HAMSTERS & HEROIN: Not all junkies are purse-snatching grandmother-killing psychos. I'm keeping this blog to bear witness to that fact.

LIVE FROM LONDON

Gledwoods deutscher Blog

Bitte hier klicken ...

DIARY OF A SLOWLY RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICT

I used to take heroin at every opportunity, for over 10 years, now I just take methadone which supposedly "stabilizes" me though I feel more destabilized than ever before despite having been relatively well behaved since late November/early December 2010... and VERY ANGRY about this when I let it get to me so I try not to.

I was told by a mental health nurse that my heroin addiction was "self medication" for a mood disorder that has recently become severe enough to cause psychotic episodes. As well as methadone I take antipsychotics daily. Despite my problems I consider myself a very sane person. My priority is to attain stability. I go to Narcotics Anonymous because I "want what they have" ~ Serenity.

My old blog used to say "candid confessions of a heroin and crack cocaine addict" how come that one comes up when I google "heroin blog" and not this one. THIS IS MY BLOG. I don't flatter myself that every reader knows everything about me and follows closely every single word every day which is why I repeat myself. Most of that is for your benefit not mine.

This is my own private diary, my journal. It is aimed at impressing no-one. It is kept for my own benefit to show where I have been and hopefully to put off somebody somewhere from ever getting into the awful mess I did and still cannot crawl out of. Despite no drugs. I still drink, I'm currently working on reducing my alcohol intake to zero.

If you have something to say you are welcome to comment. Frankness I can handle. Timewasters should try their own suggestions on themselves before wasting time thinking of ME.

PS After years of waxing and waning "mental" symptoms that made me think I had depression and possibly mild bipolar I now have found out I'm schizoaffective. My mood has been constantly "cycling" since December 2010. Mostly towards mania (an excited non-druggy "high"). For me, schizoaffective means bipolar with (sometimes severe)
mania and flashes of depression (occasionally severe) with bits of schizophrenia chucked on top. You could see it as bipolar manic-depression with sparkly knobs on ... I'm on antipsychotic pills but currently no mood stabilizer. I quite enjoy being a bit manic it gives the feelings of confidence and excitement people say they use cocaine for. But this is natural and it's free, so I don't see my "illness" as a downer. It does, however, make life exceedingly hard to engage with...

PPS The "elevated mood" is long gone. Now I'm depressed. Forget any ideas of "happiness" I have given up heroin and want OFF methadone as quick as humanly possible. I'm fed up of being a drug addict. Sick to death of it. I wanna be CLEAN!!!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Attack of the Furry Entertainers!

Sunday, May 27, 2007

More About Nursery Rhymes

I'VE DONE SOME MORE RESEARCH on the nursery rhymes posted yesterday. (This is one of those days when weblogging's reverse-chronological sequencing really makes no sense. But anyway ...)

To start off: this is how the BBC's website describes the game of oranges and lemons - better than I did. (I don't remember ever deciding to be an "orange" or a "lemon", incidentally; but maybe that's my bad memory.)

Oranges and Lemons
The Actions:


A group of children decide to play 'Oranges and Lemons'. Two children become the 'chopper' by holding hands and forming an arch. They secretly decide which one of them is 'Oranges' and which one is 'Lemons'.

The other children go through the arch in a line, circling round behind the arch, and going through again, singing the rhyme as they go. At the last line of the rhyme the 'choppers' bring their arms up and down in a chopping motion over each child that goes through. The game can get quite nerve-racking for the children at this point, and they often run through as fast as they can. The child caught in the middle at the last word of the rhyme is out.

The captured child secretly chooses to be Oranges or Lemons, and then moves around to stand behind that child forming the arch. When all the children have been captured, the teams have a tug of war. The winning team is the one left standing, but usually none of the children are by the end.

Incidentally, their version of the rhyme ends with this line:

Chop chop chop chop the last man's head!

Which makes a treble repeated rhyme. Definitely not the version I knew.

Also, the version we used to play had at least three choppers lined up so the poor kid going through had to run the gauntlet of chopping ...

