Me too...

Despite, or possibly because of all the terrible things I’ve read about, witnessed with my own eyes and experienced in the world during my 53 years on this planet, I remain an unreconstructed soppy sentimentalist at heart. Happy endings, especially Shakespearean comedies, make me cry. Back in my youth when sat in night clubs, alone and ignored at tables cluttered with empty glasses as the evening drew close to the denouement, I’d feel a sense of affectionate euphoria when I saw those neophytic couples acting on their own bestial instincts in the hope of a measure of pleasure or a handful of happiness.

Houses for sale can oft produce a lump in my throat; suburban semis in need of full utilisation, grown too large for purpose as the teenagers and twenty-somethings brought up there move away to University or for work, love and adventure, as proud parents age and begin to rediscover each other’s personalities. Most of all, when I see large, friendly, elderly dogs, tired and breathless, being taken on slow walks by their middle-aged owners, my eyes smart with tears at the knowledge of a life well lived. Labradors and spaniels that have been adored since they were puppies, providing a central, focal point for families as the children they were bought to amuse grow, then move on to take their places in the world; buy their own houses, start their own families and bring home new tiny puppies, still clumsy on their oversized paws, for their children to cherish and confide in. The quiet beauty integral to the circle of life.

Nothing brings me more joy than such irrefutable evidence of stable, secure family living; homes full of the joyful laughter and healthy tears of growth and nurture. Parents who care and children who feel the protection and love provided by their own home are the best of all people, but for decades I never understood what their experiences were. I felt fearful and challenged by the safety, order and calm of the world they inhabited as I knew nothing of it. My childhood was a living nightmare; dragged up in an abusive hell with a violent, weak bully for a father who used me as a human punch bag, on which to work out all his frustrations and a vain, selfish, evil manipulative mother who abused me sexually and emotionally, instilling deep within my soul a lifelong sense of worthlessness. I never felt loved or love, only contempt. I had no support, only scorn and judgement. I was not nurtured, but brutalised.  Many would say I should learn to forgive them as they are dead and seek to focus on the good memories I have of my parents. However, I have none.

I will admit that my father was an excellent grandad and that, for around 4 years after my father’s death, I had an enjoyable relationship with my mother, as the dynamics had changed and she grew reliant on me, though as her dementia worsened after my sister engineered a return to the family circle she had voluntarily and unilaterally placed herself outside of, my mother’s behaviour resorted to type; barbed, narcissistic, egotistical and judgemental. On balance, I am unable to absolve my parents of their central roles in destroying my capacity for love and the profoundly negative effect their actions have had on my mental health for most of my adult life, because they were fully aware of the inevitable impact of their behaviour and made a conscious decision to place their needs above those of their children. As I have said many times before, I do not have a single happy memory of my first 14 years on this earth; I can only recollect intense physical pain from repeated assaults, guilt from endless character assassinations, emptiness and longing from those pitiful times I misguidedly sought support or guidance but received wrath and bile in return. The fuck you up your mam and dad, they may not mean to but they do was Larkin’s take on family life and, in my case, it was the truth. Though there is no doubt they meant what they did; no question at all. I never knew how to love or be loved until I was in my 40s. When married, I couldn’t successfully operate in a normal family unit and to this day I struggle with unshakeable feelings of profound personal inadequacy. Suicide, or the wish for death, is never far from the surface; I must fight those urges every day.

And now, my parents are gone. My father died in August 2009, struck down by kidney cancer at the age of 75. My mother followed in September 2017, having been reduced to a denuded chimerical spectre by dementia; shorn of language, motor skills and any shred of dignity. Some would say it was a fitting reward for all she had done to me. They may have damaged me almost beyond the point of repair, but I take solace from the fact I have survived to make a success of my life; my son, my partner, my career, my hobbies and interests are all sources of immense pleasure and satisfaction for me. Sadly, the same cannot be said of my sister, who is an evil, callous, vindictive monster, utterly without emotional intelligence or compassion. She is, by any measure of psychological imbalance one wishes to use, a vain and paranoid sociopath. And a failure.

