The Old Man Of Coniston

When I was a small boy, I developed a fear of elderly gentlemen thanks to a movie called The Poltergeist (1982). There was a scene in which a small child was playing on the floor in a room, and right there at the window was an old man just stood there outside, looking in, watching her. I called him the Old Man out of simplicity’s sake. It was worse than throttling her, or stringing her up, because it left it to your imagination what he had planned for her. Christ, don’t just stare at her, do something! Looking is worse than anything. Why couldn’t she see that he was looking?

I always remembered it. When I looked at Prince Phillip, the Duke Of Edinburgh, I felt pangs of the same fear. Oldness to me reeks of ancient evil, of long lost morals, of experience in depravity. I’d rather face a keen eager beaver Tyson Fury than a wrinkly old pensioner.

Anyway, when I took a wrong turn at psychosis, and landed myself in a ward called Coniston, early thirties, I was curled in a ball on the floor, listening to my baby sister screaming in my head. I was very weak at the time, but I am unashamed of my reaction or behaviour. How would you feel, if all of a sudden, springing from a normal life, you started to hear your family screaming in your head? This is not something you squat away.

The ward Coniston was the scariest place I have ever been. Let’s just leave it at that. I can’t be bothered describing its décor or its ambience, we’ll settle by calling it a Punch n Judy horror show of a mental unit.

When I was curled on the floor, hands pressed against my ears, some old man was sat next to me, smirking and chuckling at me. He looked ghoulish, like he was mixed with a gremlin, and sent shock waves through me. I wasn’t scared of him in a fighting sense, but his wickedness flowed out of him like purling smog from a housefire. How could anyone possibly find humour from the worst pitfall of my life? He was thoroughly enjoying my fear.

In the end I escaped after shattering my ankle during a flying lunge kick at the security door. I couldn’t imagine sitting with him at the dinner table. I tried to break in to another hospital. That’s insanity for ‘ya. The best thing was that Coniston was now a distant memory.

He started popping up in my local regular life. He would follow me in parks and torment me while any other worsening psychotic episodes were underway. I wondered what he wanted from me. He said he was a 33^rd degree Grandmaster Great Mason who had waited all his life for my absurd pain tolerance. He had sharpened teeth. Spooky voice. And those ghoulish gremlin-like looks. There were all kinds of other hateful figures in my life at the time, but none quite as foreboding as him.

He was a master of stealth because he got ridiculously close to me. At times he had me spinning around. He’d enter my property while I was still in it and dance around me like a shadow, I thought it was impossible, I believed he was part phantom. He left dead animals for me along my route, when I was running away from him, always one step ahead. Obscenely, he wore clothes from my youth, what I’d been wearing on my 18^th birthday. He was super quick.

When I resume with a little more about the Old Man Of Coniston, I’ll share with you what has led me to write about him, and maybe 10 or 15 curious facts about him. There is no shortage of morbidly interesting material about him. I’ve always said that I will never write about the Devil, because it steals glory away from The Father. But the Devil is the Devil and The Old Man Of Coniston is The Old Man Of Coniston, even though the only recognisable difference to me, sometimes, is in their title. 😈

Coming soon: More unsavoury facts about TOMOC.