2023 – Self published by the author, no ISBN to date.
The book’s cover, photographed by me
A stunning debut novel that is not just about mountain climbing (often solo and without ropes or safety equipment), but also a study of conquering depression, anxiety and alienation.
Nigel is a compulsive climber, thrilled by the danger of taking on rock faces where every step could be his last, and frequently on the brink of welcoming a life threatening fall. He is a very solitary young man, reclusive, and struggling to relate to other people.
His estranged parents have not helped his moods, particularly his father who has pushed him to try for a life in the theatre, only to find Nigel relates only to well to the Tempest’s Caliban, and flees a show in mid-performance, seeking work in theatre lighting and stage-hand-craft rather than allowing himself to be in the public eye.
At every opportunity, Nigel heads for the heights of the mountains of the Lake District, Snowdonia and later, The Alps. As he climbs a peak per chapter, he reflects on the steps his life has taken, showing that in relationships or moving from rockface foothold to foothold, the dangers as well as the successful achievements are very much alike.
With time, Nigel encounters other climbers, and even joins a club, torn between respect for the group (who teach him basic rope assisted climbing), romantic bonds with a girl in the group, and being repelled by the monstrous levels of pretentious egotism and one-upmanship of some of the members.
Will Nigel find a place in the group? Find love with Angela? Or give in to the desire to fall trying to take a final seemingly impossible step up a glacial peak that could claim his life in an instant?
Chris’s descriptions of the mountains are incredibly vivid, and spellbinding. You really feel as if you are with Nigel for every step of his perilous life, and I can certainly relate to his alienation, from retreating away from those who bully, and those who expect greatness of us while being bitterly disappointed when we don’t meet their exacting standards, (Nigel’s father) or drag you along in their own narcissistic hedonism (his mother).
No real mountains are used here, so peaks are given names like Quantum Gravity, Redemption Crack, and The Well-Beloved, but they seem like Chris might well have written their descriptions while on location as they each have a vivid ‘you are here’ immediacy that gives the story tremendous tension and some degree of vertigo. Though I have never climbed such peaks I could see so much of myself in Nigel, and how every step of every day in life itself is very much an uphill challenge in itself, and there is great exhilaration in having accomplished this many summits already.
I hope Chris goes on to write many more such books.
The latest stunning free event in the Lancashire Fringe Festival Event took place at the Avenham / Miller Park riverside bar and theatre, The New Continental on Tuesday 3rd May 2022.
As the bar had announced online that there was no food service for one night only, I grabbed a burger on the way in, and enjoyed a few of the many terrific real ales the bar offers, while listening to a great music playlist in the background, The Eagles, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, etc.
My only disappointment was that the pub has taken down its inn sign, one of the best in Preston.
The Continental Pub Sign – Preston, taken by me
I have taken part in poetry events in The Conti, as it is often called, though this was the first time I’ve seen its little theatre extension.
The play was an incredible monologue on mental health issues, homelessmess, personal freedoms and identity, performed often at breakneck speed by Nell Hardy, and based on her direct experiences of many of the issues raised.
Her words were projected onto a screen behind her in synch with her presentation, which was handy as sitting near the back of the auditorium made it hard to see Nell over the heads of the other audience members when she was sitting or lying on the floor.
Avenham Park, Preston – taken by me
Nell made the ‘NoMad’ title mean many things, a denial of her character’s mental disintegration, (not mad) and her nomadic escapes from family, her partner, and institutions, to retreat into the woods, embracing the heavy rain, and becoming increasingly feral, but often faced with her intense loneliness, being left cold, wet and fearful that she might actually be crazy.
The play has much to say on the care in the community stance of providing zero or inadequate care for the most desperately needful of our citizens,
In some ways, Nell’s display of loss of control was contrasted by how controlled her presentation was, with meticulous timing and no space for improvisational freedom in her expression but this was a true tour-de- force awards worthy presentation, with a lot of quirky edgy humour and even a musical number in its heart.
A great opportunity to chat with friends pre and post show too.
