Cry for help

One degree at 10am in Cannobio today. Overcast.


Help me, someone, please oh please help me! 

I think I'm descending into madness. It's the voices.. The voices going round and round in my head... Voices from my past. Sometimes I think I recognise them... Baloo the Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, Zsa-Zsa Gabor - no wait - it sounds like Zsa-Zsa, but in some Twilight Zone reality shift it's not... 

Sometimes I can almost see them in my mind, but as soon as they take shape they disintegrate into something else. Winnie becomes a talking mouse and the mouse becomes Sherlock Holmes. The black bear turns brown and sprouts a green surcoat and weird feathered cap then morphs into a big marmalade cat. And they prattle not only in English, but in German, Italian and French too.

When I'm sleeping, I dream insane dreams. Nightmares of a foreign country. I'm lost in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. I'm terrified - incarcerated in a narrow, trunk-like space. I'm surrounded by cats. Cats in the attic. Cats in the basement. Cats everywhere. And there are the dogs, always the barking, snarling, biting dogs chasing me across a nightmare landscape with a ruined windmill and a tank on the horizon. I wake from these dreams, panting, bathed in sweat, panic coursing through my veins in the belief that in the night my children have been snatched from me and are even now drifting across the lake in a Moses basket.

But the worst, the worst is the ticker-tape of incomprehensible syllables that runs over and over, over and over through my throbbing skull every second of the waking day. Every second. I struggle to make sense of the words, if words they are. My failure leaves me teetering on the brink of insanity: Ay-bra-ham dee-laycey, gee-ooseppi-cay-see, tom-ass-oma-lee, oma-lee-the-a-lee-cat!





Will the person who gave my children The Aristocats for Christmas please raise your hand? Let me tell you, it's the most addictive Disney cartoon ever made and you owe me for the Prozac!