Wanting to keep things neat and tidy is not OCD. Straightening crooked pictures is not OCD. Demarcating your work-space clearly is not OCD. All of these things might point to OCD but they could just as likely not. Having invasive, repeated and unwanted thoughts that drive you to perform compulsions in an attempt to controlContinue reading “Mental Health November Week 4: No, you’re not “just a bit OCD””
Author Archives: Matthew Pullar
No Ghosts This Year #2
The walk home was generally a relief. Mark caught the bus home, so he wasn’t around to be a nuisance. And mostly Philip had the time to himself, to think and daydream. Sometimes he would take a book with him and try to read as he walked, but that was a hard thing to do.Continue reading “No Ghosts This Year #2”
No Ghosts This Year: A Story of Advent #1
hen holidays came, it would be okay. But for now Philip just had the long waiting days. The sun deceives us, he thought, into believing it’s holidays before it is. Last weekend he had made the mistake of sitting out on the verandah with his book, like he used to do with his sister inContinue reading “No Ghosts This Year: A Story of Advent #1”
Mental Health November Week Three: White Collar Time
Unexpected Gifts
Because the Danes roared across the waves in Viking- glory, horn-helmeted King Cnut at the helm, we can now say that we are glad, can label small what we’d otherwise miss, and can cut with a knife the smallest things the eye can see. Come wind and hail, though time may slay, we lay cold and rain beforeContinue reading “Unexpected Gifts”
Mental Health November Week 2: Prayer
How we wait
The taste of hospitals and airports says: You are here under whatever circumstances, tired, no doubt stressed. Have a coffee. Sit down. No-one will care if you cry; everyone is going somewhere different sometime soon. Everyone is crying or dazed, on edge yet kept in secure wards or waiting gates, volatile, yet in comfy chairs.Continue reading “How we wait”
Mental Health November Week 1: Anxiety
This year, the people behind Movember are having a particular focus on men’s mental health, a topic close to my heart. So, while I won’t be shaving off my beard to grow a new mo from scratch, I have decided to take a handful of my old poems on mental illness and give one ofContinue reading “Mental Health November Week 1: Anxiety”
Five Nobel Laureates that should be better known
The week just passed has seen quite a bit of controversy (some of which I’ve participated in) over Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature win. My personal favourite was the Tweeter who seemed confused over which Nobel Dylan won and felt prompted to say that, as good as it was that Dylan had won aContinue reading “Five Nobel Laureates that should be better known”
Rainy Day Sermon
The text is darker in this weather, more emphatic, as though while he wrote, outside prison walls Saint Paul saw the fall of some Ephesian rain-drops and thought: If my plea should fall on hard soil… Did he see the runaway slave in the wet, uncertain, standing at his master’s door,Continue reading “Rainy Day Sermon”
The Consolations of Writing 