Cynara's Note # 38 1972.

The first day of the new year today, but it was just as awful as last year. Same old locked ward, same old nurses, same quack. I ate the so-called special breakfast of boiled eggs and bread soldiers and the stewed tea. The cook had not surpassed herself, but beggars can’t be choosers, and it filled up the stomach. Blue my favourite nurse gave me a cigarette and lit it for me and and walked off after Lucy who was punching the life out of the day boy who must have said something to her. I stood and watched the circus unfold and Lucy was taken away by two nurses. She was struggling like a wild cat, scratching and clawing and spitting. They locked her in the cooling down room. The day boy was bloody and I was glad. I stood in the passageway gazing out the window, puffing away on the cigarette, wishing it would last forever. I saw a fox rush across the grass below. I envied him or her having the freedom to roam, unlike me stuck in the locked ward. Dinner was fish and chips; I don’t know how long the fish has been dead, but it tasted like a few months. Alun drew with crayon on the walls of the washroom, Picasso would have been proud, even if the nurses and cleaner were not. Self expression, he said it was, his way of escaping his hangups. Tea time we had the usual stale sandwiches, something like cheese and some sort of paste, and a new year cake especially made for us on the locked ward, tasting of pretend cream and sawdust. I ate as little as I could and washed it down with cocoa. Lucy kissed me in the lounge after tea, one of her wet but loving kisses, the kind one endures, but never misses.