Her autobiography consists of a lengthy sequence of misbegotten ventures, both personal and professional, for which she is unable to accept responsibility, preferring to blame me for the tatty wreckage of her past and present. Her personal life saw her embark upon her first serious relationship with a violent manipulative abuser 6 years older than her while she was still at school. At the time my father was suffering a bout of ill-health and so my mother, with scant regard for my sister’s emotional wellbeing, tolerated this relationship and hid its true nature, as she tactically viewed it to be the best scenario for her personal circumstances. I think this disastrous, abusive period in her life is the key motivation for all of the subsequent mistakes my sister has made in her personal life, not to mention the hysteria induced back pain she began to suffer at this time and which she has subsequently used as an excuse never to help with any physical work, lying through her teeth that the farcical mumbo jumbo known as The Alexander Technique precluded her from lifting anything. My mother’s conduct at that time was deplorable, but my sister’s subsequent lack of insight into her own behaviour shows the utter lack of compassion within her soul. Incapable of love, she revels in hatred.

The next inappropriate conquest my sister embarked upon was the failed, slow motion deflowering of a timid, homosexual public schoolboy, before she entered into a lengthy relationship with another woman (shy, vulnerable, inadequate) that began in her second year at university. This relationship lasted until the year after her graduation when, having verbally agreed to move from London to the north east in an attempt to start a new life together, she reneged on this commitment in the bogs of a backstreet Brighton pub. Soon after, she met the man who would eventually become her first husband, though his unwillingness to be manipulated by her caused difficulties and they regularly split up. However, perhaps evoking the spirit of Jane Eyre, his involvement in a hit and run accident as an innocent victim, not to mention the sizeable compo payment he received, enabled her to exploit how incapacitated he was and she inveigled him into marriage in 2001; the lavish ceremony entirely at my parents’ expense. Of course it didn’t last as, once he recovered his independence and spirit, he refused to live out his life in a farcical cross between Misery and 84 Charing Cross Road. Unsurprisingly, she quickly found another shill; a weak, worthless, four-eyed non-entity who would have failed a personality test if asked to take one. She moved to Cambridge to be with him, before insisting he retrained as a social worker, to optimise his earning potential, as a prelude to dragging him to live in Newcastle in 2009, where he had the misfortune of becoming her second husband. Rather like her opulent first wedding, this apparently more modest affair (I wasn’t invited) was paid for by my mother. By 2013 this marriage was over and he was shacked up with some podgy young thing, leaving my sister crying bitter tears of recrimination by the coast, before she eventually dovetailed with her current boring lanky, balding loser of a significant other. I’ve no idea whether they’re married yet. I’ve only met him once; the last time I saw my mother he was there and he attempted to swagger out of the room and barge my shoulder. It was perhaps the most risible attempt at acting the chap I’ve ever seen.

If you think her personal life is a fiasco, wait until you hear about my sister’s professional one. Having started writing poetry around the age of 16, influenced by her obsession with Morrissey, she had a short collection of juvenile verse published and began to harbour aspirations of being a writer and music journalist.  Consequently, she took a job as a cub reporter in her gap year at The Chronicle, and though she neglected to lift a pen in creative anger while a student, she landed a plum sinecure after graduation at Rock CD magazine, before taking a dream promotion to be News Editor at Select.  Unfortunately, and I am unable to blame her for this, the vicious, backbiting world of print journalism was not for her and she quit after suffering a period of depression. Following this, she began a career as an antiquarian bookseller in Soho, before an ill-starred and poorly financed venture into sole trading via the internet. It didn’t work out and, having had her debts wiped by my parents, she took a post as a Local Authority Recycling Officer, where she remained even after moving to Cambridge, before resigning to move back to Newcastle in 2009. Since which point, she has failed to hold down any proper job, other than a deeply unsuccessful period with the bereavement support charity CRUSE, which it would be best to draw a veil across. In her defence, it was her misfortune to head north after the financial crash and just in time for austerity, when jobs in touchy feely art administration, which she no doubt assumed would be hers for the choosing, dried up or required a far more compelling CV than she could compile.

