A window into LandWorks

“Well, you know Gabriel from probation, he was trying to find me something to do, spill the time, you know. I’m not actually being employed at the moment and too much time on my hands and at the time I was in a toxic relationship…

When I was in before Christmas, she was still using drugs every day in the house, which I didn’t like at all. Although I stuck it out without, it was just … so it was nice to come out here and have normal company and a bit of sanity. It really was. You forget that everyone in the world’s not involved in that lifestyle, and you start to think that … you get entrenched in it. But now I’m seeing sort of like, you know, the world again outside of that … outside of that sort of lifestyle and it’s really doing me good. I’m trying to get back to more like the old me years ago and how I ended up living for a long time, which wasn’t very nice, and it was miserable. Now I’m trying to be positive, and this place is really helping me do that…

I was 13 when the eye consultant said look, basically you’re going to be … imagine you’ve got RP, retinitis pigmentosa, most cases like this you’ll probably be more or less blind before you’re out of your teens […] Even like a week later my mother’s going can you remember what they said at the hospital the other day Anthony? I just didn’t want to talk about it or acknowledge it at all. I was like thanks for bringing it up, I’m trying not to remember, you know, and I’d get annoyed and go out. I stopped going to school. I probably missed about a year-and-a-half of school until I went to West of England in Exeter … a school for partially sighted and blind and that done me a world of good. If only I could’ve got in there earlier, I would’ve actually got some worthwhile grades and exam results, but obviously because of the amount of school that I’d missed, I couldn’t get up to that level in that amount of time. I think I done fairly well considering the amount of problems that I had as well. Yeah. But then I was working when I left school, tried college for a bit. I just couldn’t keep up with the work because of the reading to stay on the course.

I went to work instead and that was just a menial job packing fish […] I carried on doing that at one place for two years and another place for five years ‘til my mid-20’s, but then the place we were working for closed. My sight got worse, started tripping over pallets. That’s why I used to like filleting because I was stationary, working in one place on a bench as opposed to like when you’re packing and labouring and you’re here, there and everywhere, moving about all over. But then when that place closed and I couldn’t find anywhere else to take me on.

Then I started getting in trouble … no work to fill my day, pissed off, fed-up, started drinking too much and then I started drinking way too much. I got fed-up with that and sort of ended up falling into the drugs scene instead. It was just bad. Just been going around in circles for years and for the last 10 years just been sort of dependent on heroin with like a needle in my arm every day. But you know, those days are over…

Yeah, 10 years. I was just burying my head in the sand, I think, with my sight issues and I didn’t deal with it very well at first. When I had sort of zero it was worse. I really didn’t deal with it well and I wasn’t organised to do it because, you know, I had financial problems, housing problems, relationship problems and then on top my sight problems. It was too much…

But LandWorks it’s just to get me … like occupational therapy innit, it’s kind of to get me in the right … it’s a good habit because I got into a lot of bad habits over the last few years, you know, with routine, lifestyle and I’ve changed a lot of those in my lifestyle. I cut the drugs out. I’m out of that relationship with my partner…

I done a tile … put my name on it and done a fish on it because I used to work with fish. The tile wasn’t bad. I think Chris is quite surprised what I can do. He’s starting to realise now I can do a bit more. It’s a shame I’ve missed the last few months here because of my injury to my leg because that would’ve been a lot longer here. I’ll do like three months, I suppose, say two-and-a-half months left, I can still do a lot in 10 weeks. I don’t know the date exactly, but I want to try and make the most of it because it’s really doing me the world of good. Just the routine of getting up, having something to get up for, constructive, and you know, not just being here, like the journey over to here and going home, having dinner, having a shower after doing something, you know, get back into the swing of normal living…

I think that obviously you’ve been understanding about my sight problems and it’s good. It might give you maybe more of an idea if you did get another person like me out here with sight issues, but it is quite rare to have people with sight issues because I’ve read up on that in the past and if you’ve got sight issues you’re more likely not to want to be involved in a confrontation, so you’ll back down due to your sight issues, you don’t want to have a go at someone and then turn around and trip over a step, so you’re more likely to take it, you’re more likely to not speak up, you might lose interest in your appearance. I’ve read up on it all. But I’m not like that. Because I know about that, I try and allow for that and not let people take advantage and treat me badly due to it, which I have had in the past…

I just don’t want to end up sitting in and getting depressed because that’s bad. So, I need routine in my life, and you know, things to do every day, and this place is really helping me to get back into normal living. It really is and I’ve heard a lot of people that have been here, they seem to do quite well when they leave. They go back into work or education or whatever and you know, the people that stick at it do well don’t they Julie…”