More Fish In The Sea

The Wall of Death experience:-
Stage (1) Starting out. Fear factor 5/10; dignity intact...


Stage (2) On the way up. Fear factor 8/10; dignity still intact...


Stage (3) Reaching the top. Fear factor 10/10; dignity still intact and momentary signs of respect from the audience...


Stage (4) Rapid descent. Fear factor 0/10; dignity shattered by inelegant landing; all signs of respect dissolve in audience laughter...


The "Summit" event yesterday was moving, celebratory, informative and great fun with over 200 attending and massive enthusiasm for all the activities ranging from the frivolous all the way to earnest workshops on medication, psychotherapy, benefits and criminal justice plus rallies for patient and carer activists respectively.

This was a great way to celebrate the culmination of our hugely successful Movin' On Up campaign which brought Hafal together with our partners Bipolar UK and the Mental Health Foundation to fight for a good deal for people with a mental illness and their families.

A fantastic job done by Emma and other stalwarts who heroically still kept their sense of humour long after the show had ended as the vast collection of display matériel was carefully dismantled and loaded onto various vans and trucks. I'm notoriously unhelpful at this stage of proceedings but tried to assist the incredibly painful winching by hand of the VW campervan onto its trailer (you didn't think we drove it around, did you?) only to find that media-man John Gilheany who was steering it up the ramp had left it in gear!

More pics today and next week here.


Postcript:

John is quickly forgiven, not least because he had earlier sung a ballad of his own composition as part of the event's closing session, also including the "Voice of Hafal" Rikki Withers and, a new discovery, Andrew Macintosh - better known as our IT guru and guardian of the sacred VW (few staff in Hafal get away with doing just one job).

I'm surprised to find that John's song is a poean to Hafal's corporate progress with the refrain "There's more efficiency" until I realise that I have misheard what is actually a rather classy piece about unrequited love - the refrain is in fact "There are more fish in the sea".

The "Voice of Hafal" plus John G. (see above)