Sources for feeling low in self-esteem. Recovering from Cancer, Lockdown limitations (as necessary an evil as they are), Having been in a cult, falling out with family members, unemployment, exile, limited intimate relationship experience, feeling left out of many conversations, constantly corrected in a pedantic fashion as if followed round by gloating back-seat drivers or teachers withy red pens relishing every opportunity to knock down my score, over-cerebral, too questioning, cynical, not suffering fools gladly, wary of authority, doubting, challenging, too offbeat.
Book Cover to Melanie Farrell’s The Overcoming Low Self-Esteem Workbook – taken by me
How I see myself negatively – arrogant, a perennial victim of circumstances and Murphy’s Law, unlucky, too individualistic, fiercely independent, torn between introspection and extroversion, torn between escapism and realism, sense that others relish seeing me fail, fall or slip-up, feeling that some may resent any sign I show of success or improvement.
A preference for writing over speaking as I can formulate what I want to express more fully with interruptions or distractions as once derailed I struggle to get back on track or refind my thread.
Triggers – pedantry, interruption, corrections, being snapped down on or walked out on, or fobbed off with any nonsense and false promises just to humour me or shut me up, false promises, insensitivity, being ripped off or robbed by people I’ve trusted, people who borrow without the slightest interest of giving me my stuff back, people keeping me waiting, losing sense of time, as I panic if I think i’m going to be late and find it weird that others can be quite cavalier about time. Sense that when out of work I am seen by some as deliberately avoiding it and scrounging.
Achievements often under-appreciated, criticised more than praised, bullied a lot, in school and in work, taught much that proved wrong, difficulty conforming, or fitting in, an odd one out. Find that bad situations and feelings can get piled on, as some try to make me feel worse than I already do. Treated as weird for not liking football – finding my difficult to read handwriting (down to nuns forcing me to be right handed when I was naturally left handed) often handicaps me (had to read my university exam papers on a tape-recorder for the examiners as they couldn’t read my writing at all) and my writing gets scoffed at and mocked sometimes cruelly. Is that what it’s like for Dyslexics too? Too much of a loner, drifter, daydreamer, idealist. Easily alienated, left out, switched off, forgotten, talked around as if I’m not there. I often feel like Marty, the ghost half of Randall & Hopkirk, present but unseen, but with few Jeff Randall’s who can actually detect my presence.
Self-criticism – I put myself down a lot. I think of John Stuart Mill’s line about it being better to be Socrates unhappy than a pig happy and I suspect the opposite might often be true. I also think of De Sade’s Justine, trying to be good and righteous, but being abused, exploited, cruelly treated, and when she finally prays to God, struck by lightning despite never ding anything wrong in her life. Meanwhile, her sister, Judith is decadent, promiscuous, greedy, self-serving, even murderous, and gets to live a rich, plentiful life despite her blatant self-serving shameless immorality. The meek don’t inherit the Earth, we just get trampled into it. Despite so much literature to the contrary, the good doesn’t always win in the end, bad things do happen to good people, and there is no such thing as just desserts. Karma is blind.
I see myself as a fool and an idiot, easily exploited and estranged. When accepted along I still feel like an outsider on the fringes rather than sharing centre stage. Others can get Hell bent on taking charge of me, getting me to conform and shape myself (or be shaped by them like a lump of plasticine). I tend to wallow in self-pity too, as I expect this list testifies. I can be too trusting and left feeling deeply betrayed when that trust is abused, exploited or not reciprocated.
If others came to me with my kind of self-perception about themselves. – I’d empathise and tell them what a bummer it is and to plod on as best they can.
I struggle to be what others expect me to be as I try to be accepted as I am, warts and all. I rarely sell myself well or create any artificial impressions. I am far too much just me. The cult tried to destroy me, and I seem to have spent my life since trying to re-find myself and patch myself up. I often compare myself to a broken vase glued back together, but impossible to hide the cracks and flaked away bits. I can be clumsy and inept. I stub my toe, bend to see what I stood on, drop stuff, drop more stuff picking up what I dropped the first time, banging my head getting back up, then being distracted as the phone rings, as lots of little things spiral round me in a vicious cycle of midge bites. I end up infuriated at the injustice of the universe as if it has a grudge against me personally.
I thrive on interactive communication. I love finding mail. I hate it when the post-box pigeon hole is full of nothing but circulars or bills. I hate weekends and bank holidays when there are no postal deliveries and days when the mail-box is just empty.
