Whose Reality Is It Anyway

In his book High Fidelity, Nick Hornby writes about the owner of a record shop and his unruly staff. They spend their days endlessly discussing their favourite tunes, dividing them sub-dividing each into increasingly bizarre sub-genres. Turing these endless conversations no decision is ever reached, although every possible scenario is talked through ad nauseam. These conversations glide across a quick sand of quickly moving parameters, constantly rearranging themselves. To anyone not in this select group, these discussions seem to be spoken in an alien language as the normal rules of conversation never apply.

Why should those conversations between music nerds be important during Mental Health Awareness Week? Because each of us think other people’s behaviour is strange, never are own. You've heard of the Yorkshire saying, ‘There’s nowt queerer than folk,’ well, it’s true. I for instance, can and sometimes do, spend many  hours rearranging my alarming large MP3 music collection on my home computer. That’s how I know about High Fidelity because I'm one of those nerds too.
But what if the person whether they are a spouse, relation, or close friends behaviour, is not just odd, but bares not relation to reality? Then, it’s not just a case of eccentric behaviour, but something more alarming and serious. How can you help someone whose understanding of the world you know to be faulty or worse dangerous?

Let me tell you about my Father. As a young man with a new family and a job working with a new technology called computers, he was trusted enough to methodically comb through pages of computer printouts searching for mistakes. If he missed any, and these mistakes were programmed into the computer it could cost lives, not just a few but hundreds. My Father was so good, he gained promotion and his new position saw him responsible for not just one computer programme but for several. In the end, for a gentle man who loved books, films and numbers, the pressure of his job and young family became too much.
Fast forward a few years, to rainy Saturday afternoons spend visiting his now school boy son who wants everything he sees in clothes shops and wouldn't stop talking about his friends, and what they do with their Fathers. A growing lad, who had inherited his Fathers' love of words and books, but sadly, not his understanding of numbers, dragged a Father, puffy and tired from psychiatric medication, around the local high street. We connected mostly through a rugby ball which, booted high and caked with mud dropped on a Father trying to keep his only casual cloths clean. A Father, whose behaviour could be called strange most of the time and at others could be frightening. But I never stopped seeing him. Even when, left outside the dark cavern of a local Bookmaker, for what seemed hours, I never told. I couldn't do anything about the unreality of his world, but I could that. I could not tell on him. I loved him enough for that.