The original was...

...a photo of one of my acrylic flow paintings...I darkened it very slightly when I took the photo...put it through the reflection app, which I admit I am addicted to...but only a very tiny bit at the bottom of the picture.

I was in a town centre where more than half the shops were closed down this morning. Many have been closed down a long time, and they are looking absolutely filthy and disgusting.

I had only 3 shops I needed to visit before my intended destination today. The first was Waterstones book shop, which to me is so poorly stocked from the Waterstones I remember from years ago.

The second is Savers, where I get some eyedrops, but I checked the dates on the boxes...every box had on it 4/2018 as the expiry date...it’s 3/2018 now...i left without buying.

I saw another shop between the second and third shop, so went in because I had a bit of time to spare, but it had reduced all this stuff to 50p for clearance...it wasn’t even fit for a bonfire...I left and didnt buy anything.

I went to my third shop, and as soon as I got in I was assailed with stuff at ‘bargain’ prices, but I’d had enough at the tattiness of the town centre by now, the windows of the closed down shops smeared with dirt and goodness knows what else, that I left without looking further at something I had intended to get.

Then I went to get my breakfast at my usual place. The breakfast has gone up in price, and the breakfast was now lost in the large breakfast plate. Instead of putting the baked beans on the plate with the rest of the breakfast, it was in a separate dish in the middle of the plate (maybe to make it look more, but it means the beans were now cold), and I looked in astonishment at the two tiny slices of fried mushroom. I lifted everything to look for the rest of the sliced mushrooms but there was no more....

I got to wondering what happens when we don’t have town centre shops any more...things seem going that way...my mind was writing Armageddon type stories...I didnt have time to write them down...I need to get to the meeting...and then when I got there, very few had turned up.

I was very tired anyway today, but the state of the town centre didn’t help. Nothing uplifting about it. And then I am talking with people who have had cochlear implants as well. They were talking about two people (who I know) who have had the cochlear implant where it didn’t go well and it deteriorated, and that both people had died, but i dont know what they specifically died of.

They were also saying that as soon as they got home, the first thing they did was take their speech processors off, because the sound was doing their heads in. They couldnt think. They needed silence.

Luckily they don’t have tinnitus (I have it non-stop) like I do. When I take the speech processor off my tinnitus ups a few notches into the Screaming Zone...

I need a more positive place than where I was today...it has not done me any good at all...I need some escapism and fantasy...