My belief is that the frustrations stirred up by her failure to secure a sniff of any rewarding work and frustrations at being just another middle aged fish in a huge regional pond, rather than the meteoric media success story she had been at the end of the 1980s, have resulted in her being eaten up by furious but misplaced jealousy and impotent, boiling rage. She has clearly and repeatedly blamed me for the failures in her life for more than a decade now, utterly without foundation. The fact I am so widely published, in journalistic as well as creative circles, not to mention the periodicals I continue to edit, destroys her inside.  My success ruins her. She is eaten up by it. Indeed, it is my contention that her main focus in life is on destroying me, by making endless spurious accusations and attacks on me; a campaign which she is able to wage with the support of Northumbria Police as I’ll explain in due course.

Her initial, unilateral decision to fall out with me happened in July 2007, ironically on the day I successfully gave up smoking. It was the time of my son’s 12^th birthday party and a few days previous, when my sister was still in Cambridge, I’d had a row with my mother who, on the birthday itself, had decided to bring out a school photo of me from 1978 that I hated the sight of. Typical of my mother, she thought little and cared less about the impact of her actions. Words were exchanged at high volume. It wasn’t a good time. Since then my sister, despite not being present, has made repeated false allegations that I grabbed my mother around the throat. That’s bollocks as I’ve never been violent in my life. However this “incident” spurred her to break off all contact with me, other than by sending a regular flow of abusive poison pen letters. At the time I tried to understand her problems as I realised her life wasn’t working out and magnanimously forgave her, but any sympathy I had for her ended with her conduct following  my maternal aunt’s death in September 2008.

Being frank, my aunt was a thoroughly irascible, disputatious, bitter old crone; a childless widow without a good word to say for anyone. Living in an exclusive estate, though in a dilapidated bungalow, my aunt made ends meet by constantly borrowing various sums of money from my parents, but never showed any gratitude or made any attempt to settle her debts. My father kept a tally and the sum outstanding exceeded more than £5k at the time of her death. The provisions of my aunt’s will were such that she left 50% of her estate to her late husband’s nephew and 50% to my sister. For whatever reason, my sister pocketed the entire amount she inherited and did not seek to pay back the money my parents had loaned my aunt, or to make any gesture to compensate my mother for being callously left out of her sister’s will. This, to me, is the single most indefensible and evil act of my sister’s life, eclipsing even the terrible wrongs she has done me, my partner and my son. I think now is the time when we need to go back to the very start.

My sister is 5 and a bit years younger than me. As a small child through to her mid-teenage years, when I left the family home forever, she was a timid, conformist Daddy’s girl, who sought and received both praise and acceptance in equal measures in whatever realm or circumstance she found herself. Presumably this is why she willingly sexually assaulted me at my mother’s prompting in May 1981. Seemingly without imagination or any desire to assert her own personality, my sister was a model though stolid student and dutiful daughter.  Her conduct and childhood experiences were the polar opposites of mine; my father showered her with affection and never placed a finger on her, while her utter lack of an independent spirit allowed her to be moulded into the kind of child my mother could be proud of. Whenever conflict arose between my parents and me, she loyally took their side, though this did materially benefit her as she grew older.

As an undergraduate, I never received a penny towards my living costs from my parents. I cashed in my Premium Bonds and utilised a maturing £200 life insurance policy my maternal grandparents established on my birth in an attempt to survive, but in my final year I needed to work full time in a bar to pay the rent. I tried my best to keep up with university work, but the first class honours I’d set my heart on disappeared from view, and as a consequence so did my hopes of a funded PhD. Reassessing my ambitions, I embarked on a PGCE, where I was delighted to unexpectedly benefit from financial contributions from my parents, who had themselves benefitted from my maternal grandmother’s will after her passing in March 1987. This was the only time I ever received financial gifts while my father was alive. Having bought my first flat aged 24 in 1989, I borrowed a grand for the purposes of refurbishment from them and repaid it less than a year later after scrimping to save £100 a month. When my son was born, with my ex-wife on minimal maternity pay, we begged to borrow £2,000 from my parents, which we returned to them in full within 2 years, though I will concede my father bought his grandson’s season ticket for SJP every year.

