Description

By Peter G. Mackie

ISBN: 978-1-84991-966-1
Published: 2013
Pages: 108
Key Themes: Mental Health, Short Stories, Mental Illness

Description

The Last Thing Before the Apocalypse is a collection of somewhat mysterious writings starting with a short story Faust Returns to the Fatherland, a tale of love, drugs and tragedy as seen through the eyes of a young Scotsman who finds himself in Berlin at the time of the squatting movement in the early 1980s and discovers that everything becomes stranger and stranger all the time and ending with A Seventies Odyssey, a narrative describing a young mans experiences as he starts travelling in Europe in the late 1970s. Most of the stories touch upon the subject of mental illness and have a dreamlike quality about them.

About the Author

Peter G Mackie was born in Perth, Scotland in 1957 and, as a teenager, was mistakenly kept in the Adolescent Unit of a psychiatric hospital for two and a half years, an experience which affected his whole life and which led him to suffer from depression.

Due to problems with his family, he ran away from home at the age of 16 and suffered abuse on the streets of London.

At the age of 17, after a brief period in a hippy commune, he wrote his novel The Madhouse of Love in a bed sit in Tooting, South London, based on his earlier experiences in the psychiatric unit.

From 1977 to 1984, he spent a period working and travelling in Europe, which helped him to see a different perspective on life.

However, due to unemployment in the 1980s, he was forced to return to Scotland, where he took an HND in Computer Data Processing, but failed to find work in that field.

Due to his education having been disrupted early in life, he has had to survive by doing unskilled jobs interspersed with periods of unemployment.

From 2001 to 2007, he went through a very difficult time, moving from place to place, trying to find work and accommodation, with little success, causing him to have a nervous breakdown and to lapse again into depression.

He ended up homeless in Edinburgh, where he sold The Big Issue for over a year.
In 2011, he completed an IT course at Redhall Walled Garden, a project in Edinburgh run by the Scottish Association for Mental Health SAMH .

Between the 1970s and 1990s, he had poems published by numerous small press magazines.

He has also recorded a CD of music on piano and synthesiser All Over the Shop, which is available over the Internet.

In July 2012, he did some voluntary work with disadvantaged teenagers in Slovenia and is now planning to train to work with homeless young people in Edinburgh.