 

area of Southwark as being bleak and stony, with hardly a tree 

for miles, and the only respite being a few expensive, typically 

Central London, unfriendly pubs. 

During the start of the above ‘Phase 2’ testing that spring, 

I finally had some kind of break from that tedious commuting, 

and drove several times down the M25 then M3 to Fleet in 

Hampshire, to attend various meetings at the office of SD- 

Scicon, the software contractor. 

Meanwhile, increasingly that year, Helen and I had 

discussed starting a family, as she was now approaching 30. 

So she stopped her contraceptive pills around May or early 

June. In mid-July 1990, one morning she returned from the 

bathroom to the bedroom, where I was still waking up. 

Without saying a word, she held out a sampling-stick from a 

pregnancy testing kit, and the end was dark blue, which I knew 

meant that she was almost definitely pregnant! Soon after 

getting the GP to confirm that with a second test, we 

announced this good news to both sides of the family. My 

mother was delighted to find herself waiting to meet her first 

grandchild! Soon we converted our third bedroom into a 

nursery. 

Then, later in the summer, my brother and his partner 

announced suddenly, that their first child was on the way too! 

So our baby would have a Lee cousin, to add to the two boys of 

Helen’s sister on her side! My parents would soon have not 

one but two grandchildren! 

By complete contrast, it was doom and gloom back at 

NGC in our team. Brenda from Cooper’s finally got herself onto 

another project, and Neil from PA finally got another job, both 

leaving with huge smiles of relief from the tedium. I just 

wished at that stage, that I had acquired enough current skills 

to also get another job, for I had lost all enthusiasm for that 

dreadful project. Only David, the newcomer from PA, now had 

any enthusiasm, whereas I had lost mine months before. 

377

Clearly very bright, he spent a long time merging about three 

‘Lotus 1-2-3’ spreadsheets into one big one, in a clever way 

that made the next phase of testing much easier, once it finally 

started that Autumn. 

As soon as the relative luxury of even that tedious next 

round of system testing started, compared to all the 

intervening hanging around, moreover on client premises, 

doing nothing, I had a surprise. As I said, from the start of my 

time there, I had clearly recognised that the all-important 

‘calculations’ never involved even A level maths at that stage. 

However, I now and increasingly found myself called upon as 

‘the project team top expert’ on these calculations! It is a long 

time ago, so I think that yet another horrific period of ‘endless 

waiting around all day doing nothing – in the client’s office’ 

ended the following February. 

Just before then the last original member of the team 

apart from me, the team leader Neil, was transferred by his 

company to another project. He too was very relieved to 

‘escape’ at last! I was immediately pleased to be told ‘you are 

the new team leader’ then very annoyed to hear the totally 

backhanded qualification ‘but only on technical matters, not 

personnel management’! So even that one brief period at PA in 

over three years there, my role with people reporting to me for 

the only time was insultingly ‘only technical, not managerial’! 

I had just started to get to work on the latest ‘Phase’ of 

system testing, when I realised that this time there had been 

some really dreadful mistakes made. Soon the project team 

were all running around like ‘headless chickens’, having 

realised that this complete ‘Phase’ – or was it then a ‘Subphase?’ 

– had been disastrously messed up by SD-Scicon! 

Then, about 12am on 22 nd February 1991, I got a very 

important phone call. Helen had started labour and gone to 

the QEII hospital at Welwyn Garden City! I immediately caught 

the train and went home, picked up my portable hi-fi and some 

soothing CD’s by the Irish composer and singer Enya, and got 

to the delivery room at that hospital just after 2pm. 

Immediately I arrived, I found Helen in a gown in bed, with a 

gas bottle and mask ready – and the first birth pang of the 

labour came about a minute later! The nurses were delighted 

378

to hear me play such ‘cultured, soothing’ music to her during 

the labour, compared to a lot of much louder music they had 

heard in their time! 

Finally, about 8.10 pm, the delivery started – and I 

became aware, very excited, of the brown hair of the new baby 

starting to appear! Finally our Jenny was born at 6 minutes to 

9 that same evening, as I recall I looked at the accurate clock 

in the room at that point. I still recall being stunned by the 

beauty of the bright blue spiral of the umbilical cord itself. The 

nurse immediately commented that it was superbly healthy, 

and clearly, although I went outside occasionally for a break, 

my wife herself did not smoke. Finally I went out to buy an 

expensive Peking Chinese take-away, which Helen really 

enjoyed, now being very hungry. My parents turned up briefly 

to see their first grand-child, and eventually I went home, to 

leave Helen there with Jenny overnight, before taking the 

official week allowed of ‘paternity leave’ to help them both get 

used to it on returning home. 

So, we were soon into suckling, bottles, nappies, and 

midnight awakenings to tend to a crying baby, although Jenny 

soon turned out to our relief to sleep mostly very soundly. I 

think it was the contrast of that week at home, with such a 

joyful newcomer to the house – soon the dogs and cats were 

totally used to her – that finally caused me to lose any 

remaining patience with the NGC project. 

Even a whole week after that, I was dismayed that, on 

getting back to work, the project had still apparently not got 

over the huge problems when I left. Within a week, our 

remaining team were still trying to make sense out of chaos! 

Finally, in exasperation, I wrote a polite, yet very direct fax 

completely over the head of the Project Manager, direct to the 

Project Manager at SD-Scicon, with a bitter set of complaints 

about the fiasco they had caused. Even though most NGC 

project members quietly said to me, “You did just the right 

thing! Somebody had to deal with the situation!” I was hauled 

over the coals by the PA Project manager. 

So, that Phase or Sub-Phase was abandoned, and finally a 

month or so later, SD-Scicon produced software that soon 

proved to have all those huge faults taken out. Then, the tiny 

379

and only the second incident happened, that got me off that 

project within a few weeks. I was asked to stay behind after 

work to wait (for no specific time) for one meeting to run late, 

when I was to be asked to spend a few minutes as the 

‘calculation expert’. 5.30pm, then 6pm, and finally 6.30pm 

came and went – with no sign of me being called in. At long 

last I had had enough of ‘endless waiting around with nothing 

to do’ – so simply went home. 

When I got there the next morning at 9.15am, firstly the 

PA Project Manager tapped his watch. Hypocrite! He often got 

there after 10.30! Then a real bitch of a Consultant from 

another company, was sitting there, clearly waiting to have 

that ‘vital’ two minute chat with me that I had forced to be 

delayed till that morning. “You’re in really deep shit, mate!” 

she said, and looked absolute daggers at me! There was only a 

slight reprimand over that, the reason soon becoming 

apparent. A few weeks later, to my vast relief, I was off the 

project! 

So, now to long periods of weeks with nothing to do, for 

over a year, interspersed with being handed forever dreary, 

small pieces of work to actually do for clients. My PA CV looked 

no more impressive, with the little added I could think to say 

about the NGC nightmare just ended. So, as ever, I was 

continually sidelined in favour of colleagues, even much more 

junior, with relevant, modern skills. Meanwhile Helen soon 

found a child-minder in Dane End, with children of her own, 

who Jenny spent her first year with, while Helen returned to 

work a few weeks after her birth. While I fretted about total 

lack of work, having no way to get any, and so my future, 

Helen meanwhile was fully occupied flat out at work! 

Finally, about May 1991, I thought briefly that my luck 

had changed. I was told that I was being sent on a training 

course in the same, then very popular ‘Oracle’ database as 

used at NGC, focussing on ‘SQL’, the standard language used 

to put data into, and retrieve it from such a database. Fairly 

naturally, both before that one-week course in London, and the 

later two weeks when I studied ‘SSADM 3’, a governmentsponsored 

‘systems methodology’ – immediately out of date! - 

I assumed they would result in work. No such luck! The 

380

training was purely speculative, it turned out, intended ‘just in 

case PA took on such a project’. 

I never worked with those technologies at PA or 

afterwards again, on ‘real’ work. The closest I got, still 

believing they had only sent me on the ‘Oracle’ course because 

they must have a project in mind, was that I spent a month at 

PA headquarters, reinforcing what I had learned, by doing a 

small ‘internal asset management project’ on a PC. So my only 

courses since 1980 were also useless! 

The only technical training I did there was again at PA 

headquarters, at 123 Buckingham Palace Road, near Victoria 

Station. They were very proud of having secured such a 

‘prestigious’ address for their equally ‘prestigious’ 

headquarters. I always found it bleak, futuristic, and grim – 

and prim. The restaurant was like a wine bar without the wine! 

So I again tolerated being there, and first watched some videos 

on ‘object-oriented programming’, and then spent a day or so 

at a computer, training myself up in the basics of ‘C++’, then 

and still now, a popular language of that flavour. So it was 

that the only useful training I got there, as we soon see, that I 

actually used later, was not done on any expensive training 

course. 

During a typically barren period of hanging round the 

office in September 1991, I was suddenly told to get ready for 

a week in Ross-on-Wye, for my only other training course, at 

the ‘Leadership Trust’. Many people from PA had been on it, all 

returning very secretive about it, except that it was very tough, 

was some kind of ‘outward bound course’ for management – 

and they could not recommend it highly enough! So that 

Sunday, I drove down to the West Country, to spend the night 

there, before starting first thing the next day, very concerned 

about the ‘tough’ nature of it affecting my mental health. At 

first when I arrived, I was surprised to find it was a 

comfortable country house, with bar and restaurant, and 

decent enough rooms. I saw the doctor on the first morning, 

who listened briefly and said that my ‘problems’ were 

irrelevant. So, onto the brink! 

There were about 30 or so men and a couple of women, 

all like me in their mid-thirties, at the first joint ‘briefing’. We 

381

were immediately told to choose our ‘worst fear from 

mountaineering, canoeing, pot-holing or scuba diving’. I 

tossed up between mountaineering and pot holing, and finally 

chose mountaineering as I had experienced bad vertigo before. 

Then we found we had been assigned to teams of about eight, 

and were to take part in a series of competitive ‘outward bound 

challenges’ interspersed with training sessions in our chosen 

‘worst fear’. 

So there were to be two such ‘challenges’ or initiative 

tests for four days, all on ‘courses’ with specific, often unlikely 

equipment, with only a short ‘briefing’ to tell us what we were 

supposed to do with them. On the Friday we had to spend all 

day in a final such ‘exercise’ – involving all our training up till 

then, for the first time, in our ‘worst fears’. We immediately 

went outside to attempt the first exercise. It was bright and 

sunny all week, which was a real boon, it turned out. 

The first exercise turned out, I immediately realised, to 

involve siphoning a barrel of water to buckets on the other 

side, so soon we were miles ahead of the other teams, and 

would have ‘won’. Had not the last person put his foot very 

slightly off the stepping-stones onto gravel we were not 

allowed to touch at all throughout. Now we found just how 

strictly we had to stick to the ‘rules’, for the ‘adjudicator’ 

immediately disqualified our team, even over such a tiny thing! 

Soon we started on our ‘chosen worst fear activities’ and 

my first experience of mountaineering, on nearby cliffs. After 

an initial embarrassing first attempt, I was getting up rapidly 

and nimbly after the first two days. When it came to abseiling, 

I found my first drop much easier than climbing, but had to 

give up after that, as I got blurred vision when a piece of grit 

dropped straight into my eye. When it came to abseiling for 

the exercise on the last day, a colleague on my team took my 

place, which was actually allowed. 

