Writelink Arena

The opening chapter in a non-fiction work detailing how I have come to the state of failing health I now enjoy.

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Chapter One: Falling Into The Abyss

When I got out of bed at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, March 4th, 2006, I knew that it was destined to be a landmark day in my life. I just didn’t realise I knew it.

It was bright, sunny morning, but bitterly cold. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the night had seen temperatures drop to –4 leaving the pavements covered in a sheet of ice. And I was depressed.

There’s nothing unusual about that. Unlike my wife, who was diagnosed with clinical depression soon after she met me (I don’t know if the two events are linked, but she’s convinced of it) I’m not given to depression, but I do get down occasionally, particularly in winter with its long, dark nights, and short days. It’s often the result of boredom, but equally often, it’s the thought of work. That morning, I was due in work from 11 in the morning until 8p.m. and that kind of shift on a Saturday is enough to depress anyone.

And yet, there was something unusual about the feeling that morning. Normally, when it hits me, it doesn’t take me long to figure out the cause, and from there I can either put the problem right or do something about my attitude and lift the feeling. That Saturday, I couldn’t identify the cause. I had a novel lodged with a publisher, another one in full flow, and the future looked promising, so if anything I should have been on the up.

March is a funny month, neither winter nor spring. The days can be warm, then cold, windy then calm, rainy then sunny. Daylight hours are still comparatively short. The ephemeris shows that on Saturday, Mach 4, 2006 the sun rose in Manchester at 6:50 a.m. and set at 5:52 p.m. The moon was approaching 1st quarter and rose at 8:10, setting at a quarter to one the following morning. In the gin clear sky, it would be visible to the naked eye for much of the day. Nine weeks had passed since the end of the Christmas and New Year holidays, and there were still a full 6 weeks to Easter.

There were, then, plenty of possible causes for the blues, but as always, I should have been able to pinpoint them and give myself a kick in the arse, pick myself up and get on with it. And yet I remained depressed.

My shift that day was an easy one. Yard shunt. As its title suggests, it involves shunting trailers from the loading bays to the trailers parks and vice versa, using specialist vehicles called tugs. We have 60 loading bays and during the week, shunting is a busy job, but on a Saturday, with very little incoming traffic, it tends to be light. There are always two shunters and if they do 100 moves between them in a 9-hour shift, it’s been a busy day.

Every Friday night, the trailers are drawn forward from the bays, to facilitate cleaning the ground behind them, and the first job on Saturday is to push them back. Procedures demand that the trailers be parked on their bays by the time the afternoon warehouse shift arrives at noon, so the shunters turn in at 11, giving them a full hour to get the job done.

To complete this picture of a cold Saturday in March, the building is oriented roughly north/south, and during the autumn/winter/spring months, the sun does not climb much above the warehouse during the day, so the north yard gets little sun, while the south yard gets it all day because there are no other buildings in the vicinity. In turn, this means that on those icy mornings, while the south yard is warm and thawed, the north yard always needs gritting. On that Saturday morning, it had indeed been gritted, but as we arrived for work, I noticed that the gaps between the trailers had not, and they were sheets of mirror-finish ice.

My mate, Geoff, and I, checked in at 10:50, and I drew the short straw. He would push back the warm, sunny south yard, I would take the cold and shadowy north.

We reported the icy condition of the north yard to the yard controller, who made a note of it, but reminded us that we needed those trailers back on the bays by noon. I made a start at bay 1, working my way up to bay 30.

The company has written procedures for parking trailers on bays where the warehouse crew will load them. The parking brake must be applied. There are huge signs all over the yard, reminding the shunters of this rule.

For those who don’t know, the parking brake on semi-trailers is a button or ratchet operated handle, often located down one side or the other and in the UK, it is predominantly on the nearside of the trailer. This meant that as I backed the trailers on, I had to climb down and set the brake. Getting on and off the tug, wary of the ice, I took taking extra care not to slip. I was up around bay 20 by 11:45 when the ops controller asked for a progress report. I told him it was slow going because of the freezing conditions. He volunteered to come out and give us a hand to grit between the trailers, but only after we had them all back on the bays and he could report to the warehouse shift manager.