In contrast, my sister had her debts paid off at the end of each academic year, without question, as well as receiving regular cheques through the post, though this did not enable her to progress beyond the mediocre in her academic career. Perhaps such fiscal indulgence prevented her from learning how to budget effectively, but until my father’s death, at which time she was 39 years of age, she was repeatedly and indulgently bailed out and showered with gifts of cash, though she never displayed any sense of guilt or gratitude, only arrogant entitlement. Not once in her life did she offer my parents a penny piece. In her eyes, she’d done what her parents wanted and demanded payment in return; any suggestion that this may be denied her provoked, and continues to provoke, a vindictive rage that would not be out of place in Greek tragedy.

The last time my sister spoke to me wasn’t our father’s funeral in August 2009, but any contact I’ve had subsequent to that has been minimal and fraught with difficulty to say the least. When the sap who was her second husband moved up north, they initially rented a property in the Tyne Valley, before utilising my sister’s unearned and immoral windfall from my aunt to buy a house in Whitley Bay in 2010, where she still lives I believe, not that I’ve ever been inside. From 2009 to 2012, the two of us, with the help of my partner, took turns to care for my mother. To avoid any unpleasantness, my sister was always given first choice for visiting timesand what have you. After almost 3 years of walking on eggshells, the 2012 Olympics provided my sister with a spurious excuse for a flounce. On the day the Olympic Flag passed through Gateshead, the route included going past the end of my parents’ street. It was a normal work day so my sister was on duty, having little else to occupy her time. Having wheeled my mother in her chair to see the parade, she took exception to my mother saying “I wish your dad had been here” as the procession passed by.

Any normal, rational human being would have understood that this was a widow expressing regret that her life partner wasn’t around to share in this auspicious moment. My sister isn’t a rational human being though. Instead she reacted with fury, seeing a slight where none had been intended, and broke off all contact with my mother for a couple of months, only calming down by early November. On this occasion, my sister managed to keep her temper for about a month until they went to The Sage for a Northern Sinfonia Sunday afternoon carol concert. At my sister’s insistence and my mother’s expense, they went for lunch in the Tyneside Cinema tea-rooms, which in their original incarnation had been her hang out of choice in sixth form. However, it didn’t go to plan; my mother was becoming slower and more doddery, meaning it took her an age to eat lunch and, because my sister refused to stump up for a taxi, the journey on foot down Grey Street, along the Quayside, across the Swing Bridge and up the stairs to The Sage took it out of my mother whose mobility was by now severely restricted. Consequently, they were late for the start and at the interval my mother, fatigued and disorientated, vomited her lunch back up. The fact my mother had apparently disrespected the catering of the wonderful Tyneside Cinema tea-rooms in such a manner was enough for my sister to withdraw from my mother for almost 2 years, other than her favoured tactic of a series of poison pen letters directed each month in my mother’s direction. My mother attempted to apologise, but this cut no ice; my sister had decreed she had behaved unacceptably. Seriously, throwing up an overly spiced potato rosti caused my sister to turn her back on my mother for almost two years; to the extent she never set foot in the family home ever again. I’m not making this up you know.

As 2013 dawned, with all care responsibilities resting on my shoulders, with the assistance of my partner, we did our best and my mother was thankful. I’ll not lie; it was very hard and I was thankful when in March 2013, she pointed out an advert in The Sunday Sun for retirement apartments in Monkseaton. The house was too big for her and she felt increasingly isolated. As a result we embarked upon a programme of moving her to the Coast. I have never worked so hard in my life during the period leading up to the moment my mother took up residence in August that year. I’d spent every single day of my summer holidays emptying the house of what was extraneous to requirements. As my father never threw anything away, this was an enormous task for someone who didn’t drive and lived 15 miles away, or a lengthy metro and equally tedious bus journey away. I didn’t mind. Despite the garage being an Aladdin’s Cave of otiose detritus, I felt a sense of both affection and responsibility for my mother and she showed gratitude. Not once in this whole time did my sister show any inclination to visit the house to help or even to take any keepsakes she wanted, which has directly led to her unshakeable and erroneous belief that I either threw out or took for myself the collection of photo albums my parents had compiled over the years. I didn’t. Why would I?

