The Advice Shop, on South Bridge, the council's so-called service for money problems, advertises in its own shop window that it's impartial. It's not impartial at all, and has now admitted the fact in the written minuted record of meetings hosted by social work about a complaint.
I have been fighting for years over a council tax appeal, which I repeat annually, which the council refuses to recognise as an appeal. This is obviously a money problem of malpractice - lodging council tax appeals is an entitlement enacted in law, and the council absolutely does not have the power it is claiming to exercise,. it does not have a power unilaterally to decide that any appeal should not be recognised as an appeal.
The Advice Shop will refuse to take up such a case or represent you. It is outside its powers, because it is a conflict of interest to pursue your fight against the position taken by the same council as pays their salaries. This they have openly said in answer to the complaint. How impartial is that?
But there is a deeper concern, for the ethics being shown to vulnerable groups, and specially to those with a communication problem. Advice Shop will not actually take this position of refusing until you complain against them through social work, and in my case it has taken as long as 2 years, from first contact, to reach this position. The type of case that Advice Shop now say they can't take on, at first oh yes they do take on. They take you on, on a false basis, but never actually engage with the council on behalf of your case. They try to manipulate you into giving in to what the council says. They keep sneaking that assumption into their advice, while declaring themselves not qualified to answer your reasons for holding that the council is wrong. If you stand by it and press them for a committal position on what you are saying, they will take a view against pursuing your conflict with the council's position, on the excuse of the worst-case legal risks, no matter how obviously the council's position is wrong, while continuing to refuse to take any position on the merits of your reasons for saying the council is wrong.
In effect this means they will side with the council, against you their client, and test your will to stand up to it. Then they will say, we have reached an impasse and you won't cooperate with our advice.
They won't do what they literally claim they will do. Indeed, at the time of accepting my case they gave me a form to sign to allow them to represent me, which would give them a blank cheque over what to do, and when I carefully added extra words to it to tie them only to uphold my case not retract it, they made pressurising noises and hand moves trying to stop me. I knew not to trust their agenda, from that moment on, after seeing them willing to try to make you sign things under pressure instead of you taking your time to scrutinise them first. This is a public help service towards folks in all sorts of vulnerable positions, doing this. Testing our ability to stand up to themselves, in the hour when we had come seeking support in standing up to the council!
I have established now, factually, through social work, the well foundedness of complaining of these practices. It is an ethically disturbing pattern of testing our vulnerability to manipulation in conflict with our own wishes.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
University with Asperger's
My name is Brian Brodie. I am a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, where I read Business Studies (and, for the first three out of four years, Accountancy) from 1992 to 1996, and gained a Bachelor of Commerce degree. I have Asperger Syndrome, not picked up on or diagnosed until years later. At the time I was at EU there was little or no knowledge of Asperger’s and certainly no help or assistance for those with the condition in their life at university. Therefore, I’m writing as someone who went through university with undiagnosed Asperger’s about the experiences I had.
I studied Business Studies and Accountancy partly because of persuasion (and dissuasion from doing a subject of more interest to me) and partly because of indecision at the time as to my future career. My accommodation in Edinburgh in the first year was at Pollock Halls of Residence, and straight away I found I was experiencing problems fitting in to life at university both at the halls of residence and elsewhere. Initially I was socialising with a group which included people I knew from my high school, as well as some people I’d met at Pollock. I found myself coming under a lot of peer pressure to drink heavily like other students did (when at the time I was underage). I also had no idea how to socialise properly in a way that fitted in well with these groups. These difficulties led to me being rejected rather quickly by these groups, and becoming a loner within the university setting. In the four years after that I made virtually no friends, preferring to be alone anyway as I became very depressed and, unfortunately, disenchanted with the university environment.
Academically, I was not very well prepared for the different structure of study at university, compared to high school. It was difficult for me that things were a lot more unstructured. There were a number of lectures and tutorials per week but other than that, studying was a lot more independent. I soon found I was failing a lot of exams, needing to resit many, and so realised I needed to be doing a lot more study than I initially thought. I found it a struggle to study anyway, not only because the subject didn’t interest me very much, but also due to demotivation in both study life and wider university life. In spite of all that I pushed onwards and got my degree.