Getting old – 59, but feel as if the cancer added ten years on to that. Always wondered what might kill me one day; feared dying pre-50 as my dad did (a month short of his 50th). Given my crap diet I always thought heart attack or stroke. Felt safe from cancer as I never smoked but that was of course no guarantee of protection. THe dormant sleeper cells still in me now lead the odds as my most likely way off this mortal coil.
Realized I missed out on marrying and having kids. A few romances but no enduring relationships. I think pressure to marry and carry the family name as the last male in the Chappell family line left me thinking being seen with a girl was more to please others than for me.
The few times I brought girls home to meet my parents were disastrous. In 1985 a German girl I dated for a time was coming to visit. In the time it took me to meet her at the train station my mum invited round my sister, my grandparents and several neighbours to witness the marvel of the age and the poor girl was treated like a zoo exhibition. I think they had me clocked up as potentially gay to that point. When my granddad (never noted for subtlety) shook hands with my friend with ‘so your Arthur’s German tart are you?’ I got her out of the house sharpish and we headed out to talk in the park. I left the inspection party in no doubt that I found their attitudes appalling.
The girl at the core of that debacle was important to me in many ways. We met when I was starting to sever my ties to the cult. Unless already married before recruitment you were expected to be celibate and chaste. She was brought in for recruiting but she was clearly not taking to it at all, and a few there treated her as if she was luring me out – someone actually shoulder charged her into a wall at one event but she never told me who it was. She wasn’t trying to draw me out but their treatment of her played a big part in my own decision to finally break away. Ultimately, our relationship dissolved as she was still very much with her previous partner. I wasn’t happy being her ‘bit on the side’.
The only other lady I brought to the house was very different. The first had been quite timid. The second was a force of nature, a wild free spirited hellcat like Bizet’s Carmen on acid. I think it was bordering on revenge inviting her home as she could turn anyone else’s social gathering into her own. She was quite volatile, brutally outspoken, (and drank two bottles of pernod a day), but my time with her was huge fun. It did ultimately get that friends would invite me to parties as long as I promised not to bring her along.
She was involved with another guy when we met, though he was quite abusive to her, and I was very much her shoulder to cry on. Many, including her own Mum, wanted her to dump him and go steady with me. Everyone felt there was more chemistry between her and me than with her and him. Sadly when their relationship broke, she went to another even more abusive guy, who flat out robbed her and left her pregnant. Again I was reduced to pick-up-the-pieces guy. Though we remained friends I knew I’d never be more to her than I already was.
I did get to be around when her daughter was born, and even helped changed the baby’s nappies a few times. I realized then that through the whole time my sister raised her three sons at my Mum’s I’d been entirely excluded from any such activity. My friend’s baby was the first to really leave me feeling paternal and sense what it would be like to be a father, but also already sensing it was late in life for such a path.
My rules for living – Avoid stress, try to be as punctual as possible, keeping constant to do lists, communicating in writing as much as possible.
The last week – Hole in kitchen floor caused by leak from a faulty washing machine (both now in process of repair by my wonderful landlord team), finding the cold weather a drag. A coach excursion I wanted to go on pre-Xmas cancelled. My trip to see my Mum at weekend could be delayed by potential train strikes, general stoma changing. Blah!
Positives – good feedback to some of my writing, some of it even selling modestly. My landlord team have been great, the counseling is really helping me put things in perspective. Finding I cope well with constructive criticism of my creative writing, – quite a contrast to those who seem to mark me down in the general school of life.
Given my run-in with bowel cancer at the height of the Covid lockdown, hospitalization through Xmas 2020 & New Year 2021, two life saving surgical operations, being saddled with a stoma bag, subjected to injections, transfusions, X-Rays, cat-scans, and a colonoscopy, among other treatments it is no real surprise that my stress levels have soared.
One of the many District nurses who treated me daily from my release from hospital on January 18th 2021 to about mid-May noted on my records, ‘Arthur’s mental Heath has taken a battering to put it mildly’.