As a result of my sister’s antagonistic conduct, it was my mother’s decision at this point, bearing in my mind that my sister had inherited everything from my aunt and withdrawn from all contact with my mother, other than her regular abusive letters, to change the terms of her will, from an equal split for us both, to leaving the apartment for me, on the basis that I’d done so much to help my mother and was more likely to reach the age of being eligible to live there than my sister. I did not ask her to do this and, with witnesses, regularly asked her if she was sure that’s what she wanted, which she assured everyone she did. Also, I insisted that my mother still split the money equally between my sister and my son. With those conditions met, a solicitor who judged my mother to be of sound mind drew up a draft will that my mother fully intended to sign; if it had ever arrived that is. For some reason, we never received it and it somehow ended up in my sister’s possession.

Sadly, moving house probably accelerated my mother’s decline. By early 2014, it was clear she was unable to cope with the new electrical appliances or the lay out of the flat and was struggling. An appointment with her new GP resulted in a diagnosis of a severe bladder infection, which was causing a state of confusion bordering on delirium. Several courses of antibiotics were required before my mother was seemingly cured. It was tough, having to visit her every single day, do all her shopping, organise all utilities and so on, but we were coping, just.

All of a sudden, for whatever reason, my sister reappeared on the scene. After over 18 months away, over a year after my mother moved into her apartment, my sister was back, needless to say without any apology for her conduct. Initially it was helpful that she was involved, but things soon escalated as she sought, as ever, to pursue her own agenda. Somehow, she’d obtained the draft of the new will and, presumably as it suggested a pecuniary inconvenience for her, all hell broke loose. In the autumn of 2014, she got social services involved, suggesting my partner and I were abusing my mother; of course social services incontinently dismissed her allegations of impropriety out of hand. However the elephant in the room had to be addressed; my mother’s repeated wanderings, confusion and inability to look after herself were no longer simply a case of the effects of regular urinary tract infections. Having been hospitalised after a fall, the hammer blow came after a routine blood test showed that there was no infection present. The only possible diagnosis for my mother’s condition was dementia. An extensive care package, with the assistance of social services was put in place to keep my mother in her apartment, but only time would tell if it could be successful. This was not something my sister was happy with, as she began a determined campaign to have my mother institutionalised as quickly as possible.

About 4pm on the Sunday before Christmas in December 2014, convicted paedophile Adam Johnson scored the winner for Sunderland at SJP. At that exact moment, I was privy to the pitiful sight of an aged, distressed woman soiling herself in the main corridor of the Helen McArdle Care Home on Rake Lane, next door to North Tyneside General Hospital. My sister, without consulting me or social services, had booked my mother in for a week at this establishment, where I frankly wouldn’t board my dog, to allow “respite care;” not for my mother, but for her. Helen McArdle didn’t become the Care industry’s first multi-millionaire by displaying compassion; this modern equivalent of the Bethlehem Asylum takes anyone, mendaciously assesses them as lacking capacity on the flimsiest of pretexts, deprives them of their liberty then charges £500 a week minimum for allowing residents the privilege of crying their eyes out while covered in shit.

With the help of the CAB, I managed to get my mother out of there and to stay with us for Christmas, but it was a losing battle to keep her out of permanent residential care. One final 2am trip along the Esplanade at Whitley in the middle of February, attired in only her nighty and slippers, supposedly to get her husband’s tea, was enough for everyone. The young plod who rescued her took her to the hospital, who got the duty social worker involved. A full case conference confirmed the inevitable deprivation of liberty order (DOLT). It was March 9^th; my father’s birthday. My mother never went home to her apartment again. A few weeks in hospital were followed by her final move to St. Ann’s Care Home in Cullercoats, where she died on September 2^nd 2017, having declined to a state you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. I’d like to say her passing was the end of the story, but it isn’t. In some ways it is only the beginning, as I’ll now explain the scale of both incompetence and corruption by Northumbria Police in this matter, as well as the truly barbarous evil at the heart of my sister’s conduct.

The day after my mother’s DOLT order was confirmed, I received a menacing, intimidating call from a Northumbria Police detective based at Middle Engine Lane. To my immense regret, I didn’t get his name. Never in my life have I been subjected to such snarling threats, all based on my sister’s spurious allegations to the cops. Having been thwarted by the professionalism of social services, immediately after the conclusion of the case conference about my mother, my sister had gone straight to Northumbria Police and accused me, my partner, my son and my ex-wife of stealing money from my mother, as well as fraudulently producing a replacement will. Lies; all lies and she knew that, though it didn’t stop her from spreading these malicious falsehoods among the stupid, cretinous remnants of my father’s family. These tragically limited, mentally ill and mentally deficient morons from Felling, Low Fell, Watford and Vitoria Gasteiz unthinkingly accepted the specious propaganda they were fed and, despite none of them ever having a decent word to say about my mother previously (either because she was bourgeois or apparently complicit in the murder of a family dog in 1971), reinvented themselves as her best pals, even if she didn’t have a clue who they were by this stage.