Social problems continued from the second year onwards as I had to move out of Pollock and start to share flats with other students. This was an extremely difficult thing for me to do. In the first flat I shared, I only lasted the first semester as the other flatmates felt I didn’t fit in and I was asked to leave. I then moved into a house with some other students (each having their own room) where I had some bad experiences of bullying from some of them. In the final two years I was in another shared flat where I somehow got through the two years living very separately from my flatmates. As I had not made friends at uni, it meant having to share flats with people who were previously unbeknown to me which did not help matters.
Since graduating, I have been in various jobs and I feel most of my working career has not gone as well as hoped, after getting a degree. Having Asperger’s has caused difficulties in the workplace and my jobs have tended to be insecure. I feel my degree in Business Studies isn’t commensurate with the jobs I’d have good potential in, however fortunately I am in a job now where my situation is a lot better and I'm a lot more stable.
I studied Business Studies and Accountancy partly because of persuasion (and dissuasion from doing a subject of more interest to me) and partly because of indecision at the time as to my future career. My accommodation in Edinburgh in the first year was at Pollock Halls of Residence, and straight away I found I was experiencing problems fitting in to life at university both at the halls of residence and elsewhere. Initially I was socialising with a group which included people I knew from my high school, as well as some people I’d met at Pollock. I found myself coming under a lot of peer pressure to drink heavily like other students did (when at the time I was underage). I also had no idea how to socialise properly in a way that fitted in well with these groups. These difficulties led to me being rejected rather quickly by these groups, and becoming a loner within the university setting. In the four years after that I made virtually no friends, preferring to be alone anyway as I became very depressed and, unfortunately, disenchanted with the university environment.
Academically, I was not very well prepared for the different structure of study at university, compared to high school. It was difficult for me that things were a lot more unstructured. There were a number of lectures and tutorials per week but other than that, studying was a lot more independent. I soon found I was failing a lot of exams, needing to resit many, and so realised I needed to be doing a lot more study than I initially thought. I found it a struggle to study anyway, not only because the subject didn’t interest me very much, but also due to demotivation in both study life and wider university life. In spite of all that I pushed onwards and got my degree.
Social problems continued from the second year onwards as I had to move out of Pollock and start to share flats with other students. This was an extremely difficult thing for me to do. In the first flat I shared, I only lasted the first semester as the other flatmates felt I didn’t fit in and I was asked to leave. I then moved into a house with some other students (each having their own room) where I had some bad experiences of bullying from some of them. In the final two years I was in another shared flat where I somehow got through the two years living very separately from my flatmates. As I had not made friends at uni, it meant having to share flats with people who were previously unbeknown to me which did not help matters.
Since graduating, I have been in various jobs and I feel most of my working career has not gone as well as hoped, after getting a degree. Having Asperger’s has caused difficulties in the workplace and my jobs have tended to be insecure. I feel my degree in Business Studies isn’t commensurate with the jobs I’d have good potential in, however fortunately I am in a job now where my situation is a lot better and I'm a lot more stable.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The Fairest Maid of Graemesburgh
I step out of Graemesburgh Portgate station into the rain drenched streets of the city, and I am disoriented. I ask a woman with umbrella the way to Portgate and she points to the right. I go and there it is exactly as I remember it from my first ever visit. I pause to look at the city's coat-of-arms above the arch that is just wide enough to take a car and then on I go towards the Conference Hall with plenty of time for my engagement.
I had come here with a party of my fellow Glasgow University students but left them when they went into a raucous dive where pop music deafened me. I had on me a Purma camera and there in front of me is one of the old "vennels" between the houses giving on to a courtyard where just as forty years ago I see tubs of carnations jostling beside objects like old cartwheels. Beyond, the Graemeshire moors melt into the low scud brought on this unreasonable gale as I quicken my stride.
The Portgate is cobbles and half way along is a ruined chapel through whose arches I pointed the Purma and took timeless views of this ancient city founded by Admiral Alan de Graeme and running through my head are half remembered lines from the famous ballad of that name:
"Bold Alan de Graeme raise your standard once more!
