My World Is Getting Smaller

The twenty-first century was meant to be good to me.

Sure, it began well enough. I had a brilliant job, and I worked with people who were more like family than friends. I’d also started to travel a little, two trips to France in 1999, a trip to Belgium for my birthday in 2000, a trip to the Eden Project in Cornwall in 2001.

Then a guy from Diss happened. He purchased the business, and instead of having the balls to tell me that I didn’t fit his vision of what he wanted for the business he set about making my life a misery, taking everything I’d worked so hard for away from me before making it impossible for me to stay. He wore me down and abused me mentally with late-night phone drunken phone calls. In the end I said no more, and I resigned on health grounds.

The professional wrestling business was meant to be my haven from everything that had happened in my job. Although they supported me through some of the darkest days of my life, a lot of these so-called friends only wanted to know me because I could provide them with worldwide attention and help their careers. Long before the days of social media I worked my backside off gathering contacts and telling the world how great my friends were. It didn’t work both ways though. My friends never told the world how great I was, and when I’d had enough of the politics, enough of the one-way traffic, the back slaps, the handshakes, the e-mails and phone calls asking me how I was suddenly stopped. Why should they bother, when they had no more use for me?

After years of black dog days I thought I’d found a decent job in my local paper shop. Everything seemed to be going so well, and business and footfall even picked up during my time there. But head office had other ideas, and instead of investing a bit of money into giving the place the spruce up it needed they pulled the rug out from under me, sending me back to the unemployment line. A short-term contract working for a well-known pharmacy chain followed, but by then things were changing, and not for the better.

I thought I’d get another job quickly, but then the economy crashed and recession set in. What I thought would be weeks of unemployment turned into months. The months turned into years, eight years to be exact. I began to spend some time volunteering in one of the local museums. It was great, but it wasn’t putting money in the bank.

Eventually, after thousands of job applications, I thought I’d found something. But after just a short time my body had other ideas as a heart condition presented itself. The job vanished before I found myself looking up at a surgeon shoving a small stent up my arm to open up a blocked blood vessel at the back of my heart.

As I recovered a lady I only knew in passing, the owner of the pet shop in a nearby town, offered me a job. It was perfect for me, and it seemed that, for the second time in my life, I’d found a job where the people I worked with were more like family than friends. I learned a lot, enjoyed meeting new people, and especially enjoyed meeting some new furry friends, most of whom seemed happy to see me, judging by the amount of tail wagging I saw.

But then we learned that things weren’t as great as we’d been told. After one of the bosses was taken ill, we found out that financially the business was in dire straits. People called asking for bills to be paid. Companies told us they wouldn’t send us stock unless other bills were paid. Then the landlord put the building up for rent because he hadn’t been paid in months. Mrs. Boss didn’t care. She’d stopped caring months before, and stopped showing up for work and stopped talking to us.

Then, one morning, everything changed. My key no longer fitted the back door, and on the front door a notice from the landlord. Dream job mark two, the dream that had turned into a nightmare, had come to an end, leaving us workers out of pocket and without a hope of getting the wages we were still owed.

So it was back to the job centre for regular meetings with a chap called Neil. But after a few months the old ticker decided to act up again. Thankfully no major treatment was needed, just a short trip to the big hospital so they could stick a few pads on my chest and hit me with a few jolts.

Then it was back to the unemployment line, that was until a blonde buffoon named Boris appeared on television one Monday evening. The unemployment line was gone, as were a great deal of other things, as people panicked like something out of a 1970’s dystopian film when the country was put into lockdown. Job opportunities that were there before BoJo’s announcement suddenly vanished, which meant that while I could still sit on my backside all day I didn’t have to look for work. Mind you, there wasn’t much work to look for.

As the world dealt with a pandemic it wasn’t really equipped to deal with, things looked up when a northern supermarket said I was good enough to become a key worker for them. A temporary contract led to another contract with them a few months later. Okay, it was only fifteen hours a week, and the shift began at 5am, but it was better than nothing.

So, life went on. The money wasn’t great, but it was nice to have money, and things seemed to go very well. Until I began to feel out of sorts one summer, and a doctor on temporary assignment told me that “it’s just a chest infection”. You know the rest of the story, the parts that bring me to writing this blog entry today.

There was a lot of other stuff I could have written about in this blog today, the deaths of two of my brothers as well as other friends and family who are no longer with us, and the way that people who I thought would have supported me during difficult times turned their back on me, how they couldn’t put any differences to one side when it looked like I might not make it through that frightening Friday night back in 2023.

But as the title of this blog suggests, it really does feel like my world is getting smaller. There’s no point in making plans to travel the world anymore when you get out of breath just walking to the end of the road. You have doubts about using public transport, even on the shortest of journeys, because you know that even the slightest bump in the road will send a jolt of pain through every part of your body.

I really did have big plans as the 20^th century came to an end. I guess none of that will happen now, and judging by the way other things have happened, by the way other people have acted towards me in recent years, the world probably won’t be coming to me any time soon.