I was walking down a street in Somers Town on a Friday night. A pub was overflowing with people enjoying the evening. Suits, students, builders, bar staff. The music and the bustle spilled out onto the road, voices cascading into warm air. I near-by Indian restaurant was booked-up. A lively hubbub escaping was from the open doors and the chairs and tables lining the front of this establishment. The same was true of an Italian place on the other side of the street. Behind me Euston Road was flowing with traffic. Mercs, Beamers. Porsches with music blaring out of their windows. The pedal-rickshaws were doing a good trade. Their disco lights flashing and their boom boxes blasting Abba into the ether. The whole world was having a good time.
The headlights of a car pulling into Chalton Street crossed my path to the local mini mart. Brightness threw my shadow across the wall and lit up some graffiti on the side of a wheely bin. Smeared in black aerosol; “Let World Chaser Have It”.
In the old life I used to do the 9–to-5. Trudging backward and forward between a diamond sorting office in Hatton Garden and a council flat near Euston Station. Over five years money slowly built up in the bank. I was exhausted, berated and hassled. I was passed over for promotion, but I held the job down. I’d also undertaken a study of philosophy at night school. Although I was near the bottom of the pyramid, I’d never been this financially secure and my credit rating was excellent. I dreamed of a life beyond the one I had. Climbing a mountain into a dreamed-of world.
In the middle part of my twenties, I had a bad mental breakdown. At the lowest ebb of my illness, I’d stopped washing and eating. I wasn’t attending to the most basic things in my life. I weighed seven stone, I stank, my flat looked like a bombsite. All the money I’d built up in the bank had gone.
I was admitted to a psychiatric ward for the first time at the age of 28. Over the next few years, I was admitted to hospitals and day centres several times. In one horrible incident I was sectioned to be detained and medicated against my will. I was given a diagnosis which was anathema to me. I felt completely lost in the world and misunderstood on all levels.
I’m now well into my forties. Things have improved in my life in many but I’m still not back to where I wanted to be. My clothes are always clean and I’m well-kempt these days. My flat is just moderately untidy. I eat three times a day. I am a normal weight for my height. After years of living in a shambles, I’m beginning to put my financial life back together. I haven’t worked since my twenties and receive disability benefits from the DWP.
I still engage with the world around me. I have friends and people who say hello to me. I have a supportive family who live up in Yorkshire. I’ve developed my interests in photography and poetry slowly but surely, although my budding musicianship has ceased. The way the digital revolution has democratised things for people like photographers, musos and filmmakers has fallen into my lap. My collection of CDs got damaged through the bad times. Now I stream music online. Through social media and my blog people can see who I am. Not everything is bad.
I feel like someone fast-forwarded my life and dumped me in Bladerunner. They tell you to cultivate gratitude for good things you have and there are some. I’m trying to look forward from a troubled past to a brave new world that could exist in the future...
Ben Preston 