The pace and intensity soon started taking it out of me, 

and indeed, by the Thursday I had started to get increasingly 

‘hypomanic’ – which was soon obvious. Then the reason for all 

that intensity and stress only came out on the Friday. The 

organisers suddenly revealed that they were actually SAS 

officers, recruiting likely candidates, to help with the Gulf War 

382

at that time! I returned home, high as a kite after that 

exhausting week, and Helen immediately realised I was ‘ill’ 

again! 

Away from the demands of the SAS! Also in 1991, still 

desperately trying to improve my CV, to get any sort of work, I 

suddenly decided to apply to the Institute of Measurement and 

Control to become a Full Member. This would immediately give 

me the qualification of ‘Chartered Engineer’, which carried 

some weight in the engineering world. I filled out a form, sent 

it off with my CV, and had an interview with two existing 

members who were actually very impressed with the CV and 

my experience in process control. So from October 1991 I 

started adding ‘CEng MInstMC’ as letters after my name. 

Then, the next year, 1992, not content with that, I applied 

to the even more relevant and much bigger Institution of 

Electrical Engineers, the IEE, who admitted me with no exam 

and not even another interview, as I was already a Chartered 

Engineer. So now I had ‘CEng MIEE MInstMC’ after my name. 

Years later, in 1997, I finally started receiving great help from 

my membership of the IEE, which somehow I had managed to 

keep paid up all the years since joining. For when I found 

myself with £4,500 of credit card debts, on minuscule income, 

the IEE Benevolent Fund paid them off, and have paid me 

nearly £14,000 more since then, to supplement my benefit 

income since 1997! 

At the time, although these qualifications seem to have 

helped since, they were to prove to be no help in getting more 

vital work at PA in 1991. With no process control section now, 

the Measurement and Control Charter I had, was of little or no 

value to PA! So over my remaining time there, I only did a 

few, really as ever, extremely mediocre and frustrating tasks 

‘on fees’, mostly by myself: - 

I signed the Official Secrets Act, and travelled round 

extremely grim, bleak, and secretive MOD offices in London, 

gathering information. Then spent a month writing a long 

report giving the results of the team ‘cross-comparing’ 

databases at all these sites, of the various services. Not 

surprisingly, due to the total secrecy, there was very little in 

383

common, and secondly, this whole situation made me 

quickly get ‘hypomanic’ – throughout! 

With a small amount of VAX ‘Fortran’ at NGC, and not 

knowing microVAX computers at all, I did some grotty work 

for a month, fixing ‘bugs’ and limited trivial development. 

This was right around the M25 at the RAC, Croydon! 

I finally wrote some tiny ‘C’ routines, to test the COBOL on a 

project being done for Mercury Communications. This also 

took about a month. 

Finally, in August 1992, I signed the Official Secrets Act 

again (and later again in 1997), and visited a military airfield in 

the West Country to see an air traffic control system, 

developed by a company PA had bought. I was about to start 

doing a long project to enhance this, which I got onto as it 

used the obsolete UCSD Pascal as at LML! However, after two 

weeks on this, I was suddenly taken off the work and told, ‘as 

ever, you are not earning enough fees! We are having to make 

you redundant, as from September 1 st’ ’! I then had a battle to 

be paid my ‘redundancy pay’ of a mere three months’ pay in 

lieu of notice, on that date, so tax-free, instead of working my 

notice period to 1 st December, which also would have meant 

paying money out of it to live! My second redundancy in four 

years! 

11 th September 1992 onwards. I find myself, with a nearly 

useless CV, in a very deep industrial recession, especially in 

computing. The nightmares are only just beginning, however! 

Soon I experience far worse than crap work! 

I started the above lengthy section one of this account, on 

Friday 31 st January 2003. It has taken me ten whole days of 

really difficult, painful writing to type and correct those mere 

sixty or so pages. Firstly, it is the first time I have ever sat 

down and forced myself to think back so long ago, to 

remember and put in order such a comprehensive account of 

384

my career, such as it was. Above all, now it is finished, I am 

more fully aware than ever before, just how totally careerlimiting 

all my father’s technical decisions were back in 1980, 

taken behind not only my back, but behind those of an entire 

team from the firm funding us. Even worse, he and my mother 

emotionally blackmailed me to stay in his disastrous family 

firm, never even considering the incentive of a pay rise, on the 

many occasions I desperately tried to leave. 

So here I was, 12 years on, and redundant again. Even 

the prestigious firm of PA Consulting Group where I last 

worked, had totally failed to give me any useful training or 

experience. Still, I had to keep going somehow. I paid about 

£200 to buy a limited company and my choice of name for it, 

so I could prepare to start doing contracting work, then still 

fully legal, out of my limited £6,000 or so redundancy money. 

I spent a further £2,000 on a modern PC – soon outmoded, of 

course. I had a printer from LML, so that saved some outlay. 

Immediately I produced a fresh CV based on my PA 

internal one, and started sending it to every job agency, and 

possible likely employer, I could find. A year later, I had got 

about just two replies to all those hundreds of CV’s and letters! 

In the meantime I looked around, found an attractive looking 

C++ compiler for PC’s from ‘Borland’, and started to do some 

work in that language. 

For I knew I desperately needed at least one modern skill. 

I needed something substantial as a project, so chose to start 

developing a ‘super-Microfast’ idea, but done my way – with no 

interference from my father! 

All that investment cost a lot of my redundancy money, 

yet as I was now a company director, despite taking no 

income, was led to believe that I could not claim benefit – even 

unemployment benefit, then as now tiny! So now I was totally 

dependent on Helen for everything I bought. As a result, very 

soon, for about a year, I found myself looking after baby, 

Jenny, now eighteen months old and about to start talking, and 

doing a lot of housework. So for about a year, penniless apart 

from some money from Helen, I brought my computer down to 

the lounge and worked furiously on it – desperate to at last 

learn a modern skill, where PA had failed to teach me – I had 

385

to teach myself! All that time, I was also struggling to look 

after tiny Jenny in her playpen or on the floor next to me. My 

wife’s wild claims that ‘I never played any part in my 

daughter’s upbringing’ are completely untrue, therefore. I 

played a HUGE part for that year, at least! 

My own small funds from redundancy soon went as I tried 

to find a C++ compiler that actually provided all the features I 

needed. I knew nobody to ask for advice from about this! 

Meanwhile, a few months of using the Borland compiler soon 

featured on my CV, then some months with the next 

combination I tried – an obscure product called DESQview/X – 

with which I programmed for a while until I found I needed 

extensive support, yet none was available. The job I mention 

overleaf in (6) came about because of the latter, and a major 

reason I would have lost that job even without illness, was that 

they had not realised how totally different that DESQview/X 

was to its predecessor DESQview, that they actually used. My 

brief Borland experience got me the job in point (7) overleaf, 

which was even more disastrous! 

I finally settled on Microsoft ‘Visual C++’, and finished 

developing 90% of the code for my practice system based on 

previous work at LML. Then the first time I ever ran it, it hit 

the first ‘bug’, ‘crashed’, and corrupted quite a few files on the 

hard disk! I gave up the ghost on developing on just one PC, 

with all the other vital files being so vulnerable to crashes. 

Soon after that, I got some work at last, at the start of 

November1993, 50 miles away in a grotty, noisy factory at 

Bicester near Oxford – where Gemma was mated! Two weeks 

later, as overleaf, I was ill, and they had already given me 

notice after just two weeks there. 

The die is cast yet again for ten years of utter misery 1993- 

2002 – now ‘medical’! 

Meanwhile, for the last couple of years at PA, until he 

retired in 1991 to do a bit of final work just at his Harley Street 

Practice, I saw Dr Gander privately at his home, on health 

insurance from PA. After that, in 1992, just twice, I saw Dr 

Jack Dominian, famous for writing books on depression, also at 

Harley Street. 

386

BETWEEN MID-1992 TO MID-1993 I HAD FINALLY 

ACHIEVED MY WILDEST DREAM! I WAS FULLY WELL, 

COMPLIANT WITH MY MEDICATION, AND SEEING MY CPN 

MONTHLY. BUT WITHOUT SEEING ANY PSYCHIATRIST. I WAS 

FREED FROM PSYCHIATRY! 

Now my Mother, not my Father, started taking my 

decisions for me. I was not ill at that stage, and certainly, for 

the first few months when I did reluctantly see a Doctor, he 

never suggested I seemed at all ‘ill’. So naturally, I was 

incredibly reluctant, when she kept on about me seeing a 

‘brilliant young Doctor with a fantastic reputation, back at the 

QEII. He even plays live jazz to his patients, he is so nice!’ 

There were initially big problems with this – as I should have 

seen a psychiatrist at Harlow Hospital, as I was in that 

hospital’s ‘catchment area’ rather than that of the QEII. So it 

would take a ‘special arrangement’ and lots of paperwork, for 

me to be seen by this alleged ‘genius’ she kept on about. 

Finally, fed up with the badgering from her, I went around June 

1993 to the QEII. 

Instead of the usual smartly-dressed, even-pimp like 

psychiatrist I expected, I was seen by a man about my age, 

with to my astonishment, a rather dirty, un-ironed turtleneck 

top, and greasy, lank hair, with a peculiar, abrupt manner! I 

spare myself any more pain in describing my years since, by 

continuing with the statement I made in late 2001, to secure 

my litigation against him, and others who merely perpetuated 

his abuse me over 1993-1995, for years later. 

387

I, Simon Lee, of _________________________________________ 

will state: 

1. I make this statement in support of my application for a Certificate of 

Public Funding to investigate a claim for Clinical Negligence against 

both East Hertfordshire NHS Trust and against Essex and East 

Hertfordshire NHS Trust (today merged, as Hertfordshire Partnership 

NHS Trust). The events involved happened with me ricocheting 

between incorrect treatment and extensive hospitalisation by, and 

hence great suffering at the hands of, these two Trusts, between 

1993-2000. 

2. I was born on 30 March 1957. In 1978 I suffered from a psychotic 

breakdown, whilst an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge. I 

spent three days in Fulbourn Hospital. I was put on depot injections of 

modecate, which intensely disagreed with me and gave me appalling 

physical side effects. I have been put on modecate and its tablet form, 

chlorpromazine, again repeatedly as an experiment, during the period 

at issue, 1993-2000, and experienced the same awful reaction. I hold 

this bad reaction responsible for only achieving a II:2 not my expected 

First when I graduated from Cambridge in 1979 - finishing my degree 

with few friends left after my breakdown, and with the handicap of this 

incorrect medication, was a huge ordeal. I was appalled to find out that 

my ‘diagnosis’ (made at the weekend by the Ward Doctor as 

Consultants are off at the weekend) was categorically, black and white, 

spelt out exactly as ‘S C H I Z O P H R E N I A’ on my report! This was 

just the start of all of a twenty-two year long battle to get rid of this 

dreadfully wrong and pejorative ‘label’, and replace it with the correct 

‘label’ of ‘bipolar (I) affective disorder’, a mood disorder suffered by 

many creative, highly intelligent people. At very long last, all of 23 

years later, this is indeed the diagnosis, according to my new Doctors! 

