back to life

This week I went on a night out with my friend Jane, she had a wild night planned for me at a talk in her local second hand book store in Clevedon. Given that I have been on quite a few dodgy outings with Jane over the years I must admit I was a bit dubious about this latest excursion. Several years ago she dragged me along to a cosmetic event, but instead of getting lots of freebies we were listening to a talk about the best lip salve to use in the arctic circle. As we weren’t planning a trip to the North pole, we made a run for it at coffee break and didn’t look back.

As the book store is so quaint and I’m planning to do a creative writing course there in January I though I’d better support it. The speaker was a local historian called David Milner and he gave a talk about local men who served in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. He had some very interesting tales but the one that stood out for me was the tale of Joel Fisher. He came from Weston Super Mare in Somerset and returned there after the Battle of Waterloo and opened a pub with his wife. All seemed well in their lives until they started taking in lodgers, the rent started disappearing and Joel blamed his wife. One night after a violent argument he took an iron bar bludgeoned her over the head, not convinced the job was done he then went down to the kitchen and returned with a knife and slit her throat. His hanging was a public event and nearly 5000 people turned out to watch his demise. Many locals had said that when Joel had returned from the war he didn’t seem the same and acted erratically, according to our speaker this could have been the earliest reference to battle fatigue or as it’s now referred to as post traumatic stress disorder.

The whole talk was very good and David was obviously very knowledgeable about local history and I’ll probably go to more of his talks in the future.

The moral of this story….. trust Jane’s judgement and go with the flow.