Send forth your brave men from the Menteithshire shore
Past skerries and airds where waters flow deep
By verdant wide pastures where graze cattle and sheep"
In the coach there was Jenny Atchison bright and fair, brought up in Graemesburgh, that looks over the harbour from whence Alan de Graeme sailed with his flotilla to defeat Edward the Hammer's army at Castle Island in 1297. She regaled with us the history of her city and on the way back we sang that ballad with gusto. Whenever I hear it played in the streets of Wallaceburgh during the Arts Festivals I see Jenny as a little young lass with sparkling eyes and oh the magic of her voice. I wanted to marry her but I could never summon the courage to even ask her to accompany me on a Day for Two train trip to Inversnaid to linger by that burn immortalised by Gerald Manley Hopkins whose bust graces the station platform at Inversnaid.
I was so caught up with the momentum of my studies to ask girls to my lodgings in Byres Road where that dragon of a landlady Mrs Lenski would surely have thrown me out. I spotted Jenny in the refectory chatting to Roderick Beal captain of the Rugby Club and my heart sank. How DID Roderick win a place at university? All beef and not competent at driving his old Fiat Firenze which I knew for sure had brought about a string of drunken-driving convictions. I would bump into her from time to time in the Ronald Laing Building and oh whenever she spoke she mesmerised me!
But always a curtain would crash in my mind as I recalled the nude frolic at Brannockstow in 1953 wit my cousin Laura parading her breasts and something else. That led to such a shock but worse was to come a few weeks after when preoccupied with my disgrace. I forgot to look where I was going on my way to Corchester Grammar School and ended up under a lorry and losing my feet.
Then followed nigh on two years of agony before I attended Netherover Remedial School in the heart of Kent, and all the paradoxes which resulted from meeting Alan Moelwyn-Wright my honorary brother. I think, as I identify all the historic buildings in Portgate which I photographed with that Purma whilst Jenny and my fellow students listened to abominable racket and swigged the local beer.
It is far too wet to use the Pentax, and utterly pointless, too. For any more photographs of Graemesburgh will remind me so painfully of Jenny and what is missing from my life - a loving wife. Even Alan cannot extirpate the pain in my mind that has arisen out of the Brannockstow nude frolic and what happened at Hogganfield Park on the outskirts of Corchester where Provendermill Lane veers right, from the Manchester Road beside the lake and up and over a hillock and so to the Grammar School. I AM TO BLAME shouts the gale in Father's voice as I relive in my dreams the awakening in the hospital with both feet amputated.
When I graduated I moved back to Corchester where I had spent my primary school years before my father became Borough Treasurer of Whiteseaton, but a short cycle ride from where Alan had moved to at Abbotshythe in 1954. There I had a job as a photographic technician with Baddeleys who at one time were the leading specialists in unusual photographic techniques. All because I had presented samples of my work displayed every week in the University Refectory when I ran the camera club - so many indeed taken with that Purma! a British made camera of the 1940s with its pendulum-activated shutter! bought for a princely pound from the Glasgow street market! It was a thoroughly fulfilling career until Baddeleys went bust - when was that? 1974? or the hot summer of Seventy Five?
They allowed me to wear jodhpurs at Baddeleys. I am execrably uncomfortable in ordinary trousers and fearful that my false feet will slip off as they certainly did during a model railway exhibition in Manchester in 1985 and I was arraigned before the Officers of the Manchester Model Railway Club for that calamity. I see myself reflected in a mirror in that furniture shop - the fan twill Gripperbreeks locking the prostheses in place so I feel as normal as can be. Then I recall fleeting liaisons with Corchester girls and having to tell them why I dress as a horseman.
Lovemaking, like everything else has to take place with my breeches on. I will NOT allow anybody but Limb-Fitters or Doctors to see me with my breeches down. So when my brother barged into my bedroom at Lairigealt Cottage to see me with my remnants exposed, there was a terminal row. Now he is serving a prison sentence for assaulting equally handicapped Jonathan Seabright the electronics engineer whose appliances called Seabright Owls detect intruders in many neighbourhoods.
