Where have all the Nutters gone?- A lament.

[rollinstok]

Princess Anne was visiting the local asylum
She spent an hour on the wards where she met a very interesting, and apparently sane young man. The man explained how he was taken away from his parents at an early age and had been in the asylum for 12 years without receiving any information as to why he was being kept there and if he would ever be released.
Princess Anne promised him that she would have a word with the Queen about his predicament
As she was about to climb into the limousine on the completion of her visit, she was hit by a brick on the back of her head
" Dont forget to tell the Queen" he screamed

 

[subaqua]

popeye/Mad harry/Old Harry he was the local nutter when i was a kid growing up in N Wales. about 65-70 yrs old suffering with what would now be described as PTSD. I only found this out when i was older and had to work in his flat. pictures of him in his Parachute regiment uniform . apparently captured in SE Asia by the japs and very badly beaten and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.

and the mad old lady. who i now know had a senile dementia of some sort, but only as i recognise my mother in her actions.

Warrington has lots as the last Tory Govt closed Winwick MH Hospital , community mental helath trust picked up the slack and i ended up working on maintenance in some of the " halfway houses" .

have been to plenty of places where the residents have mental health issues and store papers , cans etc. Mr Trebus from Life of Grime is an example of the type of person i mean.

 

[Deleted member 1258]

Its probably good that we rarely see these people any more, but the did add some colour to life.
I first came to Coventry in the early 1970's and there were two characters that I remember, one I think was called happy, he used to wear white gloves and stand in the road trying to direct traffic, I don't know the name of the other one but he would stand at the side of the road waving his walking stick shouting and swearing at the passing traffic, I had a motorbike at the time and when I saw them I would be worried about what they were going to do next.

 

[hotfuzzrj]

Birmingham is quite literally teeming with 'em. Bless their odd souls.

 

[PBancroft]

[QUOTE 1806170, member: 45"]What happened to the boy who spent every single playtime running around the playground, arms outstretched in front of him holding an imaginary steering wheel, pretending to drive a car, with appropriate sound effects?[/quote]

I knew one at my school. He's now quite a successful car photographer. All the power to him!

 

[Blue Steel]

A number of years back we used to have a black guy in Norwich universally known as Marigold, due to his practice of always wearing washing up gloves. He would wander around Norwich at all hours of the day and night directing traffic. You would be driving through the city minding your own business, when you would suddenly come across this huge black dude standing in the middle of the road waving his arms at you, resplendent in his pink rubber gloves. Everybody seemed to know him, he was quite famous locally. Then he just vanished. Rumour was that he had been murdered. Don't know how true it was.

 

[perplexed]

Marloboro man used to live in Pitsmoor in Sheffield. In the 1970s, he'd walk round the local area listening intently then talking into a pack of Marlboros held to his ear, slightly hunched over. He'd throw some shapes occasionally when he thought he had music on.

Bear in mind this pre-dates mobile phones and walkmans, and it looked pretty odd.

Now it'd look almost routine...

 

[Mr Haematocrit]

One of the people i grew up with became a serial killer and made national press a few years ago. The tabloids dubbed him the bus stop killer.

 

[Rohloff_Brompton_Rider]

When I was a kid, there were plenty of people in the community that added colour to the daily drudge, and then there were the proper, copper bottomed bread and butters. A few examples;

Nitty Nora- An older Catholic Irish lady who lived in a boarded up house round the corner who used to stand at the end of our street on a Sunday morning in all weathers calling no-one in particular bastards, whores and sinners, we're all gonna rot in hell for our sins etc etc etc- this would usually carry on 'till someone chucked a bucket of water over her (which did happen on a couple of occasions)

Sideways Tommy- little old feller who walked around with a crash helmet on back to front who regularly approached people and said '3-2-1- Wowwwwwww!'. He'd also be doing this whilst sat on his todd in the pub (crash helmet removed obviously).

That bloke who lived near school who walked around in his dead mothers' dresses. He WAS a tad sinister.

Chicken George- A 1st generation jamaican immigrant who had polio as a child. Walked with a profound limp (he needed crutches or a chair really- never occured to him to get one). Really cheerful bloke- he'd walk pas you on the other side of the street, big grin on his pus saying 'OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKAY!' to friends and strangers alike.


Anyway, these people were on the whole harmless, but where have they and their like gone? They added colour and character to my childhood community, but these days as we bovinely go about our business behind our steering wheels or staring at the glowing black mirror as we walk about, we don't even seem to care.

What sez you? Any nutjob reminisces?

quite simple, mental health services have improved and thankfully people are less judgmental, albeit this thread doesn't show that, what's next making fun of cancer patients? mentally ill people are poorly and vulnerable.

 

[asterix]

quite simple, mental health services have improved and thankfully people are less judgmental, albeit this thread doesn't show that, what's next making fun of cancer patients? mentally ill people are poorly and vulnerable.

No, I think that is unfair. The OP is a good question. In some regimes such people would suffer badly and their fellow citizens asked no questions as to where they went.

 

[Rohloff_Brompton_Rider]

No, I think that is unfair. The OP is a good question. In some regimes such people would suffer badly and their fellow citizens asked no questions as to where they went.

sorry i don't agree and the term nutter when referring to poorly people is derogatory and used by the uneducated. i suppose racist terms are ok to you as long as they're used endearingly.

 

[Norm]

Edited a few posts. Please don't drag yourself down, just to score points.

 

[asterix]

sorry i don't agree and the term nutter when referring to poorly people is derogatory and used by the uneducated. i suppose racist terms are ok to you as long as they're used endearingly.

It's just that I prefer Maggot's way of dealing with what I still regard as a fair question. That's all.

[QUOTE 1806219, member: 76"]I trained as a psychiatric nurse in the 80's in a big asylum in Wiltshire. The place was obviously full of people like you describe. Then when the asylum shut it's doors wI moved to an acute unit in Swindon, and cannot argue with BSRU, although to be fair, very few of the strangely behaving people in Swindon are under the psychiatric services!

Most of the 'characters' are now better medicated and don't tend to display the symptoms that we used to in such an overtly florid way. This is obviously good for them, but less amusing for the rest of us. Or they have all moved to the Isle of Wight.[/quote]

 

[Norm]

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