Ruth knows a version with far more bells (which waters down the sinisterness also):

"Oranges and Lemons" say the Bells of St. Clements
"Bullseyes and Targets" say the Bells of St. Margaret's
"Brickbats and Tiles" say the Bells of St. Giles
"Halfpence and Farthings" say the Bells of St. Martin's
"Pancakes and Fritters" say the Bells of St. Peter's
"Two Sticks and an Apple" say the Bells of Whitechapel
"Maids in white aprons" say the Bells at St. Katherine's
"Pokers and Tongs" say the Bells of St. John's
"Kettles and Pans" say the Bells of St. Anne's
"Old Father Baldpate" say the slow Bells of Aldgate
"You owe me Ten Shillings" say the Bells of St. Helen's
"When will you Pay me?" say the Bells of Old Bailey
"When I grow Rich" say the Bells of Shoreditch
"Pray when will that be?" say the Bells of Stepney
"I do not know" say the Great Bell of Bow


Another one that Paterfamilias mentioned and I couldn't believe I'd missed out was London Bridge is Falling Down (click for an illustrated version):

London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, Falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.

Take a key and lock her up,
Lock her up, Lock her up.

Take a key and lock her up,
My fair lady.

How will we build it up,
Build it up, Build it up?

How will we build it up,
My fair lady?

Build it up with silver and gold,
Silver and gold, Silver and gold.

Build it up with silver and gold,
My fair lady.

Gold and silver I have none,
I have none, I have none.

Gold and silver I have none,
My fair lady.

Build it up with needles and pins,
Needles and pins, Needles and pins.

Build it up with needles and pins,
My fair lady.

Pins and needles bend and break,
Bend and break, Bend and break.

Pins and needles bend and break,
My fair lady.

Build it up with wood and clay,
Wood and clay, Wood and clay.

Build it up with wood and clay,
My fair lady.

Wood and clay will wash away,
Wash away, Wash away.

Wood and clay will wash away,
My fair lady.

Build it up with stone so strong,
Stone so strong, Stone so strong.

Build it up with stone so strong,
My fair lady.

Stone so strong will last so long,
Last so long, Last so long.

Stone so strong will last so long,
My fair lady.

Although many say that London Brige "falling down" harks back to the Great Fire of 1666, this is discounted by history because the brige did not actually burn down. "My fair lady" is often attributed to Elizabeth I, but again, her reign was long over by the great fire. According to warphead.com, this rhyme may actually date back to Viking times, when the bridge was indeed torn down. And the "fair lady" may actually be a virgin ritually buried in the bridge's foundations!

Incidentally, by the 1960s, London Bridge really was falling down. So when the American town of Lake Havasu City, Arizona made an offer of $2.4 million to buy the bridge in order to ship it over and rebuild it stone by stone in Arizona the London authorities jumped at the chance. Only when the brige had actually been delivered (so the story goes) did the Arizonans jump up in arms ask "where are the opening up bits, where are the towers?" The bridge they had bought was a common (but nice-looking) road bridge, not the ornate landmark they'd been expecting.

The Americans had confused London Bridge (by 1962 a pretty bog-standard large stone bridge) with the spectacular Tower Bridge - which would never have been put up for sale anyhow!

Wikipedia's London Bridge article shows lots of red London buses and blue Connex commuter trains. Their top picture, incidentally, includes a view of the famous Gherkin tower block.

By the way, the reason (so I hear) that London's towers are so poxily, embarrassingly gnomelike by international standards is an eejut height restriction put in to assist planes flying into the tiny City of London Airport (City of London refers to the financial district not the metropolis and the airport there is tiny. London's main airport, Heathrow, is the world's busiest international transport hub.

12 comments:

KJR said...

hey ta for comment :-) nice to know someone other than the wife reads what I put on there..... :D

Helene Breau-Ouellette said...

Thank you for your comment. I like what you've done here. have fun. :D

Gledwood said...

You're welcome. i thought it might be fun to blog about something other than my dull old SELF for a change!!!!!

Gledwood said...

(I was so depressed I went hophopHIPHOPHOP all over the internet today. And found a depression blog (at long last) most depressed people are too depresed 2b bothered but this one's in my links under "intriguing" bc I didn't want to label them "mentally ill"... how politically correct of me.)

Anonymous said...

Hi, thanks for dropipng in on my blog on education. From what I can recall from history lessons, the London Bridge that was falling down (and which was eventually replaced with the London bridge sold to the USA) had houses on both sides of it. One of the reasons The Thames was so prone to freezing over was that the spans of the bridge were very small, thus the river flowed more slowly.

rowan said...