Thankfully a cursory check by the plod completely exonerated us all, though no apology was ever received, which is par for the course from Northumbria Police I’ve subsequently discovered. Neither were they interested in discussing the bare faced lies my sister had told with her, for no apparently good reason as I can tell. It seems to me Northumbria Police refuse to behave in an even handed manner when dealing with allegations made by my sister; for whatever reason, their default position is that they take her word as the truth and insist those accused disprove her lies. It is an abhorrent, corrupt and sickening course of action. I have regularly sought redress by complaining to the IPC, but have had no satisfaction thus far.

In July 2015, I received another call from the female officer who had interviewed us and investigated the case. Unsurprisingly my sister had made another complaint; this time her wrath had been stirred up because I’d liked a Facebook page about Tynemouth Market Book Fair, which she had some involvement in at the time. I’d done so because my partner’s best friend was running a stall there. However this apparently provocative act resulted in a strongly worded complaint to the filth. You couldn’t make it up. I unliked the page and asked the law to tell my sister to leave us alone, agreeing as an olive branch to only visit my mother 3 Sundays a month, to allow my sister the flexibility to visit on the other one.  It should be pointed out that from the day of the phone call from the testosterone fuelled detective onwards, I was on sick leave until early November 2015, as the stress of the lies being told about me and the emotion of having to deal with my mother’s deterioration caused me to have a nervous breakdown. I honestly came within a few inches of suicide on several occasions, which is what I believe my sister wanted and still wants.

This call from the female officer was not the end alas; I began to receive a series of letters of greater and greater hysteria, demanding I return those photo albums that I did not possess. I replied to the first letter saying this and, after about the fourth one, I got the peelers involved and they went round to have a word. Silence after that, but as my mother’s condition deteriorated ever more rapidly, the inevitability of death and the attendant funeral difficulties loomed on the horizon.

As a Golden Wedding gift to each other, my parents had purchased Co-Op Funeral Plans. It’s what that generation did. When my father died, despite an unnecessary delay before the funeral, no doubt engineered by my sister to discomfit as many people as possible, everything went smoothly. We had the service in St. Whatever’s, the burial in the graveyard next door, then sandwiches and pints in Blaydon Rugby Club. It wasn’t a good do, but it was the best anyone could have hoped for. My mother had always said that is what she wanted, the same as her husband, to the extent of leaving a bequest for £1,000 in her will for the church. Somewhat typically, my sister’s intervention immediately after my mother’s death resulted in the utter disregard of my mother’s wishes.

Because my mother had been subject to a DOLT order, the Court of Protection was in sole charge of her affairs and they don’t work weekends. Hence, her death on the Saturday meant nothing could be done for 48 hours, other than removing her body to Co-Op funeral care in North Shields after the doctor had issued a death certificate. As an aside, a few days later I visited my mother’s room at St. Ann’s for the last time to remove the few personal artefacts left behind; it appeared my sister had stripped the place of all items of value, including every single piece of my mother’s jewellery. Legally, she was not entitled to do that. She wasn’t entitled to make knowingly false accusations or to sexually assault me either, but she had done.

The Court of Protection registered my mother’s death first thing on the Monday, passed all documentation regarding her estate to the Co-Op Legal Services department who had been granted probate in the terms of my mother’s will and effectively had no further involvement from that moment on. Having found this out after phoning them, I was instructed to contact Co-Op Funeral Care directly, which I did, only to discover that my sister had already made arrangements that were completely alien to what my mother would have wanted.