Despite that, the DWP rejected my application for a PIP benefit, seeing my daily stoma care as a minor inconvenience. Though they don’t take any mental health issues into account in their assessment criteria, they reported that records of my mental health assessments say I am fine. This was news to me as I was never tested for exactly what my mental health status was, and they ignored the views given above from the district nurse.
It is stated by the DWP that I take ‘no prescribed antidepressants’, as if this alone equals a bench mark for mental health concerns. Just because I’m not suicidal, self harming, or physically harming others does not mean I don’t have issues. I feel as though I’d have to actually be on the ledge threatening to jump to be taken seriously on this.
I feel pushed into deeper introspection than ever. I always felt no one should declare themselves mad or sane and the surest way to go crazy is self-analysis. The old joke goes that the first sign of madness is having hairs growing on the palms of your hands. The second sign is examining the palms of your own hands, checking for hairs.
I do have insomnia and much anxiety (the statements says I don’t seem anxious. Sorry if it doesn’t manifest too visibly or audibly).
My self-evident anxieties include 1/. perpetual fear of stoma leakage, splits and bursts. 2/. Fears others seeing the stoma or being aware of it will shun me and distance themselves from me. 3/. Fear of its visibility. 4/. Tendency to fidget the stoma and constantly check it for blockages, over-filling or pancaking (contents piling up in a small area rather than spreading evenly through the bag). 5/. Frustrations from ongoing Covid rulings that can impact my limited post-cancer activity. 6/. Worries about becoming a sufferer of invisible disabilities, and having to defend my position, (as I feel I am doing in getting this PIP application adequately (re)assessed. 7/. Financial worries, given my debts and uncertainty as to how the PIP award or lack of it will affect me. 8/. Despair at being ‘disabled’ at all. I have to keep reminding myself I’m not finished. 9/. Knowing there are still cancers in me, though dormant, including flakes on my Pancreas which I’m told could be untreatable if they become active, turns me into a walking time bomb, but somehow I am deemed totally unanxious about that. 10/. I have had to change many aspects of my lifestyle so I feel old and retired from much before my time. 11/. I’m left totally self-conscious, to some extent even self-loathing, highly self-pitying to the point of pathetic, low in self-esteem, sceptical, cynical and rather battle-hardened. If none of that counts as mental health concern, I’ll eat …. something generally regarded as not really good to eat.
The very worry that I might be mentally ill was helping make me feel more mentally ill. I contacted my doctor and requested a professional assessment, and got one. The conclusion that I have High Anxiety levels and mild depression.
I was assigned a counselor, who gives me fortnightly telephone consultations, and she has been very helpful and informative. Her methods involve ‘cognitive behavior techniques’. This largely involves studying sliding scale questions, such as ‘you need to get a refund for defective products you were sold. On a scale of 1 for mildly irritated to 10 for deeply distressed, where do you think you stand? I’d be about a 7 or 8 right now.
Me with the shrine poster of my Guru and a cult warning leaflet – taken by a reporter
I asked my counselor for any recommended reading material I could look at and she kindly e-mailed me a reading list, from which I found a few relevant titles going cheap online. The first I read and worked through was Melanie Fennel’s The Overcoming Low-Self-Esteem Handbook, published just this year by Robinson books.
It is a very good book, that looks quite daunting at 466 pages, but much of it is blank pages to use for writing notes on the numerous exercises, and self assessments (which I do on notepads and my computer as I never defiance books by scrawling in them).
One problem with the book is that it needs the user to evaluate their whole life. This opened up a whole new can of worms for me. Until now I saw my mental health as only destabilized because of my cancer and stoma treatment, as if I was coasting along fine before then and only peeping down the rabbit hole recently. I now find I may have been off the rails much longer, if not for most of my life. I’ve gone from a recent crisis to the full Freudian messed up since childhood sense of my anxiety. After all, I had insomnia from way before my cancer issues – it just got worse once I was diagnosed with bowel problems.
