2020 The year that tried to kill me

By Oliver Morrison

The story narrates a critical year in the life of a 40-year-old man living in a remote farmer's town on the border of Wales. Having lived in numerous countries and cities due to his father's profession, he found solace only in one town&nbs

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twisted Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781919612713

Book preview

2020:

The year that

tried to kill me

A True Story

By Oliver Morrison

Table of Contents

Introduction

Side Splitting Fun

Ouch!

That’s new?

What a Morning!

Breaking News!

That did the trick

Sleeping Beauty & the Beast

Breathe!

Home Sweet Home

One…Two…Three!

The Road to Recovery

WTF?

Lockdown

The Nightmare’s Just Begun

Friday the 13th

Throwing the towel in

A Small World

In Good Hands

Like Glue

The Fight of My Life

The White Room

I.C.U

The High Dependency Ward

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

Testing Time

The Naughty Ward

The Aftermath

Dedications

Introduction

They say life begins at forty but for me it nearly ended or, at least, that’s one way to look at it anyway. Who am I? I’m just a regular guy, trying to live an ordinary life who survived a series of extraordinary events that can only be described as attempts on my life by natural causes.

Born in 1980, I’m one of the last members of generation X.

A generation that remembers a time before mobile phones.

A generation who could entertain ourselves with a stick and a drinks can, a generation who, if you wanted to call a friend and they lived in the same village, you would only have to dial three numbers from a land line.

A generation who remembers having only four TV channels, a generation who was rewarded for achieving accomplishments and not just for turning up, and a generation who, as kids, if you threw a tantrum or back chatted your mum you wouldn’t be sat down to talk about your feelings like the privileged kids of today, oh no, you would get one of three prizes, prize one the slipper, prize two the spatula or prize three, my mum’s behaviour correctional tool of choice, the wooden spoon.

I can tell you one thing though, it worked. I think the older generation used to call it ‘character building’.

Anyway, as I said, I’m just a regular guy, trying to live an ordinary life.

The trouble is nothing in my life is ordinary!

Take where I’m from. Now to any normal person that would be an easy question to answer, but for me it’s a bloody mine field. I live in a small town on the border between Wales and England called Oswestry. It is right on the welsh border, and in fact it changed hands between Welsh and English many times during the middle ages till it eventually was deemed to be English.

I haven’t always lived there though. I’ve lived all over the country and all over the world in fact. My dad worked in the oil industry, so he moved about a lot. I was actually born in Venezuela, South America, before moving to Huston, Texas, when I was a baby and spent the first 6 years of my life living state side. We eventually moved to the U.K, where my dad is originally from.

My mother, on the other hand, was from Thailand, which is where I get my darker complexion and south East Asian features from.

We moved about all over the U.K before settling in Oswestry nearly 18 years later.

The family had changed along the way as I now had a brother, a sister, and a step mum.  Mum and Dad divorced back in the mid nineties and then my mum lost her battle with cancer in 2001. Oswestry is where I’ve lived all my adult life.

I’ve been here over twenty years.

I have many friends which I have known over the twenty years, and the bond with them is very strong. So, if I get asked the question, ‘where are you from?’ I would say Oswestry, but I’ve learnt over the years, especially my younger days, that people sometimes do not actually want to know where I’m from.

They want the answer to a different question entirely.

Because when I answer them, it’s not the answer they are looking for and they’ll follow up with, No, I mean where were you born?

So, when I tell them Venezuela in South America, they look at me with confusion, as if I’ve said the wrong answer.

Then I’ll get a You don’t look like you’re from South America? Which is when it becomes apparent what they are actually trying to ask me and had been for the last 15 minutes is "what is your ethnic background?" So, then I have to explain to them that my dad is English and my mum is Thai and that I am the product of such union.

Living in a small farmers market town on the welsh border there wasn’t a great deal of ethnic diversity, to say the least, but I was never victim to any discrimination although, there were the odd accounts of small mindedness, mainly from older generations. I dealt with it all with humour and it wasn’t ever malicious but based in ignorance.

An old boy once asked me where I was from and knowing full well what he meant, I didn’t give him the answer he was looking for. I fucked with him and said in the broadest old school Oswestrian accent I’m from Oswestry monner, and walked off as he went cross eyed and tilted his head slightly, his brain not being able to compute the voice coming from the foreigner in front of him.

We’re a hardy bunch from Oswestry, always the underdog. I remember going out drinking as a young adult. If we went 15 minutes north to Wrexham, which is in Wales, they used to run us out saying we were English scum, and if we went 15 minutes south to Shrewsbury, which like Oswestry is in England, they would run us out calling us Welsh sheep shaggers!

The odds always seemed to be against us, but it was never a deterrent.

This is why I think there is a close-knit community feel to this little farmers market town I call home.

Nearly twenty years I had lived in Oswestry before I moved back to my dad and Step mum’s house, in a little village just outside of the town. The pressure of things in my life became overwhelming and you know when you just need to recalibrate your life.

Well, that happened to me.

It was as if one day I was in my early twenties, with my whole life ahead of me, and before I knew it, I was the wrong end of thirty, single and drowning in debt, just going through the motions of a mundane existence. I was just coasting through life, trying to keep my head above the water. I was not in a good place at all, but what can I say, shit happens. Something had to give, which is why I decided to move back in with my parents and revaluate my life.

Time is such a precious commodity, it’s a luxury that I think so many of us find too easy to take for granted.

That’s why I have learnt it is so important to live your best life and not be constraint from the fear of change, the fear of rejection or the fear of failure.

Change is ok it’s a natural part of progression.

Rejection is ok once your over that initial hurt you can evaluate your situation and feel motivated to do better it can also urge you to explore a different path in life.

Failure is ok it’s a natural phase of learning, we cannot learn without failing. If you’re not careful time will pass you by in an instant.

Everything moved in the right direction for me, living back at my parents. I kept my head down and was getting myself out of debt. Don’t get me wrong, moving back to my parents at nearly forty is not something I’m proud of, but sometimes you have to put your pride in your pocket, which is a very hard thing to do. But as they say, everything happens for a reason.

Call it fate, if you will, because if I hadn’t been living with my parents, I don’t believe I would be alive to tell this story.

Now the events I’m about to relay to you are so outrageous that you wouldn’t believe they could happen to one person, let alone happen in one year, which is why I had to write about it.

I used to think that what I went through was the most challenging thing in my life, but as time went on I thought I could take that challenge to the next level. If I can inspire at least one person not to give up in the face of adversity, even when things seem to be at their upmost difficult, then surly that would be a positive impact to have come out of the horrific ordeal I went through.

There were many ways I could have written this book, but I thought it best to be written as true to my