When I was a kid at Pudsey park on the outskirts of Leeds, just across from the abandoned Traction Engine steam roller, in the main play ground there was a Helter-Skelter.

It was a proper Helter-Skelter, a huge wooden construction. It was not dissimilar to the kind that normally toured with small fairs. The kind that required you to carry a mat up to the top and sit on a it to slide down. Also unlike the ones that went around with travelling fairs this one was a permanent fixture. An enormous construction if fact, taller than most of its ilk and the slide mats were even more worn than they were at fairgrounds. But that was okay as you didn’t need to pay to go on it, and once you had slide all the way down you just grabbed your mat and climbed back up to go again…Which in the golden summers of my childhood I would do again and again…

Except, this isn’t true.

There was no Helter-Skelter just across from the traction engine in Pudsey park. I had just convinced myself for years that there had been. It is an utterly false memory.

There was a Helter-Skelter at Roundhay Park over on the other side of Leeds, and it is this my memory has long since transplanted to Pudsey. But it was never free, and you couldn’t just keep going up and down on it.

I started this blog post in May. The title meant something at the time, but I never got further than the Pudsey Helter-Skelter. It spoke of my state of mind at the time and my general sense of self. I chose to stop writing the post back then because I was not in the right state of mind to share my frame of mind… Which is one of the problems with a certain frame of mind, certainly for me.

The title still means something… I am however in a better place than I was back in May and have been for some time I may add. This is in part due to a lot of people who are I suspect unaware of the part they have played in me getting to a better place. Suffice to say there are many of them and many reasons why they have helped, knowingly or otherwise.

The point in dragging out this half finished post, is just to say, that even when things look dark, there is always a dawn on some horizon that will come eventually. Even if the Helter-Skelter’s of our memories never existed…