When I saw it on my Care Plan Approach report last month under 

‘diagnosis’ I was both relieved and appalled. It seemed firstly, to end 

23 years of misdiagnosis, especially in the 1990’s, which had caused 

me to lose everything precious to me in my life. However, the thought 

of how needless and pointless my well over three years in mental 

hospital in the last nine years had been, including five section 3 

detainments and over a year in total in secure units, has continued 

since to utterly appall and sicken me. 

3. In 1980 my care was transferred to Dr Gander at the local Queen 

Elizabeth II Hospital at Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. He 

immediately added lithium carbonate tablets to my treatment, clearly 

388

suspecting it is and was basically a mood disorder, and responded to 

my evident feelings of resentment about the physical effects of the 

primitive anti-psychotic medication that was all that was then 

available. He tried me on orap and chlorpromazine tablets with no 

improvement of my feelings of ‘physical queasiness’ on this 

medication. Finally, he had the opportunity to assess me in hospital on 

the then new drugs, depixol and haloperidol, settling on haloperidol, 

together with keeping up the lithium tablets. This was during a sixweek 

spell I spent in his ward at the QE II hospital in 1983 after I had 

stopped taking my previous ‘awful’ medication for a period of six 

months. On this new regime, of lithium, with haloperidol in both depot 

and nightly tablet form, for the whole of all the next ten years 1984- 

1993, I stayed 99.9% well. I met my ex-wife, got married and in 1991 

our daughter Jenny was born. I had successful occupations as a 

Director of the family computer automation company, as a software 

manager and as a management consultant, all earning glowing 

references, and financing in the end a 4-bed family home in a village 

and our estate car. I was made redundant in 1992 from PA Consulting 

Group. This was the trigger for pressure and so stress that let a 

sequence of Psychiatrists experiment wantonly with both my diagnosis 

and hence medication treatment in the 1990’s, starting a year later in 

1993 at the QE II. (Now that the only Doctor to ever always 

consistently treat me properly, Dr Gander, had retired in 1992). 

4. Some time after Dr Gander’s retirement Dr Whore became his full time 

replacement at the QEII. In 1993 Dr Whore agreed to take over 

responsibility for my long term psychiatric care, even though I was 

officiaIly under a different Trust and would normally have attended 

Princess Alexandra Hospital at Harlow. It is highly ironic and tragic that 

it was my own Mother, then a Nursing Sister at the local University, 

who was the proactive agent in this awkward shift of Trust, Doctor and 

so Funding. She argued he had the ‘reputation of being a genius of a 

Doctor’ who ‘played live jazz to his patients’ and she argued that if I 

saw him ‘he would sort me out’. He certainly did that, but in the 

completely adverse sense that he utterly destroyed my health for the 

next two years, and so my marriage and my career were ruined. His 

wanton experiments on my brain have since let a whole series of other 

Doctors at both the Trusts named in (1) above, ‘have a go’ at me in 

wild experiments with my medication. As a result I have suffered all of 

seven devastating admissions since 1993 usually caused directly by my 

then Doctors in turn taking me off the standard - for me - treatment of 

the hitherto fully-established haloperidol and lithium. It was only when 

returned to this, all of six times, after extensive periods in hospital and 

so suffering immensely, that I recovered from such mental mauling. 

389

5. In the spring of 1993 Dr Whore explained to my family and myself that 

there was no such condition as schizo-affective disorder and that all 

patients so diagnosed must actually have either bipolar disorder or 

schizophrenia, but could not have both. He went on to tell us about the 

American DSM-4 method of diagnosis and he enthused about new 

drugs, which he said had produced dramatic improvements in patients 

who had previously been treated with long established drugs. Dr 

Whore believed that the treatment I had previously been receiving was 

indecisive and it should be abandoned. 

6. Dr Whore came to the conclusion that the dominant feature of my 

illness was mood disorder and he decided that I should receive 

treatment for bipolar disorder. In the autumn of 1993 my antipsychotic 

drugs were stopped altogether and my dose of lithium was 

doubled taking it close to the maximum tolerable level. I began to 

deteriorate under this new regime. I was working away under stress 

at the time, and was sacked after just two weeks through illness. 

7. In April 1994 I discussed black holes with Dr Whore after stress struck 

when vainly trying to work a long way away from home and I returned 

home for treatment. Dr Whore now decided that I did not have bipolar 

disorder after all and that I must be mildly schizophrenic. Dr Whore 

changed my medication to rispiridone. I was assured that this 

medication would produce a visible improvement within three weeks 

and return to health within three months. I was not admitted to the 

QEII despite my actual condition of B1AD. I continued to deteriorate 

and I was admitted to Mymms ward on 12 May 1994 on a Care/Share 

basis with weekends on home leave. 

8. At the hospital there appeared to be an absence of communication 

between staff. I was given large doses of chlorpromazine, thioridizene, 

diazepam, lorazepam and haloperidol. My parents and my then wife 

expressed concerns about the poor standard of nursing care to Dr 

Whore. They were asked to keep a detailed diary of all such events, 

which my mother and wife then did. Whilst I was on weekend leave in 

late May 1994 I inadvertently took a double dose of all my nighttime 

medication. My wife blatantly exploited my understandably 

traumatised behaviour in staying up all that night, finding breathing 

difficult, in a nonsensical and deeply hurtful claim of ‘violence’ that was 

totally cruelly unjust; along with another similar claim, in 1995 to 

secure her decree nisi. Due to stigma of my own ‘solicitor’ my 9-page 

100% solid defence was never even presented to the court. After this 

390

my condition continued to deteriorate and for the first time I was 

‘sectioned’ - under section 2 of the Mental Health Act 1983. This was 

conducted amid disagreements between various doctors and mistakes 

were made by the social worker involved in my care. 

9. A Mental Health Tribunal hearing was due to take place in July 1994. 

The day prior to this, Whore lifted the Section 2 and I was discharged 

home despite the fact that I remained unwell. Dr Whore continued to 

prescribe rispiridone and lithium despite the fact that my parents had 

warned Dr Whore that this treatment was not working. I remained at 

home for six months, totally isolated and lonely and increasingly angry 

at my treatment for ‘schizophrenia’, knowing it was a complete lie and 

falsehood to have that awful ‘label’. At this time my marriage finally 

collapsed. 

10.ln January 1995 Dr Whore admitted that rispiridone was not working. 

Dr Whore then decided that my deterioration was due to the fact that I 

was now ‘in the severest category of patients with schizophrenia’. Dr 

Whore decided to change my treatment to clozapine. I was told about 

its potentially beneficial effects and also about the drug’s known 

toxicity. I went home and I was given time to think about the adverse 

effects of the drug. I was so frightened by what the social worker had 

me about the toxic effects of the drug that I refused to take it. I was 

totally disillusioned by the care I was receiving. 

11.On 5 February 1995 I was admitted back into hospital under Section 2 

of the Mental Health Act 1983. The following day this was altered to a 

Section 3 admission to allow time for a course of clozapine to be given 

by force of Law. Two weeks later I reluctantly started taking a minimal 

dose of clozapine, and was to resist taking more than a tenth of the 

‘minimum’ dose, very bravely, despite being very ill through all this 

abuse by Dr Whore, throughout the next three months under his ‘care’. 

I suffered from bad side effects such as nausea, vomiting and fainting 

for up to two hours on the floor of the acute mental ward every time I 

reluctantly took my tablets of clozapine. I had four bouts of quite bad 

influenza that winter on that ward, that were very depressing in that 

awful place. Treatment should have been stopped with clozapine at 

those times, but for sinister and unexplained reasons, continued to be 

forced into me by Dr Whore’s staff. My treatment was eventually 

actually suspended in April 1995 when my white blood cell level fell too 

low, as this was an indication that my system could not tolerate the 

drug. 

391

12.ln January 1995 I had written to Virginia Bottomley, the then Minister 

of Health, making a complaint about the treatment I had received at 

the QEII. The Minister wrote to the hospital requesting a written 

explanation. Dr Whore responded to this. After this the standard of the 

treatment I received from both Dr Whore and the ward staff 

deteriorated. I was bullied and harassed by ward staff and I was rarely 

seen by Dr Whore. My wife was persuaded by Dr Whore that clozapine 

was my only chance of recovery and that I should be transferred to a 

secure unit at Fairfield Hospital so that I could be forced to take the 

drug. My parents continued to be distressed by my continued 

deterioration and they asked for my medication to be changed to 

lithium and haloperidol as this had been so successful in the past. Dr 

Whore rudely and arrogantly failed to reply at all to about a dozen 

formal letters in this vein. 

13.ln April 1995 a meeting with social services was held under the pretext 

of reconciliation with my wife. My wife’s position as my next of kin was 

used in order to exclude my parents from my further care. It was 

suggested that I was only feigning intolerance to clozapine and I was 

being manipulative. My parents were forced to agree that all 

information would go through my wife and that they would make no 

more objections about my medication. At a second meeting my 

parents were falsely accused of telling me not to take the clozapine. 

14.After this information regarding my condition was give to my wife only 

and it was not given to the other members of my family. Dr Whore at 

this stage wildly and even libellously claimed that ‘I was seriously ill 

with schizophrenia’ and that ‘I was violent and dangerous’. He 

continued to threaten to send me to the secure unit at the notorious 

Fairfield Hospital with the full support of my wife. In mid May 1995 I 

was given a large forced injection of another experimental drug, 

clopixol. The next morning I left an escorted walk in the hospital 

grounds to go by train to my old college at King’s College, Cambridge 

and to seek admission at the Fulbourn Hospital where I had spent 

three nights after my breakdown in Cambridge. At King’s I was given a 

bed for the night and the college contacted my parents who joined me 

at the college. My parents persuaded me to go to the police station. 

From there, a hospital ambulance arranged between Fulbourn and Dr 

Whore took me to the secure unit at Fairfield Hospital for admission. 

15.At Fairfield Hospital I was put on a high dose of chlorpromazine tablets 

for four weeks, then re-started the clozapine treatment but I could not 

392

tolerate it. I put the night-time dose under my tongue and flushed it 

furtively down the WC, as I was terrified of the fierce staff finding out. 

Initially my medical notes continued to be held by Dr Whore who 

wished to try and direct my treatment by telephone. My parents 

wished my condition to be judged by the consultant at Fairfield, Dr 

Pinto. Dr Pinto came to the conclusion that I did not have 

schizophrenia. He diagnosed schizo-affective disorder and I was 

prescribed haloperidol and lithium. This was the diagnosis and 

treatment I received prior to Dr Whore taking over responsibility for 

my care. Within weeks I had made a dramatic recovery and by July 

1995 I was allowed to go on home leave. I was desperately upset as it 

was clear by now that all this treatment for ‘schizophrenia’ by Dr 

Whore had caused my ex-wife to side with him against my family and 

her own husband, as I had maintained for two whole years that I was 

NOT schizophrenic but ‘just got high’. Events of 2001 have finally 

proved this latter view of mine completely correct! My marriage was 

clearly at an end and it was equally clear I had lost any chance of 

returning to the home I had provided for the family. I was discharged 

from the Section 3 in mid September at my next hospital at Harlow. 

