Sainsbury's gives rise to thinking

The following thoughts have followed as a consequence of what I observed in Sainsbury’s Birmingham city centre this afternoon, where we ended up shopping for food after initially going to Stourbridge (to get money from the building society) and then thinking we might go to Wolverhampton but that the wait for the bus would have been so long.

When we arrived at the Sainsbury’s in question a policeman was inside, and while from what I heard there was a supposed reason for him being there unrelated to us, my presumption close to certainty is that he was on duty because we might well turn up there. When I went to the soft drinks chill cabinet thinking to buy something like Red Bull, standing by was a seeming Sainsbury’s man with a trolley stacked with drinks of the sort I might ordinarily buy, that is stimulant drinks and Lucozade. The best theory I can find in explanation of this - especially given that the trolley was wheeled away as soon as I had left the area - was that the drinks in the chill cabinet (the ones at the front, perhaps) contained drugs and the trolley was to replace them with undrugged versions.

What I have reflected on this is that while what is being done bears a great resemblance to ‘the Experiment’ in 1980 and 1983-84 (including the contribution from BBC and other TV presenters, although we watch little nowadays), because of the context now - me living in my own home with a helpful wife instead of parents who were misadvised - much more effort has to be put in to distort the environment and to get drugs into me (particularly since I have sense to distrust the tapwater). This means that many more people from different walks of life are in the know - for example Sainsbury’s staff and managers, and police officers - and I think and hope this means that hole-in-the-corner abuse such as my detention on a mental ward in a remote district for months, or even harsh treatment in police cells for eighteen hours say, is unlikely to re-occur. On the presumption (a pretty certain presumption) that senior police officers are aware that I am - if I do not practise successful evasion - foisted foods containing mind-altering drugs, I think it is not so much a question of using techniques of mind-alteration (including the drugs) to get me by hook or by crook into a mental ward again, as to see whether I feel the help of mental doctors - or any doctors - would be any good, and in general how I react and what it is I fear.

The answer is plain: what I fear is treatment for mental illness (and in particular, drug treatment) and confinement under the jurisdiction of only medical people; and as regards the police, even though Nottinghamshire police behaved wrongly (presumably due to some misguided senior officer) and the Police Complaints Commission are dragging their feet, nonetheless I would much rather trust myself to police to be looked after than to mental doctors who as I have said before couldn’t pass the Eleven-Plus.