My Old Dad

And other fascinating fictions.
He resides in Leeds, Yorkshire.
In 1991 I came home from an extended stay abroad.
I'd just broken up with my third girlfriend in as many years, and was trying to get settled down back in the North.

I stayed with dad for about four months while building up a deposit on a flat.

Thing is, I'd been living out East with no TV or radio to speak of, and I was not au-fait with the idiom of the day.

It was a struggle.
I tried to confide.

What I got was the free pass to paranoia and delusion;never a day went by without being asked whether I 'had noticed anything' when confronted by everyday sights, as if there was anything to notice.
It was almost as if I was being subjected to subtle psychological grilling in order to discover something.
There was nothing to discover, but the lunatic delusions persist to this day.

Not in me, but in the fact that there are still people who actually believe I am 'Canadian', or there is a 'dark woman' waiting to take me away from my family, and of course, the old madman's refrain from ages past, 'what about the money', and 'what are you going to do with the money'?

I have been alleged to be mad, with some cause, but the catalogue of insanity from those around me at that time was enough to force me to reject all contact with the disgusting delusion that bound me to Yorkshire life.

When you couldn't go into the Prince Of Wales pub without hearing the same tune being played on the juke box whenever you entered, week in, week out,or the Templar Pub by the ABC Cinema, and any of the other thousands of digs from an apparently closed community which has been subjected to a false dawn of lies by some unknown malice, in order to persecute lost sons, outcasts, or anybody that wasn't there when the web was spun, in order to sew a field of hatred, then you start to build a rage, a rage that knows no bounds.

And has no target.

At this stage it is quite possible that the malicious achieve their ends, and your mind becomes warped.

Their cure is confinment and drugs.

My cure is escape. Even if only back to the wilderness.

Sure, and their games might have obscured some central importance at the time , and maybe not.
But the persistence of persecution of the individual, blasting forests of individuals aside or into compliant flatness in order to find the one, that is the malice, the cold calculation that damns the whole effort to hell in the eyes of any rational world left anywhere.

In the face of this, toughness is not enough.

I was not tough enough at any rate.
But I will be taking my chances again, on the far side, with or without friends, with or without family, and doubting forever the judgement and perception of all around me.

But without questioning it.