16.I was transferred to the Princess Alexandra Hospital at Harlow into the 

care of Dr Harlot, who maintained the haldol and lithium treatment. I 

spent six weeks at the Princess Alexandra Hospital on a voluntary basis 

mostly on home leave with my parents before I was finally discharged 

in October. I tried to stay with a friend whom I had met in hospital, but 

her alcoholism and ongoing psychotic behaviour meant that I ended up 

sleeping on my parents’ floor one Saturday night - there to remain, 

‘homeless at home’, having lost everything, for eighteen months. I 

could not see my then four-year old daughter for all of nine months in 

that period. In February 1996 Dr Harlot considered my mental 

condition at that time to be normal. I continued to recover well taking 

the lithium and haldol medication I had been previously prescribed. In 

May I was again traumatised when my ex-wife’s decree nisi came 

through the post. In July 1996, just to pay off mounting credit card 

bills, and still very traumatised by the previous years of abuse by socalled 

‘caring Doctors’, I secured employment locally as a Senior 

Software Engineer at a defence contractor. 

17.In January 1997 I started being bullied at this firm, as my alleged 

‘schizo-affective disorder’ greatly concerned the company doctor even 

though I never met him. I came under great stress, with a progress 

report on me that was incredibly damning, even though my actual 

team leader agreed with my protests and called it ‘totally wrong’. I 

took a £3,000 cut in salary from £29,000 a year just to avoid being 

393

sacked, and was put on a very mundane, humdrum, frustrating task 

away from my previous ‘elite’ team who were astonished to see me 

humiliated like this. In May 1997 the stress all this produced got 

unbearable and I decided to admit myself to Harlow Hospital (Princess 

Alexandra). This proved to be jumping from the frying pan into the 

fire, for Dr Harlot inside three weeks changed my medication 

completely to ‘the standard treatment for schizo-affective disorder’ as 

he wildly claimed. He stopped my lithium and haloperidol prescription 

and changed me to olanzapine and sodium valproate. I continued to 

deteriorate and I was sectioned under Section 3 of the Mental Health 

Act 1983. A few weeks after this I was transferred to the secure unit 

‘Shannon House’ at the Princess Alexandra Hospital. My medication 

was changed back to haldol and lithium. I recovered within three 

weeks and I was discharged from my Section. 

18.ln 1997 during the appeal against the section 3 I was under, the 

Chairman was so concerned about the treatment I had previously 

received at the QEII that I was asked to file a formal complaint against 

Dr. Whore, which I did. I never received a satisfactory response from 

the East Hertfordshire Trust and the Health Service Ombudsman 

refused to investigate my case on the basis that my allegations relate 

to incidents which occurred prior to 1996. 

19.On 5 th May 1997 I had moved out from my parents to a dingy cottage 

on the outskirts of nearby Hertford, seeking to get away from the 

catchment area of the QEII hospital and any chance of meeting up 

again with Dr. Whore. Imagine my horror after being discharged, when 

a year later in October 1998 I was transferred back to that same 

catchment area - the two trusts involved had adjusted their geography 

so Hertford now came under the QEII. I had been incredibly lonely and 

frustrated for that year in Hertford, and feeling increasingly ill. 

However, when I asked to see my new QEII Consultant, a Dr. 

Thatcher, to discuss raising my haloperidol medication from 200mg 

4/52 depot, to ease my renewed feelings of illness, he refused pointblank 

to see me or raise the medication at least ten times in a row! 

Was Dr Whore pulling the strings, I still wonder, in sinister fashion? 

20.So, rather than listen to my increasingly desperate pleas for a rise in 

dose of my medication, Dr Thatcher let me get ill enough, then 

admitted me back to the dreaded Welwyn ward at the QEII – where Dr 

Whore was in charge! The catalogue of Thatcher’s errors then grew. 

First he treated me with yet another ‘atypical tranquilliser’, sulpuride, 

specifically targetted at schizophrenia not my bipolar disorder. Then 

394

he did so for a massive eleven weeks before returning me back to 

haldol and lithium, making me increasingly ill on my Section 3 (the 

third in four years) on that notoriously dreadful ward. I had sent a 

Valentine’s card to my neighbour who shared the same private 

landlady back in February, just prior to admission, and had previously 

unwisely told her something of my history in psychiatry. She reacted in 

a very fierce and paranoid fashion and told the landlady ‘either he goes 

or I go’ - so I was told in July on the ward, once well back on haldol, I 

was once more being re-housed, again homeless. By that time Dr. 

Thatcher had at long last responded not to my pleas for a raised dose 

of haldol, but those of the ward nursing staff, and put the level up 50% 

to 300mg 4/52. That very very delayed action at last got me well. 

However after desperate pleas to be sent downstairs to a far lower 

grade ward, Mymms, I was to spend a desperately bored and 

frustrated four months there, while judged to be completely well. I was 

having to wait all that time for a new flat to be allocated. Here in Ware, 

I specified, once more to get away from that dreadful QE II hospital. 

Again, while I spent the first half of that dreadful eight months on 

Welwyn Ward upstairs, the staff hid away in their office, seemingly 

only to emerge rarely. Then, in my case, due to the fact that my 

complaint about my treatment there back in 1995 was heard there at 

that time, seemingly only to repeatedly try to ‘set me up’ even though 

I was ill and so vulnerable. My diary from then records at least a dozen 

times they tried to set me up in this way, including getting the police in 

to interview me about alleged ‘theft of over £1400’ from a long-term 

(penniless!) female fellow patient who really did have acute 

schizophrenia. It was agonising waiting for the police to turn up - they 

cancelled several times - but needless to say, I was cleared in just five 

minutes, with it turning out I had given HER £400 out of pure 

misplaced sympathy and fellow feeling, not vice versa. 

21.I was discharged to a strange new home in a studio flat in the strange 

new hometown here of Ware in September 1999. Also I had pingponged 

yet again back to the Essex and East Herts Trust - under the 

locum Psychiatrist Dr. Ballitch. It only took him three months or so to 

join the three other Doctors of recent years - Whore, Harlot and 

Thatcher - in getting my treatment seriously wrong yet again, and 

again cause a serious breakdown rather than healing my condition. Dr 

Ballitch decided to raise my haldol depot level from Dr. Thatcher’s level 

where he left it at 200mg 4/52 depot by 50%. However, this large 

increase seemed to produce large red-hot painful lesions at the 

injection site. Rather than resort to tablets or doubling the frequency 

and halving the dose, as has worked this year 2001 under similar 

circumstances, he opted for yet another schizophrenic drug - clopixol 

depots. Within six months I was seriously ill as a result, he had left, 

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and my new doctor, Dr. al-Abbadey, could not cope. I was sectioned 

with a section 3 at Harlow, and within a week was so ill I was put on 

the Secure Unit there again (Shannon House). It took two months for 

the very arrogant Consultant there, Dr. George, to take on board the 

urgent pleas of my then Social Worker, AND my parents, to put me 

back on haloperidol and lithium. Apart from being beaten up twice, the 

confinement was intensely boring and frustrating yet again. I was very 

glad to have my Section lifted on January 10th and be discharged, 

after my mother intervened as next of kin, and they had failed to find 

me a bed back on the upstairs Acute Ward, so discharged me direct. 

22.In January 2001 my new Community Psychiatric Nurse informed me 

that the condition I suffer from is in fact bipolar affective disorder and 

not schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder. This first appeared in 

writing in my CPA report from June 2001. I would like to bring claims 

for clinical negligence against East Hertfordshire NHS Trust, as well as 

Essex and East Hertfordshire Trust in respect of the psychiatric care I 

have received. 

23.The mental disorder from which I was suffering was mis-diagnosed for 

a vast 23 years. This resulted in me being prescribed incorrect 

medication, which necessitated my admission to Hospital. I have been 

unable to work for a number of years as a result of this. I am also now 

divorced and the mis-diagnosis and foul treatment of my condition 

caused the breakdown of my marriage. 

24.Issues in my own history under these two Trusts that may have wider 

implications are: - (a) why were 10 whole years out of hospital 1984- 

1993 repeatedly ignored by these Doctors, who preferred to ‘start all 

over again’ (and prove themselves the superior Doctor?) rather than 

learn any lessons from those ten years of successful treatment? (b) 

Even more fundamental, why have I repeatedly been given false 

diagnoses of ‘schizoid’ or ‘schizo-affective’ with NO EVIDENCE of 

schizophrenic symptoms? (c) Finally, why has it taken two CPN’s, Viv 

Bradley last year and Jess Lievesley this, to get the wrong diagnosis 

overturned in 2001? Why have so many doctors got it all wrong for so 

very long?! 

25.I believe that the facts stated in this witness statement are true. 

Signed …Simon Lee…………………… 

Dated …10 March 2001………………… 

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1. At length. A summary of the catalogue of abuse 

amounting to mental torture, all masquerading as ‘care’ of me 

by them, from the Psychiatric Social Services (S.S.S.) last 

year, namely the ‘Assertive Outreach Team’, Bishop’s Stortford. 

Background, and summary of, my ‘very poor share of alleged 

“care” in Ware’ since being re-housed here from Hertford after 

nine months in hospital in 1999. 

I was re-housed to my present tiny bed-sit in Ware, after 

annoying a neighbour, being evicted while in the QEII hospital, 

and spending the last four awful months there, fully well - but 

endlessly waiting for a new home. I found myself living two 

hundred yards from Cygnet House mental health unit, so was 

still under Julia Pehrson as my Social Worker, who after I 

sacked the ‘Assertive Outreach Team’ recently, has since at 

least temporarily resumed that role. 

For years I had laboured under what I knew to be the 

wrong diagnosis of either ‘schizophrenia’ or even ‘schizoaffective 

disorder’. I soon had a female Australian Community 

Psychiatric Nurse (CPN), Viv Bradley, who gave me hours of 

valuable, uplifting counselling. As she held an Australian 

counselling certificate - but not a British one. Above all, 

immediately she began reliably telling me that in her expert 

opinion, I had suffered ‘bipolar affective disorder’ all that time, 

and was in no way ‘schizo’. I soon began to draw heart from 

that, until my depots of haloperidol were raised by the then 

locum Doctor, a Dr Ballitch, which caused an acute physical 

reaction – lesions at the injection site. Rather than change to 

tablets, he changed to clopixol depots – which I knew were 

specifically anti-schizophrenic. So one day I asked him why he 

was giving me those when Viv shared my own view, over 

years, that I had B1AD. He smiled rather smarmily, as he did, 

and just said, “Oh no! You have schizo-affective disorder!” 

I had heated discussions with Viv over this, and was left 

once more with doubts – and no sign that I could see, of any 

‘schizophrenic symptoms’ at all. Then in the summer, Viv left, 

and for the next three months, I was seen by about seven 

different CPN’s, obviously without any personal knowledge of 

me. Meanwhile, the clopixol naturally did not suit me, and that 

397

August, I think, I soon found myself on a Section 3 on Shannon 

House Locked ‘Intensive Care Ward’ – yet again being 

diagnosed and treated for ‘schizo-affective disorder’. Very 

early on, a new CPN came, and said he was called Jess 

Lievesley, from a new social services team, the ‘Assertive 

Outreach Team’ from Bishop’s Stortford. He had taken one 

look at me himself, and immediately concurred with Viv 

Bradley, that I in fact had B1AD – whatever the doctors told 

me otherwise, he kept saying! 