Lovemaking... Longing to hug Jenny Atchison... yet what father did to me - I was a sex-maniac, he insisted, so giving rise to the delusion that I would go mad and indecently assault women. And now I am past sixty how I hunger for a woman's caress - to be a young man again and take a lass as fair as Jenny up a lofty mountain! Still the rain teems down and my hat gets saturated and how far it is to the Conference Hall - up a flight of steps and oh is it the arthritis now affecting my knees...
This Sunday, I am feeling my dignity. But next Sunday if it is bright I shall be utterly along with nobody to say a word to all day long... and my loneliness will get the better of me unless it is so bucketing wet that I shall merely stretch my legs around Baxtermere.
I feel so envious of all men who married well, now with adult children to be proud of. I bump into the graduate offspring of fellow graduates and feel such an enormous pain... Dorothy Coates married Alastair Mackenzie for instance and their son Brian is a tall strapping lad who left the family's opulent home in Castle Stirrat to join Boeing in Seattle and marry an Oregon girl. Then John Brooks married Diane Spelding and both are teachers at Graemesburgh Academy... Peter Groves hit it off well with Ursula de Bruyere and HIS children live in a chateau down in Provence... WHO will buttonhole me in the foyer? HOW FAR NOW as I feel incipient CRAMP in my left thigh?
I was curious as all children are, about the workings of the human body. It was just as fascinating as the discovery of algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics and French in my first year at Corchester Grammar School. Why should my father's reprimand on that fateful morning so scar my soul that whenever I see a nubile girl I feel both the urge to cuddle and kiss and a fear beyond the limits of language - a sub-animal fear of being caged for life in a lunatic asylum? Absurdly, I might get electrocuted if ever I touched a girl - her body like the conductor rails of the line from Carkilty to Graemesburgh Portgate.
Old, weary and lonely with nobody to care for me in Carkilty near my birthplace. No grandchildren to be loyal to, no-one to give all of myself to - and bitterly envious of Alan who was almost as severely scathed as myself, for DEBAGGING ME in the dormitory at Netherover School and I FORGAVE HIM the following morning.
I hear THAT BALLAD being played in the foyer as my glasses mist up.
"Bold Alan de Graeme, raise your standard once more
Reclaim our wide realm by the Menteithshire shore!"
It HURTS, how it does, that melody I first heard when the future seemed bright when I was young. Now there is only the deepening darkening pit of lonely decrepitude and nobody to comfort me, NOBODY TO BE LOYAL TO! How I long to have won the hand of bright Jenny Atchison, the fairest maid of Graemesburgh....
David Seagrave, Dunfermline, August 2007
NOTES TO ACCOMPANY "THE FAIREST MAID OF GRAEMESBURGH"
Many listeners are charmed by my lyrical descriptions of apparently imaginary places but the explicit moral message of "The Fairest Maid of Graemesburgh" must not be obscured. Yes I challenge readers to identify two cities scrambled up to create Graemesburgh and they may be taken aback by the references to what Alan de Graeme did. The main point of the story is how the narrator was so scathed by the event at Brannockstow that he developed an inextirpable fear of going mad and indecently assaulting girls. Something rather similar happened to myself and I have written this story partly as a form of catharsis but paramountly to bring into the open the idea that people are SCARRED FOR LIFE by traumatic experiences with sexual elements.
No less a man than Alexander Neill was severely punished as was his sister for taking their clothes off and exploring their anatomical differences. This was one of the reasons why he founded Summerhill School. I need NOT give details how I was scathed by something rather like the Brannockstow event. I want to explore the mechanisms that give rise to my lifelong aversions to human contact and why I feel an acute revulsion for many people which is beyond the limits of language and how it and my own "Brannockstow" has poisoned my attempts to find a wife. Is it true that influential Christians in the corridors of power have suppressed research into the effects of sexual traumas upon people because the findings might shatter the dogmas at the core of organised religion? I must also deal with why I find "LOVE" repulsive as it means for me abject submission to my stupid parents' will and so to loss of dignity and self esteem. Yet I admit that at age 68 I am frequently aroused by "dolly-birds" and have a strongly repressed impulse to hug and kiss nubile girls, whereby a curtain crashes down in my mind. I must also discover why certain women remind me of piles of excrement, and at another level I find a quite alarming resemblance of schoolboys to ducklings or wildfowl. There are times when I cannot bear to look at people because at a pre-rational level they are unspeakably repulsive so I have to remove my glasses and so I am NEVER in eye-contact.
