I am feeling relatively okay when I get up this morning, and am carefully nurturing a desire to list some more of my junk on eBay and Gumtree. I make the tea/coffee and sit down on the sofa with my iPad to check my email, my messages on my YouTube channel and catch up on activity on my Twitter and Instagram accounts. There’s a tweet that I see straight away on Twitter, and suddenly I’m not feeling so great. Tom Isaacs has died. I didn’t know Tom personally, had never met him, but I had watched videos of him on YouTube, and heard him interviewed (more than once) on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2. Tom was a fellow Parkinson’s sufferer, and one of the co-founders of the Cure Parkinson’s Trust. More than this, though, Tom was a bubbling fountain of positivity (at least in public) and I have a sentence of his that has stuck in my head from the last time that Jeremy Vine interviewed him. He had been talking about the research that was being funded by the Cure Parkinson’s Trust, and he finished the interview by saying “I know that one day I’ll be able to say that I used to have Parkinson’s”. And now he won’t, and he’s gone and I feel very sad. No cause of death has been given as yet, other than that it was unexpected and swift – he wasn’t even 50 years old.
Add to that the prospect of our lying, indecisive, weak and wobbly Prime Minister, Theresa May, getting another term in office, by running a negative, personal, fear-based campaign, and perhaps you can understand my feelings of helplessness – I can only hope that the electorate, whom she has treated with contempt, aren’t completely taken in by her.
I’ve achieved nothing today. I’ve done nothing apart from walking the dog and vacuuming downstairs. My symptoms have been well under control – even my voice hasn’t been quite so weak as usual. My mood isn’t good, though. I think I need a beer and some cannabis – so that’s what I’m going to have!