Hello Ronnie, Good and Jess thank you - it's been so amazing to feel supported, I really have been blessed the last few days and it's made all the difference.
They say go to more than one meeting, as they are all different and flipping Nora was this different. I opened the door expecting to see what I've seen so far, basically a overly conscientious Beneton advert of diversity of quiet murmuring before it all starts .
This was not that.
Everyone there was clearly auditioning to be Ray Winstone.
Before I put anyone that might be reading this off, it was a completely wonderful meeting, in the end. But crossing that threshold was partly a question of weighing up the chances of getting my head stoved in, at lunchtime, in a sunlit Methodist Church. It seemed to me that people don't normally hire a church hall or fetch themselves a little biscuit when planning anything untoward. And if someone goes to the trouble to put the chairs in a little circle on the off chance they could chop someone into little bits, its only polite to acknowledge the time and effort they've put in. So I asked if it was an AA meeting and they were LOVELY.
(Technically I guess it's possible they were auditioning for something gritty on Channel 4 but hastily decided to improv an AA meeting just cause it would have been awkward to say 'next door, love')
Anyway, it was basically 3 Ray Winstones, all of Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Sid James and me.
I didn't say much. They talked about being in prison a lot. They also said how they had never learned to grow up until they learned to be kind, tolerant and loving. They laughed a lot.