I wanted to read for a doctorate by doing research into my own aversion to people because there are surely quite a number of supremely compos mentis upright honourable people who are deeply ashamed of their irrational aversion to people and this has blighted their lives in the same way as my own. If I cannot enjoy a happy marriage because of the deep seated aversion for sexual intimacy brought about by MY "Brannockstow event" then I should strive to unravel the mechanism of the aversion in the hope that other fellow sufferers can overcome it. Surely it stands to reason that this dark side of our nature should be thoroughly investigated so that all the intensity and fear and superstition is dispelled and those so hurt by sexual matters of ANY kind can go forth in life able to enjoy happy marriages.
I most urgently await feedback.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, 15-1-2010.
=====================================================================================
There is a most pressing need for forums where people as scathed as myself can disclose every hurtful detail of sexual and other traumas. Mine was so intense that I am beset by a fear of going mad and indecently assaulting potential partners that persists to this day. I get erections every night and half awake I say sexual things, sometimes in French and German, like a line from Anouilh's play BECKER where the King says, "Je veux une fille" - "Get me a whore", and I have fantasies which Christians would burn me at the stake for disclosing. Had BROTHELS been as acceptable as Betting Shops in London in the 60s I would have used one. In Germany there are FLIRT CLUBS where nervous shy people can learn how to have sexual intimacy.
I had come here with a party of my fellow Glasgow University students but left them when they went into a raucous dive where pop music deafened me. I had on me a Purma camera and there in front of me is one of the old "vennels" between the houses giving on to a courtyard where just as forty years ago I see tubs of carnations jostling beside objects like old cartwheels. Beyond, the Graemeshire moors melt into the low scud brought on this unreasonable gale as I quicken my stride.
The Portgate is cobbles and half way along is a ruined chapel through whose arches I pointed the Purma and took timeless views of this ancient city founded by Admiral Alan de Graeme and running through my head are half remembered lines from the famous ballad of that name:
"Bold Alan de Graeme raise your standard once more!
Send forth your brave men from the Menteithshire shore
Past skerries and airds where waters flow deep
By verdant wide pastures where graze cattle and sheep"
In the coach there was Jenny Atchison bright and fair, brought up in Graemesburgh, that looks over the harbour from whence Alan de Graeme sailed with his flotilla to defeat Edward the Hammer's army at Castle Island in 1297. She regaled with us the history of her city and on the way back we sang that ballad with gusto. Whenever I hear it played in the streets of Wallaceburgh during the Arts Festivals I see Jenny as a little young lass with sparkling eyes and oh the magic of her voice. I wanted to marry her but I could never summon the courage to even ask her to accompany me on a Day for Two train trip to Inversnaid to linger by that burn immortalised by Gerald Manley Hopkins whose bust graces the station platform at Inversnaid.
I was so caught up with the momentum of my studies to ask girls to my lodgings in Byres Road where that dragon of a landlady Mrs Lenski would surely have thrown me out. I spotted Jenny in the refectory chatting to Roderick Beal captain of the Rugby Club and my heart sank. How DID Roderick win a place at university? All beef and not competent at driving his old Fiat Firenze which I knew for sure had brought about a string of drunken-driving convictions. I would bump into her from time to time in the Ronald Laing Building and oh whenever she spoke she mesmerised me!
But always a curtain would crash in my mind as I recalled the nude frolic at Brannockstow in 1953 wit my cousin Laura parading her breasts and something else. That led to such a shock but worse was to come a few weeks after when preoccupied with my disgrace. I forgot to look where I was going on my way to Corchester Grammar School and ended up under a lorry and losing my feet.