At school I was bullied a lot. I was told before going that being nice to others would spare me being on the sharp end of any such abuse but I found the bullies just liked duffing up the soft-touches and I was becoming a regular punch bag. It peaked in 1976 when one attacker slashed my face with a piece of broken glass from a milk bottle. He got arrested (suspended sentence, later enforced when he broke another kid’s arm). I ended up with 18 stitches in my left cheek. My house-master felt that aggression was good character building for the hard knocks we get later in life so bullies were often treated lightly and the weak kids like me were derided for being mard. I suspect many regarded me as gay for not being macho and assertive. As I was such a magnet for the thugs the house-master actually sent me to a child psychiatrist who interviewed me just once and threw me out, before openly criticising the school for wasting his time and burdening his case load by sending him every kid they couldn’t handle even when there was nothing too seriously wrong with us. I felt liberated and rational for that assessment.
My father’s young death, aged just 49, in 1978 was my next big blow. His instant coronary thrombosis death was compared to be shot in the heart at point bank range. He was in a cafe in Manchester on route to take money he’d collected on his (oh the irony) life-insurance salesman rounds, stood up to pay his food bill, and suddenly dropped as if fainting. Witnesses reckoned he was dead before he hit the floor.
Me with my Dad – taken by my Mum
While he went with a fast painless death, my family was hit with slow-fuse pain. My education suffered. I was just starting to like school, as the bullies had left at 16 while I stayed on, but my Dad dying, just a month after his mother, shattered my concentration. At home I was told I was ‘the man of the family’ now and had to look after my Mum & Sister. I never cried at his funeral, though I wanted to and felt monstrous because my tears wouldn’t flow. I still hate myself over that. My sister was due to get married weeks after my dad’s funeral. It fell to me to give the bride away. I felt uncomfy in my dad’s shoes from the start.
I failed most of my exams. I’d barely done any revision. I was just drifting from day to day. I became one of Thatcher’s three million unemployed.
One of the few people I bonded with was my mum’s brother, who lived in our street, but after a blazing row with my Mum, (which was largely her fault) he disowned the whole family, moved out and never even came to his own parent’s funerals.
I was a bookworm all my life, escaping to quiet empty classrooms to read hid me from the ever prowling bully-wolf-packs and I became forgotten, anonymous, practically a playtime breaktime ghost, and long after leaving school (and in fact to this day) I was buying lots of second hand books. I developed a crush on one lady book-seller, and asked her for a date which she politely declined, but a while later she invited me out for a date, specifically to accompany her to a ‘lecture’ on meditation at Manchester’s University. It proved to be a big-revival comeback (after a period of disgrace) recruitment event for a major religious cult, and she was one of its star-recruiters. It would take me four and a half years to get out in 1985.
Brainwashed! Mind-altered at the hands of others. The cult actually taught us to mistrust our own minds, because thinking would make us doubt the truths we felt. The meditations were used to stop cognitive processes dead. Of course, thinking would make us see how crap the cult was and what a charlatan its leader was. My first full on real emotional and mental breakdown was not from the cancer, but induced deliberately in the early 80’s.
The cult’s Manchester community was collapsing in in-fighting. Many left when I did, especially when they banned informal unofficial meetings in our own homes (always happier than the organized heavily regulated platform events). I drifted out and back a few times in the final year but finally walked for good after a final seeing of the Guru himself, and just feeling nothing whatsoever. I knew it was no longer for me.
Once free I set about systematically doing everything they banned me from. I had no support as I was a rare beast in having escaped unassisted. Most ex-cutists got out with aid from family, mainstream church (big cults) organizations, and deprogrammers. I had just gone cold turkey and I was suffering some flashbacks and catatonic states. Sometimes I was so zombified that my Mum told me friends and family had visited but that I’d just sat there like a marble statue right through their time with me and only snapped out of it hours later.
I started reading up books on psychology and philosophy, getting a lead on just how minds work. I wanted to kick start mine again. I did A Level sociology, psychology and economics before going to Bolton Institute Of Higher Education (now Bolton University) to do a BA in literature and philosophy.
While there, a cult (not the one I’d been in) started recruiting on campus. I wrote a warning feature on cults and my own experiences for the college newspaper. It felt like coming out of a closet. It also made me a minor famous for 15 minutes celebrity as the popular press picked up my story and I ended up on a few TV & radio shows too.
I saw my graduation with honours BA degree as a certificate of freedom, health and sanity though it did little for me in the job market. I’d gone from unqualified to over-qualified for many jobs though my creative writing was having some modest success.