The Assertive Outreach Team at Bishop’s Stortford has 

since turned out to handle ‘difficult’ cases of mental illness or 

ones requiring ‘intensive care’. However, I have never felt that 

I fall into either category. The reason I was now under them 

was really that Julia Pehrson had typically panicked, after being 

faced with a whole raft of the perennial changes of NHS Trust 

in this area. Causing so very many CPN’s coming to see me 

that I did not know at all, one after the other! 

That five months in hospital was very traumatic. It took 

ages for Jess and my parents together, to persuade the 

arrogant Dr George, the Consultant, to restore my treatment to 

the lithium and haloperidol that always worked. Even then, he 

and his assistant, Dr Mark, were as so often before like so 

many other doctors, insisting I had ‘schizo-affective disorder’. 

So I had to take olanzapine as well. On discharge direct from 

that ward, which was very unusual, I went home and 

immediately stopped the olanzapine. Jess of course approved, 

and soon my diagnosis at last, for the first time since I was 

wrongly branded ‘acute schizophrenic’ in 1978, was officially 

‘Bipolar Affective Disorder’. Jess soon had even the new locum 

Psychiatrist, a Dr Algebury, convinced about that. 

Soon I was exposed to the way that that Assertive 

Outreach Team paid regular visits of about an hour, two or 

sometimes even three people coming round every week. 

However, I soon found that I had increasing objections to all 

this attention from the S.S.S. (Psychiatric Social Services) 

which I did not really need: - 

As we saw, my Community Psychiatric Nurse, Jess Lievesley 

had proven a real friend, being an ‘official’ ally, in at last 

getting on the diagnosis I had always thought was correct, 

398

for the whole of the previous yawning 22 years since 1978. 

I was delighted to see the back of, for ever, all those years 

of having the wrong, and so abusive, casually applied 

‘labels’. I had finally got free, with his help, of ever again 

being so hideously mis-diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’ or worse 

– having a ‘schizo-affective disorder’ – both manic 

depression AND schizophrenia. Often causing the ‘double 

jeopardy’ of totally wrong treatment, without correct 

treatment – and above all, which had meant I had spent 

nearly three years of the last nine in awful mental wards! 

Immediately on leaving hospital in 1999, I started seeing 

him, my Social Worker Mildred De Vil (an ASW), and usually, 

for the first year at least, a part-time junior social worker, 

Linda Boenke, each for an hour a week. I always found Jess 

cheerful, relaxed, optimistic, delighted that I kept so well 

first for six months, then a year, then up to 18 th April 2002, 

when he left to manage a similar team at Hitchin. Above all 

he was always careful to end each hour on a positive note! I 

soon found Linda irritating, for she did nothing but conduct a 

very prattling ‘interrogation of everything I had been up to’ 

each time. 

However, the worst of the three monitoring my health was 

the Approved Social Worker, Mildred De Vil, who was 

divorced, and seemed very bitter and twisted about that, 

and so totally negative! For instance, one day I felt ‘low’, 

and told her so, and she replied, “but you have lots of 

achievements!” I asked her to remind me of them all, then. 

She replied, “well, you have a lovely daughter!” which was 

extremely insulting and back-handed! After all, most fathers 

with a daughter think she is lovely – it’s scarcely an 

‘achievement’! 

Soon I realised, that while this team constantly monitored 

me, and kept asking interrogatory questions, often 

increasingly intrusive, they offered absolutely nothing in 

return. I kept asking, for a long time, both at these 

meetings with them at my flat, and at regular Care 

Programme Approach (CPA) meetings at nearby Cygnet 

House, for help with my number one priority. To find a few 

‘normal’ friends in Ware, which appeared to have no social 

399

forums beyond some grotty pubs, where I never met 

anyone, to add to the ‘psychiatric’ acquaintances I had. 

Every CPA meeting minute from then, had ‘social life’ as top 

priority – yet in all those years, their only suggestion was 

‘evening classes at the college in Ware’! I went there every 

term, did meet people, and make the start of friendships, 

only to find that not one of them lived in Ware. On my tiny 

budget, I could not afford a car, so all their other 

suggestions were also well beyond my budget. 

Even the roughly monthly ‘social events’ organised by that 

S.S.S. Team soon proved a total letdown. Most often, the 

activity, always subsidised so only costing a few pounds, was 

ten-pin bowling at Bishop’s Stortford. I actually put up with 

going there and back with lifts from members of the team, 

but soon gave up, very fed up. For these were no ‘entries 

into the broader base of society’, instead only a few S.S.S. 

people, and mentally ill, often badly dressed and even badly 

behaved ‘clients’ of theirs. Finally, months after that, I was 

finally persuaded that June 2001, to go on one of their 

jaunts which initially was even quite enjoyable. We were 

driven to Broxbourne, to take a riverboat up the river Lea, 

past the locks, hoping to reach Ware. Apart from the fact 

that nearly all the other ‘clients’ were glumly silent, and took 

little interest, I actually quite enjoyed the trip, until 

lunchtime, taking photographs as we went. Then lunch 

came, and soon I found just how totally ‘us and them’ the 

Team were. As lunch was prepared, I photographed nearly 

all the scruffy, nearly all male, ‘clients’, mostly smoking a 

cigarette yet totally lacking any conversation, lounging in a 

long row, against the wall by the boat! Meanwhile, every 

single S.S.S. member was busy on the boat over the cold 

lunch, mostly cheap Tesco’s food, chatting normally! I later 

complained in writing, along with the photo, to the S.S.S. 

team about the ‘us and them’ situation then between them 

and us ‘client yobbos’, giving a very bad image. That was 

my last ever trip! 

The overriding criticism I would make of that team is that all 

their ‘care’ only ever catered for ‘what have you been up to?’ 

leading to the further ever banal ideas of ‘things to pass the 

400

time and fill up the long days’. There was never once a hint, 

in over two years, of any discussion with me of making any 

‘longer term plans’. I find that totally negative and 

repulsive. They are just an outfit there in numbers to 

provide only “care” along the lines of a sticking plaster. 

I put up with all this from 10 th January 2000, and meanwhile 

‘got on with my own plans and my own life’ – and above all 

had a book published in September 2001, then from January 

started rapidly improving Contact with my daughter Jenny. 

Then, when first their Occupational Therapist left, followed 

by my CPN Jess on 18 th April, they were now down by two to 

just six members. As we see next, the cracks appeared 

immediately, then to my utter horror, a catalogue of lies and 

abuse soon followed! 

From April, I find my ‘care’ declines even further from the little 

provided up till then. Above all, I soon complain that I have no 

effective replacement for the very mature, experienced Jess. 

The young female temporary CPN is just out of college, and 

was never effective. 

From April, visits were far less frequent, often much 

briefer and less relaxed than previously, mostly from my Social 

Worker, Mildred, and some from a very young, inexperienced 

CPN called Nicky. She never got close to delving into, and so 

trying to understand my history – or grievances ‘against the 

system’ – as she was strictly a temporary ‘stop-gap’ instead of 

Jess. In the end I complained about this sudden drop in 

professional care to them in writing – and told them in no 

uncertain terms that I thought that their team had descended 

to a ‘state of panic’ since Jess left. Certainly he could have 

played a huge role in diverting me away from, or even taking 

action about, the stress for months caused by Mildred, as next. 

I only met the full-time replacement for Jess, John 

Murphy, after a totally sinister admission to psychiatric hospital 

on 10 th June, as below. He is by comparison, dour, negative 

and soon joined Cuthbert Glyndebourne, the team leader, and 

above all Mildred De Vil, the so-called ASW and so alleged 

‘senior carer’, in lying fluently and being very devious indeed, 

far from ‘caring’ for me then! 

401

The lies started in May, at the peak of the graft of 

DECORATING MY FLAT. My father and I took just under four 

weeks to wash and paint all the walls, ceilings and doors, very 

close to his prediction, and the carpet went down as 

prearranged the next day. That was not the real problem, 

even though hard work. It was that, once we started painting 

the lounge, I knew I urgently needed a lot of replacement 

furniture – that did not clash with the much brighter décor. 

This could cost thousands! I had no savings and was not in a 

position to take out a loan, nor wanted to! MILDRED LIED 

THAT SHE KNEW OF NO CHEAP DEPOT IN THE AREA – FULLY 

KNOWING THE LOTTERY RUN A FURNITURE DEPOT FOR 

PEOPLE ON BENEFIT LIKE ME, THREE MILES AWAY! 

I had been given £350 to pay for my choice of carpet by 

the Benevolent Fund of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 

which I had received thousands of pounds of help from since 

1997, as a ‘member in hardship’. Once again, as ever, the IEE 

Benevolent Fund was very generous! However, first my father 

and I had to redecorate the entire flat, grubby since three 

years of use. Washing, painting, and the inevitable humping 

around of heavy furniture in the way of that, started two weeks 

later, on 24 th April, and was to take almost four weeks to 

Sunday 19 th May, just as my father had thought. 

Whereupon the carpet fitter came as arranged the next 

day – so it was exactly four weeks of work to complete the 

actual decoration. My father was to pay for nearly all the 

materials, some £200 in paint etc., apart from about £220 of 

‘odds and sods’ from me in total – which he refused to believe I 

could possibly have spent. Then, he does tend to work in ‘big 

pieces of the picture’ whereas I had bought lots of little things 

over this time. I had found a lovely bright, colourful, 

‘sunbeam’ yellow in a paint chart, that went ideally with the 

carpet, and would look very attractive in the lounge and 

hallway, with my planned bright white of the ceilings and 

doors. To go with this yellow/white/cornflower blue 

combination, I chose a purple-tinted blue, very close to 

Wedgewood blue, for the walls of the bathroom and kitchen. 

When it was all finished, the effect was vastly brighter than the 

previous ‘neutral’ and institutional effect of rather dingy, pastel 

402

marigold, with very much paler blue in the kitchen and 

bathroom than it has been transformed into now. It feels very 

‘Georgian’ now it is all finished and re-furnished! We bought 

an initial batch of this blue and white paint, and started with 

the easiest and smallest room, the bathroom, planning to move 

onto the kitchen and finally the real challenge, of the hallway 

and above all the biggest room, the bed-sit room or lounge. To 

be concluded by doing all the gloss throughout, left to the end. 

The first two weeks of this were pretty straightforward, 

with the bathroom being cleaned and painted (apart from 

gloss, like I said) in five days, on Sunday 28 th April. The 

kitchen was bigger, with taping and removal of appliances like 

fridge, microwave and freezer, on top of much harder cleaning 

– due to three years of fumes – and much more of a fiddle 

painting than the bathroom, due to the fixed units. It took 

about ten days to complete apart again from some gloss work, 

put off till the very end of emulsion painting. As I saw Jenny 

with my family at their place for the whole weekend 4 th -6 th 

May, as I recall we had got to the crucial point of starting the 

lounge. That must have been around Tuesday 7 th May 2002. 

That is when things started getting really stressful! 