Then followed nigh on two years of agony before I attended Netherover Remedial School in the heart of Kent, and all the paradoxes which resulted from meeting Alan Moelwyn-Wright my honorary brother. I think, as I identify all the historic buildings in Portgate which I photographed with that Purma whilst Jenny and my fellow students listened to abominable racket and swigged the local beer.
It is far too wet to use the Pentax, and utterly pointless, too. For any more photographs of Graemesburgh will remind me so painfully of Jenny and what is missing from my life - a loving wife. Even Alan cannot extirpate the pain in my mind that has arisen out of the Brannockstow nude frolic and what happened at Hogganfield Park on the outskirts of Corchester where Provendermill Lane veers right, from the Manchester Road beside the lake and up and over a hillock and so to the Grammar School. I AM TO BLAME shouts the gale in Father's voice as I relive in my dreams the awakening in the hospital with both feet amputated.
When I graduated I moved back to Corchester where I had spent my primary school years before my father became Borough Treasurer of Whiteseaton, but a short cycle ride from where Alan had moved to at Abbotshythe in 1954. There I had a job as a photographic technician with Baddeleys who at one time were the leading specialists in unusual photographic techniques. All because I had presented samples of my work displayed every week in the University Refectory when I ran the camera club - so many indeed taken with that Purma! a British made camera of the 1940s with its pendulum-activated shutter! bought for a princely pound from the Glasgow street market! It was a thoroughly fulfilling career until Baddeleys went bust - when was that? 1974? or the hot summer of Seventy Five?
They allowed me to wear jodhpurs at Baddeleys. I am execrably uncomfortable in ordinary trousers and fearful that my false feet will slip off as they certainly did during a model railway exhibition in Manchester in 1985 and I was arraigned before the Officers of the Manchester Model Railway Club for that calamity. I see myself reflected in a mirror in that furniture shop - the fan twill Gripperbreeks locking the prostheses in place so I feel as normal as can be. Then I recall fleeting liaisons with Corchester girls and having to tell them why I dress as a horseman.
Lovemaking, like everything else has to take place with my breeches on. I will NOT allow anybody but Limb-Fitters or Doctors to see me with my breeches down. So when my brother barged into my bedroom at Lairigealt Cottage to see me with my remnants exposed, there was a terminal row. Now he is serving a prison sentence for assaulting equally handicapped Jonathan Seabright the electronics engineer whose appliances called Seabright Owls detect intruders in many neighbourhoods.
Lovemaking... Longing to hug Jenny Atchison... yet what father did to me - I was a sex-maniac, he insisted, so giving rise to the delusion that I would go mad and indecently assault women. And now I am past sixty how I hunger for a woman's caress - to be a young man again and take a lass as fair as Jenny up a lofty mountain! Still the rain teems down and my hat gets saturated and how far it is to the Conference Hall - up a flight of steps and oh is it the arthritis now affecting my knees...
This Sunday, I am feeling my dignity. But next Sunday if it is bright I shall be utterly along with nobody to say a word to all day long... and my loneliness will get the better of me unless it is so bucketing wet that I shall merely stretch my legs around Baxtermere.
I feel so envious of all men who married well, now with adult children to be proud of. I bump into the graduate offspring of fellow graduates and feel such an enormous pain... Dorothy Coates married Alastair Mackenzie for instance and their son Brian is a tall strapping lad who left the family's opulent home in Castle Stirrat to join Boeing in Seattle and marry an Oregon girl. Then John Brooks married Diane Spelding and both are teachers at Graemesburgh Academy... Peter Groves hit it off well with Ursula de Bruyere and HIS children live in a chateau down in Provence... WHO will buttonhole me in the foyer? HOW FAR NOW as I feel incipient CRAMP in my left thigh?
I was curious as all children are, about the workings of the human body. It was just as fascinating as the discovery of algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics and French in my first year at Corchester Grammar School. Why should my father's reprimand on that fateful morning so scar my soul that whenever I see a nubile girl I feel both the urge to cuddle and kiss and a fear beyond the limits of language - a sub-animal fear of being caged for life in a lunatic asylum? Absurdly, I might get electrocuted if ever I touched a girl - her body like the conductor rails of the line from Carkilty to Graemesburgh Portgate.
