Jeni Barnett

By 9.30 ‘RISK IT FOR A BISCUIT’ was finished.
Goody and I hugged and off she went to visit her fiancee in Carshalton Hospital.
I walked by the river, the sun warm the sky blue the air cold. Thought about going to see ‘AN EDUCATION’ at BAFTA. If I got a seat I would need my BAFTA membership card. So I walked back to the flat, wakened Jim, kissed him to go to sleep again, got my card and took the 170 to Victoria.
I arrived at work feeling a lot less tired than yesterday.

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Twelve hour days are not good for a girl.
I arrived home, my bag strapped to my chest, my coat gaping open, telephone in left hand, keys in the right and a head full of toxic thoughts.
The flat is peaceful, quiet, empty and all enveloping.
The train ride home was full of ugly people. Do you ever get days like that where everybody has got something wrong with them. I know its my eyes that are actually out of kilter not them, but there were overbites and underbites, overweights and overbearings, over the tops and over here, with a big ruby red fraternity ring and a very loud mid-western telephone manner.

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This morning was cold. The grass, at the cottage, was covered in dewy frost.
Jim drove me to the station.
I thought we were going to miss the train in the event Jim drove back home and I was left standing by a dark waiting room.
The gates were half shut and the guards were standing in a clump by the gates.
The engineering works had overrun, a track was broken and the trains were running late or cancelled.
The crew were less than helpful. They didn’t seem to care that some of us had work deadlines. Stay calm I instructed the maniac in my head.

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B has just cooked us roast chicken, roast potatoes, roasted butter-nut squash, roasted red onion with thyme, peas. broccoli and onion gravy.
We await for a belly space before eating some Banoffi pie.
Jim supplied a deep, rich red wine which even I liked.
The dimmer switch has blown in the kitchen so we had ceiling lights as well as the candles.
Just the three of us, Chet Baker singing to us and the drip, drip from the rain-drops off the Clematis outside the window.
It felt like eight but it was only half five.
I am now in my pj’s, I’ve booked my armchair for the ‘X Factor’ results, and I’ve set my alarm so I can stay another night before going back to Londinium

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She’s gone.
The lodger has gone.
The girl who locked herself in my spare room has finally gone.
The funny little thing that made my life so difficult has taken her strange smell with her and gone.
Some people rub you up the wrong way she was one of them, I was in a perpetual state of cat-fur-stroked-the-wrong-way-itis. I tried to be a forgiving, decent human being but I turned into a sneidy, hissing landlady who couldn’t give her one inch, frightened that she may take a mile, now thank heavens she has gone.
She has left the room empty but not clean.
My lovely Sarah,scrubbed, hoovered, dusted, mopped, cleaned, and changed the bed clothes, it’s ready to be slept in again. I cleansed the room with a candle and some space clearing spray. I sprayed and sprayed, lit the candle, opened the windows, and the curtains – which she didn’t open for four months – and opened the door.
I have my flat back. It has been an absolute nightmare. I’m pretty sure she’ll never read this but if she does, I take total responsibility for the last few months, it was like windscreen wipers on a dry window. That squeak that gets your teeth grinding….

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Yesterday I cried on air.
The topic: the lack of after care for servicemen who arrive back in England having done tours of duty.
Alcohol abuse amongst the youngest, depression and Trauma amongst the least educated, paranoia and anxiety amongst the rest, not to mention a damaged immune system from the victims of ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ who were used as human guinea pigs by The MOD to test out new vaccines and tablets.
All my contributors were men who were suffering from one or the other of a litany of damaging conditions.
I don’t approve of war, I especially don’t approve of war when it uses young men as cannon fodder or as lab-mice for new drugs.
The men said the ‘NHS’ had no way of helping them since they had no experience of surviving in a war zone.
18 years of 3 hours sleep a night, with a knife under your pillow. 18 years of anxiety, paranoia and guilt, 18 years of living a half life.
By the time my last caller revealed how one session with a trained NLP councilor had turned him round I started to blub. He said the birth of his daughter made him look at his behaviour and his anger.
Just exactly what are we fighting for in Afhhanistan and Iraq? Whose war is it anyway?
NO MORE WAR such a feint naive cry heard in the midst of arms deals.

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