The burial would take place first, followed by a service of remembrance in Monkseaton, but there would be no gathering afterwards. There would be 2 funeral limousines, as per the details of the Funeral Plan; one for my sister and her current partner, while the other was to be used to transport the idiots from Felling. My son was allowed in the limousine with my sister, if he wanted; obviously he didn’t. There was no provision made for my partner, my ex-wife or me. Clearly, I was both stunned and appalled by this, but in fairness to the Co-Op, they acted in good faith when my sister contacted them. They had no knowledge of the volcanic, poisonous rancour in her heart and regarded her as the client, whose wishes were to be accepted at face value. However, once I’d explained my side of the story, they pretty soon realised they’d made an error acquiescing to the monster that is my sister, as in the end, the Co-Op put on an extra limousine for me, my partner, her mother and a friend free of charge; a gesture I very much appreciated and one that was clearly made because of their shame in being unwittingly complicit in my sister’s sordid acts of revenge. However, she had more high jinks in store for us all.

At 23.30 on Sunday 17^th September, the night before my mother’s funeral, my mobile rang. It was a certain PC 8151 Pilgreen of Northumbria Police who was responding to a complaint my sister had made that I was allegedly going to kill her and then kill myself at my mother’s funeral. She had made her initial complaint on Thursday 7^th September, specifically that I might disrupt the funeral. As the police did not act on this, she intensified her allegations, apparently repeating what the Co-Op Funeral Services had told her. Obviously, this was another lie and her hope was to stop me from attending the funeral, which I’d already offered to do as a way of keeping my sister from going off the deep end, but been dissuaded from doing. I believe she hoped, and PC Pilgreen expected, that I would lose it and start ranting and raving. This was why he was parked outside my partner’s house no doubt.

I did not respond in an impolite way, despite discovering that the severely intellectually impaired PC Pilgreen, who was accompanied by the apparently catatonic PC 1214 Williams, had not even bothered to do any cursory checks about the background into the case. Blustering and floundering, he made limp excuses for turning up at such a ludicrously anti-social time and claimed that such behaviour by the police wasn’t unreasonable or intimidatory and that “people react in different ways.” Needless to say when they finally arrived, no doubt devastated at not having made an easy collar feel on a quiet Sunday night, I was utterly broken emotionally. I can state here and now that I did not sleep one second that night and that my current long term absence from work with anxiety and depression is entirely as a result of the disgraceful conduct of Northumbria Police in bowing to my sister’s malicious falsehoods. As yet, I do not feel I have properly been able to grieve for my mother’s death because of Northumbria Police’s involvement and their insistence on giving these nonsensical allegations credence. This is in contrast to my sister who, apparently, delivered one of her truly awful poetry pieces at a gathering of Tyneside’s least talented scribes in the Old George on 21^st September. This doggerel was apparently viciously derogatory about me, but I’ve not sought to have her lifted for it. Yet.

The woefully inadequate PC Pilgreen subsequently made several ham-fisted attempts to interview me about my sister’s allegations. Initially he emailed me asking I come to Middle Engine Lane as a “voluntary offender.” So much for innocent until proven guilty eh? When I pointed this out to him, he curtly dismissed it as “just a typo,” rather than an insight into his and Northumbria Police’s default attitude towards me. Then he made an appointment and cancelled it an hour beforehand. Finally, when he did interview me (I’d not been so daft as to go without legal representation you’ll be glad to know), he didn’t bother to read me my rights until halfway through the interview. Any wonder I feel like Northumbria Police has got it in for me?

Thankfully the funeral itself passed off without incident, despite my sister and her entourage pointedly ignoring me. I did feel sorry for two of my cousins caught between the two sides; hectored and brainwashed by my sister, but refusing to accept her lies about me. Hopefully this marks the end of all contact with my sister and her functionaries in Northumbria Police, meaning I can live the rest of my life free from the twin prongs of Northumbria Police oppression, spurred on by the lies of my sister to Middle Engine Lane and the lies of a certain hosiery entrepreneur to Forth Banks. While I know that nothing untoward will happen to me because of the lies they’ve told about me, I need reassurance that I too will have the law’s protection, to stop people maliciously attempting to ruin my life. Those of you who know of either or both my sister and the hosiery entrepreneur may wish to pause to consider that; Northumbria Police must do.

All I desire is the chance to quietly live out the rest of my life, free from harassment, intimidation and persecution. Let me recover my mental health and rebuild my career. Let me be happy. Let me be myself. Let me live.