For, after completing the ceilings fairly quickly, just a few 

brush strokes of the ‘sunbeam’ yellow in the lounge, after three 

days finishing the hallway, showed just how awfully this lovely 

replacement ‘clashed’. In comparison to the ‘pale institutional 

marigold’ it was covering, it did not ‘go’ at all with the other 

strong colours of nearly all my existing furniture! My father, for 

the previous two weeks, had already been coming out with a 

constant, nearly all impossibly expensive stream of ‘ideas’ – 

usually from the IKEA catalogue, which I don’t really like. I 

frequently pointed out there was no way I had any money at all 

for his ideas, that mounted into several thousands at the peak, 

when he seriously suggested a fold-down bed. He then just 

stayed silent, or tried to suggest that he got a loan and I repay 

it to him. I was simply not prepared to take out a loan from 

him! Nor could I hope to get an unsecured loan from any 

finance house supplying loans, due to being in rented property, 

on benefit, and above all having had a problem with my credit 

cards in 1997, and with losing a bank account in 1999. His 

403

constant suggestions that ‘I make the flat all dual-purpose, 

rather like a caravan like his, with everything folding away 

neatly’ led in fact to some friction – I have never enjoyed 

caravans, whereas he loves theirs! 

In order to prepare to decorate the lounge, nearly 

everything in it I had put into boxes, and then put it all outside 

on the first floor landing outside my flat, along with all the 

small, moveable furniture. Fortunately the main door to the 

group of four flats can only in principle be unlocked by the four 

occupants of these flats, so the stuff all remained safe for the 

next three weeks or so. My TV and computer did go to my 

parents, being valuable. However, for the duration of 

decorating the lounge and well afterwards, the three weeks 8 th - 

28 th May, I only had a bed and a chair and table, covered in 

smelly paint, and the bed kept having to be moved around! 

All through that time, the best part of a month, right up to 

the point they had finally been overcome, largely by a chance 

discovery, I suffered nightmares and near-complete loss of any 

decent sleep for weeks about the actual re-furnishing of my 

flat. This was the start of a slippery slide, only compounded by 

all the other stressful happenings I list in other ‘themes’ below! 

I knew I needed to get replacement furniture as follows: - I 

had long since in 2001, sold my pine chest of drawers, and 

found out that even a much smaller new one, when really I 

needed a replacement twice as big, cost new over £200! Then 

my old pair of (bright alder green and vivid chocolate brown) 

bookcases needed replacing as well, and my computer desk 

badly needed upgrading from the mere bench I then had. As it 

happened, I finally ended countless heated discussions with my 

Father about my sofa-bed – by in the end, realising it was too 

expensive to replace, when covered with suitable bedding there 

was no clash, and so deciding to keep it!! 

My wonderful CPN or Community Psychiatric Jess 

Lievesley had left the Assertive Outreach Social Services Team 

about a month earlier. About now the remaining members of 

the team started a vicious hate campaign, far from caring for 

my mental health! For when I asked my Social Worker, 

Mildred De Vil, “I am desperate to find cheap furniture! Do you 

know of a place I can get some?” and she shook her head – it 

404

was to turn out there is a place at Stansted Abbotts, just three 

miles away. That she knew all about all along, as she later 

fully admitted! The first of many LIES about and to me during 

2002 by what I came to call ‘the Aggressive Out-Retch Team’! 

Lies from a team of so-called “professional carers” totally 

betraying their position of supposed care and trust! 

Meanwhile, my father volunteered to retain just the beech 

veneer top of my computer desk, and in the days after the 

carpet fitting on 20 th May, till Thursday of that week, worked to 

build a proper computer bay, drawer and filing cabinet round it. 

That was marvellous, and my luck and so stress levels 

improved dramatically that week. 

For I mentioned my need for budget furniture to 

acquaintances, and eventually tracked down the whole depot of 

nearly new furniture, just three miles down the road at Great 

Amwell, Stansted Abbotts, that Mildred De Vil had blatantly 

concealed out of spite! All offered at give away prices under a 

Lottery funded scheme – only to people on benefit, like me. I 

got my assistant social worker, Linda, to take me there the 

following Tuesday 28 th May, after ringing them to arrange a 

viewing. I spotted a set of three chests of drawers that were 

nearly new, but only about £6-£8 each not £200 or so as new. 

Also I looked at beds and various other things, but most of 

these were obviously much older and more used. Soon after 

that my Father and I went to pick up two of these three chests. 

At the same time I spotted four beautiful dining chairs in 

apparently immaculate condition, for just £4 each – in elm and 

wicker, so ideal to match the elm ‘Ercol’ dining table I had been 

given three years earlier! 

By comparison, previously I had had just two canvas 

“director’s” chairs and two fold-away chairs, all really only 

comfortable enough to use as garden chairs – which is how my 

parents have since used them! We duly collected these in a 

second trip. Finally, on Friday 31 st May, I arranged to go to the 

depot again with an unrepentant Mildred De Vil, my social 

worker – and snapped up the last member of the matching set 

of three chests of drawers. This was to be used as a matching 

bedside table, with the middle-sized one hidden in my 

wardrobe to provide yet more drawers. 

405

My social worker said ‘I told you so’ (once, long ago, when 

I was not actually looking for furniture!) when I got her to take 

me to this very cheap source of excellent nearly new furniture 

– that now left only the problem of bookcase and hi-fi storage 

to deal with. She could have so very easily repeated her ‘tip’ 

about this essential place, where I got such cheap, good 

furniture for just £31 for seven items. She would have 

prevented much stress to me over the previous month or six 

weeks! 

Now I had got this far on a tiny amount of money for all of 

seven vital pieces of furniture, my father had immediately 

started making the rest of what I needed, using all his 

expertise as a carpenter, rather than offering to buy it at far 

greater expense. So by Sunday 2 nd June, he had finished 

building everything I still needed, and that day installed a 

bookcase in the mantelpiece, as it had once originally been. As 

well as a massive ‘unit’ taking my other books and my hi-fi, 

records and CD’s – all made to measure! That was the lounge 

finished, and the flat was now finished, but I was to have only 

a week to enjoy it before – my freedom was finished too on 

10 th May! 

The night before this coincided with me fixing the last 

seemingly expensive aspect of decorating – for nothing, which 

came as a vast relief. My washing machine had stopped 

working two weeks earlier, so my brother brought a ‘spare’ – 

my sister’s – over in his four-wheel drive car on 2 nd June. I 

actually plumbed it in overnight! Then I realised that the 

problem with the original one was solely a blocked waste pipe, 

as it had no filter, and when I blew down this pipe it cleared 

the problem. I plumbed this original machine back in, on 

Sunday 9 th June. 

Looking back, the vast stress caused by Mildred De Vil's 

breathtaking lie about the furniture, was the only excuse the 

Team had for illegally ‘putting me away’ in a psychiatric ward, 

immediately we finished decorating, as we see now! 

Mildred De Vil's crude, blatant, cruel lies about there being no 

cheap furniture depot, had caused me weeks of stress and 

406

sleepless nights, which had ‘softened me up’. Was that the 

very intention of her S.S.S. Team, achieved solely by deceit? 

For on Monday 10 th June 2002, she arrived, with her boss, 

Cuthbert Glyndebourne, and proceeded to ‘put me away in 

Harlow psychiatric hospital’! WITHOUT any legally required 

‘Mental Health Assessment’, my most fundamental legal right 

of all! The whole ‘operation’ was over in two minutes, with the 

Doctors, especially the Psychiatrist, hardly being involved, and 

with no notes being taken by them! 

I was still stressed from the decorating, especially weeks 

of stress due to the lies from Mildred, as above. So, having 

just finished the very last bit of decorating the previous night, I 

got to bed at nine o’clock in the morning, on 10 th June 2002. 

Then, at about ten o’clock I was rudely awoken by the 

loud doorbell, and thought ‘Who the hell is that!’ I soon found 

out. I let them in, and suddenly Cuthbert Glyndebourne, the 

senior CPN, and manager of the Assertive Outreach Team at 

Bishop’s Stortford came in, swiftly followed by Mildred De Vil, 

ASW, then my GP Dr Simian Gibbon - and finally my locum 

Psychiatrist Dr Algebury! The whole ‘Goon Squad’! A Mental 

Health Assessment??? 

YET IT WAS NOT AN ‘ASSESSMENT’ IN ANY WAY AT ALL! 

The Psychiatrist said no more than three words 

throughout – and my mental health was never discussed, and 

no notes were taken at the time, despite the ASW Mildred De 

Vil falsely claiming that to me in January 2003. For the first 

thing Cuthbert shouted when he charged in at the front of the 

‘Squad’ was typical of the panicking and ‘jumping the gun’, 

often seeming abusive, even illegal, by the team, ever more all 

that year of 2002 since 18 th April when Jess left: - 

“You are going into hospital on a Section 3!” 

I had been up all night, had just grabbed a mere hour’s 

sleep, so pointed that out to them, then managed to wake up 

sufficiently to negotiate a voluntary admission to Harlow 

hospital. The Doctors went off, leaving the other two to 

arrange this admission, and there were several ‘mad rush’ 

panics! Firstly Cuthbert gave me a mere five minutes to pack 

an overnight bag (“enough for a few nights” he claimed. Sick 

joke! Five months, more like!) The biggest panic was the 

407

discussion between him and Mildred over whether they needed 

to ask for a police car to take me to Harlow Hospital! Once I 

had very wearily reminded them that I have never once been 

violent in my life, there was even another huge discussion – 

over whether I was even able to be trusted to sit in the front 

seat of their car – as I had argued I have long legs! Finally, 

after these several stages of, as ever, panicky, paranoid even, 

discussion was finally over, I can still recall a very amusing, to 

me, typically ‘psychiatric’ remark from Cuthbert to Mildred 

during the drive to Harlow: - 

“I must say, Mildred, this really is appropriate!” 

This statement set the entire bizarrely overly ‘politically 

correct’ tone for a lot of my yet again huge, nearly five month 

ordeal, from that 10 th June – 29 th October. We see near the 

end of this huge ‘catalogue of abuse’ that my last meeting with 

any of this Team, with Mildred De Vil, finally forced me to sack 

them, or try to, and soon seek legal advice, leading to writing 

all of this. The full list of her stream of fifteen minutes then, of 

nothing but pathological lies, gave me weeks of stress, chilling 

even. Two of them were in response to my reminding her that 

she had been instrumental in ‘putting me away’ – without the 

most basic legal requirement of a ‘mental health assessment’. 

Her replies were typically breathtaking and as insulting as all 

her other lies that came out in that abortive meeting, soon 

abandoned. “You were ill, so don’t remember the MHA!” Well, 

actually you don’t forget such a raid by the S.S.S. with their 

Gestapo ‘Doctor’ stooges just there for show, in a hurry! 

“Anyway I took full notes!” When she actually took none, as 

the whole terrible ‘thing’ was over in moments, so any she 

produced would constitute falsifying very important legal 

documents! 

From even the second day there, I encountered a huge stress, 

after my father took drastic and ILLEGAL action, taking over, 

then destroying my bank account! 

After just one day in hospital, horrified to be so confined, 

a massive, huge problem unexpectedly arose – due to my own 

Father destroying my bank account! He had severe delusions 

408

that I had financial problems, might even be being blackmailed, 

and although he still has no evidence for this, claimed I 

‘needed protecting from myself’ over money management! A 

vast, very hurtful insult – I manage my minimal benefit income 

and bank account every day – to the nearest penny! However, 

the female Bank Manager went bewilderingly beyond her legal 

rights, not only by totally ignoring the Data Protection Act in 

letting him have complete uninhibited access to the entire 

history of my account! As, legally speaking, just a ‘third party’ 

- when it should have been strictly confidential. 