At bay 24, the inevitable happened. Climbing down from the tug, I slipped on the ice and hit the deck, knocking my knee. It wasn’t a serious fall. In its own way, it was like something out of a Marx Brothers movie. I climbed down from the tug in a half crouch, slipped, sat down on the step and as I tried to stand again, I slipped once more before hitting the ground. As I fell I knocked my left shoulder, arm and knee.

I was dazed, but not badly hurt. I lay on the ground for a short time, and that won’t have done me much good because the temperature of the concrete was sub-zero: obviously, or there would have been no ice in the first place. Eventually, I got up, sat on the tug step for a minute or two, smoked a cigarette (I’ve always been able to prioritise) and then radioed in, telling the controller what had happened.

“Have you finished on that side?” he wanted to know.

“Thanks for your concern.”

There were half a dozen bays still to be pushed back and I agreed to deal with them, but by the time I’d finished I felt light headed and my shoulder was giving me some gyp. I saw a first aider and 20 minutes later, Geoff drove me home.

Naturally, my wife did not believe a word of it.

“You’ve done this on purpose,” she grumbled. “I suppose United are on the bloody telly this afternoon. Well if you think you’re getting under my feet, you’ve another think coming.”

This is called marriage and I know about marriage. I should do. I fell for it twice. It does not matter what happens, as the husband, it’s your fault. Ma’am would swear that I’d arranged World War Two as some kind of fiddle if it were not for the fact that I wasn’t born until five years after it was over.

She was also wrong about United. They were not playing until Monday, March 6th, at Wigan. But by then, I had other worries.

To get out of her way, I took a couple painkillers and went to bed early in the evening to sleep it off. I was woken at 8:30 the following morning, Sunday March 5th, 2006, by the telephone ringing. It was my younger brother’s partner, Christine. My brother, Terry, had suffered a massive heart attack the night before. He was on a life support machine and not expected to live long. By the time I got to Leeds at 11:30, he had half an hour left. He was 54 years old, a year and a half younger than me.

Stunned and grief stricken, I needed a distraction and the best remedy for any shock is work, so I returned to my job the following Thursday. By this time, the pain in my shoulder had eased, but I’d noticed slight numbness in my left leg and a niggling ache in my knee. That morning, I managed three and a half hours work before I once more went sick and this time I was off for almost six weeks.

That must rank as one of the low points of my life. I’m a born workaholic. I never watch TV except when there’s football on, I do read, but I love to work. When I’m not at work, I love to write and most of my output is intended for publication, and when I’m not writing, I like to potter round the house, doing odd DIY jobs, working on the garden, servicing the car, and so on. Now I was beset with a double, debilitating problem. I was in some physical, yet manageable pain, and I was in completely unmanageable, emotional agony. My brother was dead. That snot-nosed kid I used to protect when we were in junior school, that same, lanky lunatic I went elbow bending with in the pubs and clubs of Leeds, was gone. I would never see him again and he was younger than me. How could this happen?

As with any death of this nature, it was the suddenness that hit me. Speaking to his partner after his death, he didn’t have any serious health issues. He smoked too much, and he liked a beer, but not to excess. There was a history of coronary heart disease in the family — mother had a congenital heart condition which helped her to an early death in 1998 — but neither he nor I had inherited it. His death made no sense. He had succumbed to what is one of the nation’s biggest killers; a heart attack and the simple fact was that the medics did not get to him in time. That’s not an accusation, merely a statement of fact.

I had no problems dealing with my mother’s death, and when my father died, also of a heart attack, in 2001, I found it comparatively easy to handle. He was 75 and he’d been ill for some time. But my brother … it was just senseless, and I had terrible problems getting over it.

Through all this emotional agony, I ignored the ache in my left knee. And yet it was the opening shot in a war I could never win, the first stage in a process that would take me from Ability To Disability.