The next seismic shudders came from home. My Mum remarried, actually to my deceased father’s younger brother. While Frank was a very nice man, I felt uneasy about their real life Gertrude & Claudius relationship though only because of how it had largely developed without me seeing it. My cult time, college studies, regular warehouse work (which I gained eventually (and other activity had kept me out of the loop. At one point my Mum had faked my signature on an application for Summer work on a dire Devonshire holiday camp, which gave me the job without even offering me an interview. She said she’d acted to get me work and get me away from the cult (which I was then still with), but it was actually to allow her to develop her relationship with Frank. It was from his dad, (my grandfather) that I learned about their affair, when he wrote to me during my time on the camp.
I returned to feel my duty as the new male head of family was usurped though to be fair Frank was very much hen pecked in my mum’s matriarchal thrall anyway. I found the family getting very controlling and manipulative, using peer group pressure to get what they wanted. My sister used her three sons as leverage on my doting Mum to get what she wanted, even threatening to take them away if she didn’t get her way. The XTC song Only Making Plans For Nigel, with family and friends orchestrating his career in British Steel and deciding for him that he’ll be happy with it (the composer found such railroading went against his musical career ambitions) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-X3Wy-svIY reminds me how much my family and others have effectively planned and steered my life with peer group pressure and manipulation, and often resented it when my fierce independent obstinacy reasserts itself. It can shock many into wanting to avoid me completely, including as will be seen, some kinfolk.
A friend came to see me a few months after my degree course ended, feeling quite troubled. My mum had asked him to check up on me and to advise me what to do in life, actually what my mum wanted for me, but he was told to present it all as if it was coming from him spontaneously. He told my mum he was uncomfortable about being a pawn in such machiavellian tactics and when he told me about it I had one of my most explosive angry outbursts with my Mum ever, and with Frank who tried defending her at first. I pointed out to my Mum that what she was doing to me was the same kind of behaviour that had driven her own brother, his wife and daughters out of the family.
I had no such intent to lever power and no bargaining chips to do it with either. When my nephews (my sister’s sons), started blatantly plundering my books, and DVD’s, openly boasting about what they had taken) my mum declined to help me recover my stuff (some needed for a paid writing project I ended up losing out on), and my sister refused to talk to me ever again when I challenged her over it, persuading her third husband, her sons and their partners to totally send me to Coventry too. My Mum and Frank talked with me but my sister met me with only stony silence. I was as estranged from my sister as my mum’s brother had declared himself from the family.
After Frank died, my Mum’s health deteriorated and she had a severe heart attack that she amazingly survived, but my sister, a qualified nurse, became her carer, and largely cut me off from being able to help my mum at all when she could. After giving me lifts to the hospital to visit my Mum there my sister failed to pick me up as promised one day and then told me she wasn’t my taxi service. I had to go by tram to see my mum after that.
As my mum plans to sell her home, she felt I had to move out as selling with me as a sitting tenant would be near impossible. Though there seemed no hurry on this I started looking round for somewhere to live, but Manchester Council declared that while I still had a place at my mum’s, I was not a rehousing priority. They told me (on my early 50’s) to get myself evicted, end up on the streets for some unspecified time, and my housing needs would get a higher priority. Despite this, my sister insisted that I wasn’t looking for a house at all, and pointed to the many properties for sale and rent (despite them being outside my price range and me being far down the council waiting lists).
Friends saw my plight and stepped in to help. They had a place I could rent from them, but not in Manchester. I had to move to Preston. Though I love my flat and the new city, I still feel like an exile from my city of birth too. My Mum has stayed loyal to me as a friend and mother – despite her controlling side she has the best intentions. She was shocked that my move was to Preston, not Prestwich (near to her Manchester home).
In Preston, I found my independence and also started giving support to a university based mental health awareness group, as they found my cult experiences a worthy subject for the students on campus. I found myself apologizing a lot for not actually being diagnosed with any mental health concerns. Little did I know what was hiding in Covid’s skirts waiting to pounce on me in 2020.
So, from thinking I only cracked after cancer struck, I find my family rifts, shock from my dad’s death, cult time, and much more besides has been chipping away at my mental stability all my days. The cancer-related anxiety may well be the tip of a very big slippery slope on the tip of a very big iceberg.
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