I simply cannot overstate the huge stress and humiliation 

I was put through by the next illegal thing she did, which was 

to nearly overwhelm me continually for the next three months, 

only ending when virtually well in October! For to do what they 

did next, actually required my written permission in the form of 

a legally drawn up ‘Deed of Attorney’. My Father told me on 

the Tuesday that my bank card, the one essential document, 

had been withdrawn, and that I had to get all my cash from 

him, coming in a 60 mile round trip from Hatfield, against 

cheques that he would hold. I was absolutely devastated! 

He simply would not listen when I told him such 

‘censorship’ was illegal, and prevented by legal protection 

measures like I mentioned above – but he does think of himself 

as ‘above the Law’! This was one of the very worst ongoing 

disasters of my time there, so I will briefly summarise the 

chain of events that followed during my time in hospital, then 

move on to other matters in this book. I only want to give the 

minimum space to these nasty nightmares! 

I immediately cancelled the direct debit payment of my 

benefits. These were unchanged for the first four weeks. 

Then they dropped drastically from over £170/week to just 

£49/week – out of which, I found out much later, I was 

supposed to provide £20/week rent and over £10/week 

council tax! I asked to be sent an order book. It arrived 

promptly – but was even worse, for it could only be cashed 

in Ware! I was even more at the mercy of my father if I 

used it, for he had to make a return trip Harlow-Ware during 

a Hatfield-Harlow round trip if I did! So I returned it and 

asked for ‘giros’. Again these were only cashable at Ware, 

409

so by the end of these three weeks, on about 3 rd July, at my 

next ‘port of call’ downstairs, I went back to direct debit 

payments! 

My first vital action there was needed to activate my 

‘telephone banking facility’ for which luckily I remembered 

the security codes. However that would involve usually 

lengthy phone calls, so I now tried to remember my PIN 

code for my ‘out and about’ telephone charge facility, so I 

could make any length of call from the phone-box on the 

Ward, charging it to my home account. After about three 

long calls, all while very ill, to the 150 facility at BT, luckily 

all free, I finally got them to accept that one of two possible 

PIN numbers that I vaguely recalled was in fact correct – so 

they finally let me choose a new one! 

Then there was a drastic action by the bank that lasted, as I 

recall, virtually the whole time I was down on that Shannon 

House Ward. Having stopped my vital bank card, they now 

stopped my cheque book! My only access to my own 

account for about six weeks after that was half-hour, very 

rushed, walks to town – if a Nurse could escort me! – to the 

local branch of my bank. After intense security checks at 

first, the staff would let me draw out up to £50 just on the 

strength of having a European driving licence – even though 

the licence part had been suspended while I was in hospital, 

the photo-card was valid! 

This was unbelievably stressful for all that time – and did not 

help my recovery one little bit – quite the opposite, it 

immediately made me much worse. I finally complained by 

phone about the entire sorry tale above, and even got the 

bank’s ‘fraud squad’ involved – which temporarily made use 

of my account even harder – for they ‘put a signal’ on my 

account. I was initially delighted to be allowed to order a 

new cheque book – at first this made going to the bank 

much more ‘conventional’. Especially as they all recognised 

me by now, so after just a week the security procedures 

were completely relaxed. 

Then there were further problems, with this new 

chequebook! I had to pay some bills, confidently wrote out 

two cheques – only to have them returned as ‘lost/stolen’! 

410

After the umpteenth call to the bank, they promised to have 

reinstated the chequebook – then it immediately happened 

again – and twice more! Finally I ordered yet another 

chequebook, by which time the problem finally stopped 

happening with the other ‘on and off’ one. 

Meanwhile, of course I tried to get my much more useful and 

vital document – my bankcard, which let me draw out cash 

at ATM machines. I was eventually told ‘Hertford branch 

have it. They want you to collect it in person’. That was 

quite impossible – none of the less senior nurses were 

insured to drive patients, and true to form, the Assertive 

Outreach Team refused totally to help with this simple 

request! So I had to wait for two whole weeks for a new 

card! 

Despite doing all this, he told all the control freak nurses 

AND the Assertive Outreach Team that I was ‘lavishly 

overspending’. Soon the nurses were echoing this 

COMPLETE LIE and totally censoring my access to the 

Woolwich branch, as a result, and constantly intrusively 

demanding to know about my allegedly ‘vastly overspent’ 

bank account. Yet in those over four months, it never once 

passed its overdraft limit, despite my precious father and my 

bank manager trying to completely destroy it, and a ‘signal’ 

being put on it after I phoned the bank’s fraud squad about 

their illegally savaging my account. Some two months later, 

I finally got my bank card back, and after three whole times 

of the cheque book being mysteriously made invalid then reinstated 

at my request, the cheque book finally seemed to 

be useable again. So, after four whole months of sheer 

torture due to my father’s totally illegal actions, above all in 

such a dreadful confinement, I got my account back. 

The ‘lavish overspending’ turned out, over all of twenty 

weeks, to be at most about £400, according to my Father. 

THAT IS, JUST £1.40 A DAY I.E. SIX CIGARETTES! That only 

after my father wrecked my bank account – I had no trouble 

with banking in the year 2000, trapped on the same locked 

ward! 

411

The way that the Assertive Outreach Team commenced to 

smear me after my father acted so illegally, basing their lies 

solely on his lies about ‘vast lavish overspending’ of in reality 

£1.40 a day, was deeply sinister. I requested an Appeal 

over my ‘Section 3’ to the Hospital Managers, and the 

reports from them, the doctor and my nurse mysteriously 

only arrived ten minutes beforehand. When I saw the 

literally pages of lies about my alleged ‘lavish overspending’ 

I naturally exploded with fury, especially as unlike all other 

such appeals I had attended, the reports had nothing good 

to say about me. When Cuthbert Glyndebourne, the 

manager of the Aggressive Out-retch Team, sat in the 

Appeal and spouted all these lies for all of ten minutes, 

meanwhile my parents sat there, and nodded like lap-dogs 

at his ‘wisdom’. I felt so sick and betrayed by them, I had to 

physically block my ears and cover my eyes from hearing 

this sheer unmitigated rubbish, especially from that smarmy, 

devious git! 

Finally, after discharge at last at the end of October, I firstly 

complained fiercely about this terrible abuse by phone, and 

got a large apology, and just £25 compensation. I sent a 

‘mega-letter’ of complaint, and got £100 more – and a really 

grovelling apology - ‘we do not know where to begin with 

this!’ 

I would like to know from any lawyer reading this, just how 

serious an offence of breaking the law is in such a situation, 

where my father and the bank manager totally ignored all 

my legal rights. Above all, it caused me huge stress that 

lasted five months, when already I had few enough civil or 

legal rights. I need to know urgently, what further action I 

can take against the bank, in particular to secure more than 

a measly £125 compensation for such appalling abuse 

amounting to torture. Then there is my father… 

I remain very dubious about the real need for my being given a 

‘Section 3’ on Friday 26 th July 2002, to be transferred the 

following Wednesday to the bleak basement of the ‘locked’ 

Shannon House Ward. Once there, the S.S.S. Team 

412

obstinately refuse me any help at all, not one walk, while 

spending hours reading my notes and talking about me to staff, 

which turns out to be sinister! 

I spent the first four weeks there on Stort Ward, ostensibly 

for patients from Harlow, even though the ward principally 

for patients from Hertfordshire, is Lea Ward, where I was to 

end up. I was told Lea Ward was already full. So I was the 

only patient in the Tuesday Ward Rounds held by the locum 

Consulatant Dr Algebury on Stort Ward, who was rarely 

there, and only said about three words when he admitted 

me. Then in the third week of my stay he seemed to 

mysteriously vanish, so I did not see him. I briefly met Dr 

Igi, the extremely black and equally smarmy and very 

arrogant Consultant, and his incredibly pimp-like suit – and 

remember thinking on seeing his totally false smile, “Dr Igiuana 

more like!” Then I soon found myself protesting 

strongly to two doctors I had never met, including the 

Consultant Simon Dene, and likewise a social worker from 

Cygnet House I had never met, called Alastair, that “No! I 

am not ill enough to be put on a Section 3!” As usual, the 

doctors prevailed, but I obviously put up a big fight, for they 

discussed it for hours. 

I had been used to going around the grounds and the town, 

even home on leave, for my first few weeks, but was now 

totally confined to that cramped, hideous, airless, noisy, 

dirty ward until the following Tuesday. After Monday came, 

I had reached breaking point. I had a giro for my week’s 

benefit, then still the full amount as at home, but it was only 

cashable at my hometown of Ware, miles away. At dawn on 

the Tuesday, having stayed up, I suddenly opened the door 

to the ward, escaped and made my way to Ware by walking 

down the river to Roydon railway station five miles away, 

and jumping two trains, both of which appeared just as I 

needed them. I cashed the giro, got to Stevenage by taxi, 

caught trains north to York, and spent an hour or so, both 

outside and looking round York Minster Cathedral, which was 

awe-inspiring! A vast contrast to mental hospital, obviously! 

I returned by train with £10 left, and my parents took me 

back to hospital, all without any sign of the police. 

413

The following day I was transferred to Shannon House 

Locked Ward. Immediately as twice before on that ward, I 

found getting leave off the ward was very difficult, and only 

at the end did I manage to get leave without an escort. Up 

to then all leave had to be with a nurse – or member of 

social services, I was told. I now had at least two visits a 

week from the S.S.S. Team, from either Mildred De Vil or the 

replacement CPN, John Murphy. They came all the time 

throughout my roughly two months on that fierce ward. Yet 

they never once agreed ever, to any of my requests that 

they take me for a walk. Having made extensive enquiries 

about me and read all my notes, they always claimed they 

were in too much of a hurry to leave afterwards, to do so, 

after spending a few minutes with me. After, it turned out, 

‘digging the dirt’ on me! 

This emerged in the reports on me for the Appeal to Hospital 

Managers that was held for me, which added vastly to the 

sheer smears about ‘lavish overspending’ I have already 

covered. For while not having anything good to say about 

me as a person at all, John Murphy’s report for that Appeal 

made me seem like a life-long case for that ward, in medical 

terms! Mildred ‘enhanced’ it still further for the later 

Tribunal I was spared, as my section 3 was lifted on the 

previous Friday. She made me sound like a ‘financial 

philanderer and cripple’ not the responsible Cambridge 

Graduate I actually am! I have the reports still, sound 

evidence of their ‘campaign of abuse’. Clearly, reading 

them, they were intended to keep me in hospital much 

longer - indefinitely? 

The very cruel abuse and misinformation by the whole S.S.S. 

Team about my Housing and Council Tax Benefits while in 

hospital. Not once did any of them reassure me by simply 

saying, “The rules say that anybody like you normally paid full 

Housing and Council Tax Benefits, in your case as you get 

Income Support, remains fully entitled to them for up to twelve 

months in hospital – or even prison”. The others claimed not 

to even know this! So what sort of ‘team’ was it if Mildred De 

414

Vil kept even such simple vital information to herself! The 

cruellest cut of all was the vicious, totally unnecessary way 

they went behind my back, to get my GP – the same one, Dr 

Simian Gibbon, who helped them ‘put me away’, to brand a 

Cambridge Graduate like me, ‘Severely Mentally Impaired’! 

