Right, for for all the constant promising I have done about how often I am going to update my weblog, this one has taken over three months for me to get around to doing (see I have actually attempted starting quite a few times but I just end up running out of interest - and steam - after only a couple of sentences... which is unusual for me!)

So what's been going on? well, my mum is out of hospital norw and has been for the last three months or so. When she originally came out she was a lot better and seemed to be really heading in a positive direction, taking hold of the situation and committing herself to staying well. Of course nothing runs smoothly when it comes to mental illness and she is not back to the kind of low period that she sustained for a long period before being Sectioned. It's kind of hard seeing that happen but I guess I'm kind of used to it now. To be honest, I think the problem lays with the Community Psychiatric Services in that they are not adventurous or hands-on enough to support my mum in new ways. As long as she aint high, they think they're winning. Well they're not. And that is one thing that makes me so angry.

I'm also thinking hard about coming out to my brother. He's recently been giving me big hints that he knows my little secret but says he'd be more embarrassed than me to say what he knows. Yeah, so he know, now I just have to pluck up the courage to sit down and chat with him about it. I can honestly tell you that the thought terrifies me a bit - coming out is something you can never, ever take back. Once he knows, he knows, and he knows forever. Not that I think he'll have a problem with it. I just think confirming it will change our relationship - how much I cannot guess at. One thing I am confident about though is that he will be supportive, it's just what the extent will be.

World stuff - I went to a mass demo in trafalger Square a couple of weeks ago, the first since the end of major military bombardments in Iraq (the war, it seems, is still continuing) campaigining for the USA and UK to end their illegal occupation of Iraq. Nearly daily there is a casualty in the US/UK military forces in Iraq, but the thig that I find even more sickening is that there are numerous Iraqi casualties (numbers differ from 3 to 1 to 15 to 1) but these are not even mentioned in the mainstream media press. It's like there is a mass conpiracy going on in the press where the value of an Iraqi life is not worth even one tenth that of a British or American life. And that's not the only conspiracy in the world at the moment - the reasons that UK and USA originally went to war are being discredited almost constantly to a stage where it's clear that we were led into war under totally false pretenses (and, scarily, many people originally took at lot of these reasons at face value at the time). I really hope that tje lies of our governments catch up on them and that we can get rid of them as quickly as possible. It's even spurred me on to thinking of new ways of getting involved in politics in order to try to get my voice truly heard - but I'll let you know how that pans out.

OK, that's as far as my flow of consciousness will flow tonight - I'll try and update again soon!

steven

PS - I'm now in the middle of reading a biography of Gandi written by an American journalist who got to know him very well; Michael Moore's new book 'Dude, where's my country?' which looks good at first sight, and am also about to get immersed in my Spanish materials for my open University course. Should make an interesting, mind-expanding experience methinks (and I still have to fit in Harry Potter 5 at some point!). Steven