We all have our ups and downs to varying degrees.

During Tim’s early existence he discerned that there was something strange in the air – and just round each corner – things seemed to become more and more unsettled. His mother and father always appeared to be out of reach and on many occasions were nowhere to be found, even though they may have been in his immediate presence. Later it dawned on him that events were going drastically wrong and were becoming increasingly depressing. There may be those who read this who have experienced what it is to be sick at heart within a frighteningly dark family atmosphere.

So Tim fled from ‘home’ when he was sixteen and worked on the back of a lorry delivering huge trays of buns and bread to giant London hotels. He had always been a keen jazz fan and eventually he managed to purloin an old tenor sax from a Dickensian junk shop. Then he began to play jazz in London pubs and basements. He continued to experience some not very nice lingering bouts of acute sadness which nevertheless helped him play the blues.

Unable to continue to pay the London rents he moved out into the countryside and met a lovely country girl who lived on a farm. As they wandered through green lanes and dusky tracks and lay naked picnicking amongst the emerald hills of Surrey Tim’s bouts of acute sadness seemed to evaporate – except for the poetic kind of course!

They married and eventually both managed to go to Christ Church University Canterbury and joined the teaching profession. Tim scraped his way up to headship which for seven years he loved but after eight years something began to surface that he had denied for a long time - he began to realise that he had often experienced serious depression – it got worse and worse. He became so ill he couldn’t do the job - but it wasn’t the job that was the cause of his increasing and alarming paralysis, he found out it was a disease so he left the job. He dedicated himself to poetry and music. But the depressions worsened and he tried to escape through alcohol. Yet at the same time he would experience curiously energetic bouts laced with wondrous pleasure that somehow caused him to overlay such feelings with much brandy. This in turn catapulted him into an ecstatic world that was almost visionary and he was so clear sighted, so sharp in comprehension - he understood it all – at least for a time - then he forgot what he had seen. Often he would stay up all night working at the computer on compositions of one kind or another with a whisky bottle as his only companion. As he worked into the small hours of the morning he noticed that the whisky bottle had become mysteriously empty.

Tim began to drink even more and was soon demanding to take out his sword and fight the Romans in the garden. He was soon trying to stamp on the frogs, snatch off necklaces of snakes and was hearing ever piercing and excruciating screeches of sharp objects rasping on rough and jagged surfaces as he surged chaotically through wild spaces on a strange horse .

Poor Jan how did she cope?? Tim felt worn down by guilt and paranoia.