1. I had been in hospital before on benefits, in 1999 and 2000, 

and the first time ended up paying no contribution towards 

housing or council tax throughout, and the second time, a 

few tens of pounds, rather than argue. So in July, on 

Shannon House, I thought nothing of it when my income 

support stopped, and when I was sent a housing and council 

tax benefit form to fill in, did so and immediately posted it 

back. So I was very surprised when just two weeks later, 

my father yet again seems to have interfered, and asked me 

to fill another one in! I was not prepared to do so, just 

having filled out an identical long form just a fortnight 

earlier, and was now quite ill on that dreadful ward, so he 

took it away to fill in. Some days later, he returned, I made 

some corrections, and he took it off to give to Mildred De Vil 

to send back. So far, so good. 

2. However, she appeared one day, and absolutely insisted that 

I sign a ‘letter of authority’ for her to handle my benefits. I 

was mystified as to why this was needed, when I had 

already done it all myself weeks earlier, yet agreed to this 

demand. She claims she later spent an hour at the Council 

Offices in Bishop’s Stortford with this, seeming to think that 

was some kind of ‘huge sacrifice and amount of time’. It 

was nothing compared to the three to five hours a week I 

had to spend in Hertford, arguing with the Social Security 

Office about benefits, for weeks at the end of my time, on 

home leave on Lea Ward! For many months after that I just 

naturally assumed she was handling my affairs. 

3. Meanwhile somebody, a nurse as I recall, made out that the 

rules about benefit might have changed. I got a bill which 

showed that I was being charged £20 a week towards my 

rent and £6 or so towards my council tax, even on a tiny 

income. So increasingly, over the next few months, I got 

very concerned that by the time I got home, those bills 

415

would soon approach £500! The whole team now professed 

complete ignorance about the very simple rules about 

benefits while in hospital, which meant that I was actually 

exempt the whole time, with Cuthbert Glyndebourne saying, 

‘Yes, I have heard of people ending up owing hundreds of 

pounds’. Meanwhile Mildred typically kept silent, and John 

Murphy only claimed to ‘have picked up just a few things 

about benefits in his time’. So from July till January, they 

left me completely in the dark, getting increasingly worried, 

yet again about money affairs. 

4. Finally, months later, on 6 th January, after the scandalous, 

massively offensive abuse by them that emerged in 

December, I finally got sound advice from the citizens’ 

advice bureau. They checked the rules, which were very 

clear and simple, as in the title to this piece. Five minutes 

later, I got the ‘backdating’ form from the nearby Rent 

Office, filled in the trivially brief six lines, and handed it in. 

Two weeks later, with the exception of one week that 

required proof of income, I found myself owing nothing, yet 

up till then the S.S.S. Team had led me to think I owed 

hundred of pounds to the Council! 

5. Meanwhile, back in early December, I was totally shocked to 

receive a letter from the Council, not even to me, but saying 

‘the person at this address has been certified SEVERELY 

MENTALLY IMPAIRED’! I immediately rang the Council, and 

asked the Clerk who had authorised this. She duly got out 

the form, and said, “It was applied for by a John Murphy, 

CPN, and he got it signed by a Dr Simian Gibbon” – my GP. 

I asked to cancel this clear travesty, and she asked me to 

write in about it. I immediately wrote in, and demanded that 

they surrender their whole file on this affair. So in a few 

days I had the actual file, which merely comprised the 

original form. Hence the comments I make in the next few 

points are reliably based on still having the original. 

6. Absolutely livid, I phoned John. He realised I was extremely 

angry, and immediately the lies started yet again. “I don’t 

know anything about that”, he tried to casually bluff. I 

pressed him, yet when he rang back again, and said, “Yes, I 

have found that form. Oh yes, it does say ‘severely mentally 

416

impaired’ on it” – in actual fact, the form starts with that 

awful ‘label’ in big black letters – and John had filled in his 

name, that he was a CPN, and his address, immediately 

below. It would have been impossible, while filling out that 

form, not to be 100% aware that it condemned me as 

‘Severely Mentally Impaired’! His final lie was that “don’t 

worry, that form is not in any way ‘medical’”! Yet very few 

people reading it, and seeing it was applied for by a Nurse, 

and above all, signed and stamped in various places by a 

Doctor, and looks totally medical, would think it anything 

else! 

7. The entire team have since tried to bluff me that being 

labelled ‘mentally handicapped’ or the equivalent, for no 

reason at all, as I was already exempt from that Council Tax, 

is somehow ‘nothing to worry about’. Yet they went 

completely behind my back to brand me so viciously and 

totally unnecessarily in this way, way back on 23 rd August! 

My GP is either completely complicit with this vicious Team 

in trying constantly to destroy me in this way, or completely 

mad so to judge me when so intelligent, for as we have seen 

this was his second drastic action on their behalf since June, 

the phoney admission! 

The last straw. Mildred turns up for an hour’s meeting on 

Tuesday 14 th January 2003, and immediately launches into a 

literally pathological diatribe of lies, both to me and even about 

me, so the meeting is cut short after just 15 minutes. I am 

shocked and stunned, particularly about her threats during 

this, cut off that dreadful S.S.S. Team at last, and within days 

start seeking legal advice, intent not just on complaining about 

all their abuse in the name of ‘care’, but legal action… 

After my eventual discharge on 29 th October 2002, my 

father’s 70 th birthday, as it happened, till Christmas, Mildred De 

Vil and John Murphy paid weekly visits which became very 

fractious in December, after the above final utter ‘slur’ they 

branded me with. Mildred reappeared on Thursday 2 nd January, 

and started to teach me ‘cribbage’, saying she was due to call 

again in two weeks time on the 14 th . 

417

It was the following Monday that I found out that I could 

avoid any debt, which the team had so far let me believe I 

would owe the Council, by filling in the simple backdating form. 

Meanwhile I had been typing Chapter One of this account, with 

great difficulty and frustration, as the computer kept 

overheating and had to be turned off after half an hour of 

work. It was under warranty, but the supplier only restarted 

work after the New Year, on Wednesday 8 th January. Even 

then, I only got through after trying many times on the phone, 

on that Friday. 

The following day the PC broke down completely. On the 

Monday, 13 th January my father came and picked me up, took 

me and the PC and printer over to Watford 30 miles away, and 

after a half hour queue, we were seen to drop it off, when he 

took me home. It had to be repaired twice as they botched it 

the first time! So I only got it back on Thursday 30 th January, 

and have been typing like mad to get this Chapter Two 

completed by today, Monday 10 th February. 

When Mildred arrived at 2.30pm the next day, 14 th 

January, I immediately tackled her about the way she must 

have known about the rules that made me exempt from 

Benefits on my flat while in hospital, yet had never told me. 

Her response was simply such a monstrous lie that I was 

immediately flabbergasted: - 

“You were totally secretive about your benefit in hospital!” 

In fact, as we have seen, she took control of my benefits in 

July, even demanding that I signed a letter of authority for 

that, even though I had done it all! 

Then I said, 

“You put me in hospital with no ‘mental health 

assessment’!” 

Her replies, all total lies, we have mentioned before: - 

“You were ill, so you don’t remember anything! Not to 

have such an MHA would be illegal! I took notes 

throughout!” 

As for the first cover-up, so convenient, as I have said, one 

does not forget a raid by the S.S.S. with their stooge pair of 

Gestapo Doctors, in a hurry! Her second is an interesting 

confession of breaking the law! Any notes she produces will be 

418

forgeries, for she never took any notes at any time of the two 

minutes it took to get me ready to admit myself to hospital. I 

later asked a solicitor whether they ‘falsely imprisoned’ me at 

that admission, and got the answer that had it been a matter 

of being a Section 3 as they came charging into my flat intent 

on, I could make a case. Despite it being a case of my word 

against all of theirs. However, as I technically was free to 

leave after being admitted voluntarily, it was not. Even though 

we both shrewdly acknowledged the virtual possibility even 

when voluntary, of leaving mental hospitals without a Section 

being imposed. 

Unperturbed by this opening, Mildred ludicrously now tried 

to get me to resume my ‘cribbage’ lessons, which naturally I 

scoffed at! She now lied further, mostly about me, so I 

immediately got her to go for a walk outside: - 

“You never do anything we suggest!” 

“What things have you suggested then, that I never do?”, 

I said outside. 

“You never went sketching with Linda, like we asked!” 

“But Linda has not called for nearly a year now, for some 

reason!” 

“You never call your daughter as we say, because you’re 

scared of Helen!” 

That last one was below the belt, and even totally untrue! 

Again I was too stunned at yet another smear, as I had 

frequently phoned Jenny for months, to respond. Likewise, I 

just denied the stream of lies outright, that she continued to 

come out with outside, of about seven things I allegedly was 

not doing, even though the truth was that I was doing them. 

By now we were in the car park by the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, 

when the most chilling threats emerged from the clearly 

disturbed, witch-like, ‘Approved Social Worker’, like some 

satanic chant: - 

“If you’re ill, you go to hospital! If you’re ill, you go to 

hospital!” 

I told her not to try to wind me up like that any more, it was 

not going to work! So we got in silence now, to the river 

bridge, and, with that Team’s ever-fervent desire to abuse 

clients in private, she got me to turn right, where there was an 

419

empty path. Finally, I said, “why didn’t you ever simply 

backdate my benefits, not slap that dreadful label on me for no 

reason?” She just said her final lie, 

“I didn’t know you had not already done it!” 

I had by now had quite enough and said simply “Bollocks!” 

She turned round and walked off, and I went the other way 

back to my flat. Unbelievably, as she passed in her car, she 

called out ‘I will see you again after my holiday’! 

John Murphy called on the Thursday, and I said there was 

no way I was seeing any of them again, without a huge 

apology for all these pathological lies by Mildred. Not to 

mention a whole catalogue of abuse preceding them! So I 

have not seen any of them since, and now have a new Social 

Worker, for now. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, faced with such a mammoth, rather 

rambling off the rails quite often, report, Austin Allen’s solicitor 

said that she could not represent me to sue the AOT (Assertive 

Outreach Team) nor any Doctors – ‘I am not qualified to’!!! 

420

Disabled – by 

Doctors…! 

The second part of his autobiography, 

covering 2002 into 2003; with the theme, 

“with doctors like these, who needs 

enemies?” 



BA MA (King’s College, Cambridge) CEng MIEE MIET MInstMC 

This book picks up where the first in the series, “Which Witch 

Doctor?” left off on New Year’s Eve 2001, and takes up an even 

more complex story. Considerable time is also taken to go 

over old and very painful ground not fully explored in the first 

book, which needs it – for full cathartic release of all pain! 

The book is quite long, as there are many inter-linking, 

complex themes interwoven here. The beautiful 19 year old 

girl to appear here of a total of all of four women called Helen 

in my life, appears early on, in the midst of the author finding 

himself falsely imprisoned in an alleged ‘hospital’ where she 

arrived high on LSD! Drugs, their romance, betrayals, and 

such dreadful ‘hospitals’ are themes that mingle freely here, 

often continuing from the first book. 

Electric Zen Buddha 

(as on Face Book)

Disabled - by HIS OWN GOOGLEPLEX - OF DOCTORS......!!!!(#£####????

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