How did it start?

Perhaps the first seeds were planted when my gran died, or my brother went away, perhaps it was when my sister left or when my grandad died.
I don't really know, could well have been the fact that my mum was downright neurotic for a hell of a lot of my childhood.

Then my dad went to work in Australia and suddenly I was a teenager.

That's when the abuse started from my mothers "rock" as Princess Diana might say.

I was 15 or 16 we'd all drink, I'd go to bed, my mother would pass out and things would happen.

Of course I couldn't tell anybody because that would break my mother, she hadn't got over her dads death yet, how could I take away her best friend as well. Fair play to him, he mentally tortured me far more successfully than anyone ought to have been able to and that was far more damaging than the physicality of it

What I do know is that I had a strong sense that nobody really gave a shit about me and that anybody that did always left one way or another. And I'd had this feeling for a long time before the bastard happened.

I struggled to make close friends but knew hundreds of people. All of them acquaintances. Don't suppose it matters as much if an acquaintance leaves.

It's probably a combination of the lot that made everything go pearshaped


See you soon.