Old, weary and lonely with nobody to care for me in Carkilty near my birthplace. No grandchildren to be loyal to, no-one to give all of myself to - and bitterly envious of Alan who was almost as severely scathed as myself, for DEBAGGING ME in the dormitory at Netherover School and I FORGAVE HIM the following morning.
I hear THAT BALLAD being played in the foyer as my glasses mist up.
"Bold Alan de Graeme, raise your standard once more
Reclaim our wide realm by the Menteithshire shore!"
It HURTS, how it does, that melody I first heard when the future seemed bright when I was young. Now there is only the deepening darkening pit of lonely decrepitude and nobody to comfort me, NOBODY TO BE LOYAL TO! How I long to have won the hand of bright Jenny Atchison, the fairest maid of Graemesburgh....
David Seagrave, Dunfermline, August 2007
NOTES TO ACCOMPANY "THE FAIREST MAID OF GRAEMESBURGH"
Many listeners are charmed by my lyrical descriptions of apparently imaginary places but the explicit moral message of "The Fairest Maid of Graemesburgh" must not be obscured. Yes I challenge readers to identify two cities scrambled up to create Graemesburgh and they may be taken aback by the references to what Alan de Graeme did. The main point of the story is how the narrator was so scathed by the event at Brannockstow that he developed an inextirpable fear of going mad and indecently assaulting girls. Something rather similar happened to myself and I have written this story partly as a form of catharsis but paramountly to bring into the open the idea that people are SCARRED FOR LIFE by traumatic experiences with sexual elements.
No less a man than Alexander Neill was severely punished as was his sister for taking their clothes off and exploring their anatomical differences. This was one of the reasons why he founded Summerhill School. I need NOT give details how I was scathed by something rather like the Brannockstow event. I want to explore the mechanisms that give rise to my lifelong aversions to human contact and why I feel an acute revulsion for many people which is beyond the limits of language and how it and my own "Brannockstow" has poisoned my attempts to find a wife. Is it true that influential Christians in the corridors of power have suppressed research into the effects of sexual traumas upon people because the findings might shatter the dogmas at the core of organised religion? I must also deal with why I find "LOVE" repulsive as it means for me abject submission to my stupid parents' will and so to loss of dignity and self esteem. Yet I admit that at age 68 I am frequently aroused by "dolly-birds" and have a strongly repressed impulse to hug and kiss nubile girls, whereby a curtain crashes down in my mind. I must also discover why certain women remind me of piles of excrement, and at another level I find a quite alarming resemblance of schoolboys to ducklings or wildfowl. There are times when I cannot bear to look at people because at a pre-rational level they are unspeakably repulsive so I have to remove my glasses and so I am NEVER in eye-contact.
I wanted to read for a doctorate by doing research into my own aversion to people because there are surely quite a number of supremely compos mentis upright honourable people who are deeply ashamed of their irrational aversion to people and this has blighted their lives in the same way as my own. If I cannot enjoy a happy marriage because of the deep seated aversion for sexual intimacy brought about by MY "Brannockstow event" then I should strive to unravel the mechanism of the aversion in the hope that other fellow sufferers can overcome it. Surely it stands to reason that this dark side of our nature should be thoroughly investigated so that all the intensity and fear and superstition is dispelled and those so hurt by sexual matters of ANY kind can go forth in life able to enjoy happy marriages.
I most urgently await feedback.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, 15-1-2010.
=====================================================================================
There is a most pressing need for forums where people as scathed as myself can disclose every hurtful detail of sexual and other traumas. Mine was so intense that I am beset by a fear of going mad and indecently assaulting potential partners that persists to this day. I get erections every night and half awake I say sexual things, sometimes in French and German, like a line from Anouilh's play BECKER where the King says, "Je veux une fille" - "Get me a whore", and I have fantasies which Christians would burn me at the stake for disclosing. Had BROTHELS been as acceptable as Betting Shops in London in the 60s I would have used one. In Germany there are FLIRT CLUBS where nervous shy people can learn how to have sexual intimacy.
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