IN response to you: (I posted this on my blog too)

I hate it! It makes me feel MORE tired. Sleeping more.. makes me sleep.. more.
It really shouldnt work that way should it.

Anonymous said...

Yeah I remember seeing old drawings of bridges with houses all along them. I always thought that to commemorate the millennium instead of that stupid teflon dome they should have built a new bridge full of shopping malls, restaurants and luxury apartments with viewing stations somewhere across the thames. That would have been fantastic.

Anonymous said...

Ivy you posted that comment just as I was posting the one underneath this one which is odd. Yeah only the other day Marilyn (not Monroe) was telling me she thought sleeping made you more tired. I suppose that is true ...

hairyshoefairy said...

I found you through a comment you randomly left on a friends blog and thought your post sounded interesting. I love this kind of thing. I've heard "Lemons and Oranges" quite a few times though I don't really know it. I'd heard the somewhat morbid references for the others you mentioned, too. I grew up hearing and singing lullabys that, now that I actually think about the words, are kind of morbid, too (kidnapped babes dying in the woods and such). They were passed down from generations so I still sing them to my baby, but it's kind of curious how things like this are turned into childrens rhymes, isn't it? Thanks for the interesting post.

hairyshoefairy said...

Wow. Sorry that was so long and you don't even know me. *blush*

Edyta said...

London bridge???
Even i sang that waaay back in primary school :D

Anonymous said...

BTW following my comment about "mentally ill" ... if you read further you'll see I've been depressed on & off for years too so my "jokey" references come from 1st hand experience also

I WANT OFF METHADONE AS QUICK AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!

METHADONE ~ A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH







Heroin Shortage: News

If you are looking for the British Heroin Drought post, click here; the latest word is in the comments.







Christiane F

"Wir, Kinder vom Bahnhoff Zoo" by "Christiane F", memoir of a teenage heroin addict and prostitute, was a massive bestseller in Europe and is now a set text in German schools. Bahnhoff Zoo was, until recently, Berlin's central railway station. A kind of equivalent (in more ways than one) to London's King's Cross... Of course my local library doesn't have it. So I'm going to have to order it through a bookshop and plough through the text in German. I asked my druggieworker Maple Syrup, who is Italiana how she learned English and she said reading books is the best way. CHRISTIANE F: TRAILER You can watch the entire 120-min movie in 12 parts at my Random blog. Every section EXCEPT part one is subtitled in English (sorry: but if you skip past you still get the gist) ~ to watch it all click HERE.

To See Gledwood's Entire Blog...

DID you find my blog via a Google or other search? Are you stuck on a post dated some time ago? Do you want to read Gledwood Volume 2 right from "the top" ~ ie from today?
If so click here and you'll get to the most recent post immediately!

Drugs Videos

Most of these come from my Random blog, which is an electronic scrapbook of stuff I thought I might like to view at some time or other. For those who want to view stuff on drugs I've collected the very best links here. Unless otherwise stated these are full-length features, usually an hour or more.

If you have a slow connexion and are unused to viewing multiscreen films on Youtube here's what to do: click the first one and play on mute, stopping and starting as it does. Then, when it's done, click on Repeat Play and you get the full entertainment without interruption. While you watch screen one, do the same to screens 2, 3 and so on. So as each bit finishes, the next part's ready and waiting.

Mexican Black Tar Heroin: "Dark End"

Khun Sa, whose name meant Prince Prosperous, had been, before his death in the mid 2000s, the world's biggest dealer in China White Heroin: "Lord of the Golden Triangle"

In-depth portrait of the Afghan heroin trade at its very height. Includes heroin-lab bust. "Afghanistan's Fateful Harvest"

Classic miniseries whose title became a catchphrase for the misery of life in East Asian prison. Nicole Kidman plays a privileged middle-class girl set up to mule heroin through Thai customs with the inevitable consequences. This is so long it had to be posted in two parts. "Bangkok Hilton 1" (first 2 hours or so); "Bangkok Hilton 2" (last couple of hours).

Short film: from tapwater-clear H4 in the USA to murky black Afghan brown in Norway: "Heroin Addicts Speak"

Before his untimely death this guy kept a video diary. Here's the hour-long highlights as broadcast on BBC TV: "Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict". Thanks to Noah for the original link.

Some of the most entertaining scenes from Britain's top soap (as much for the poor research as anything else). Not even Phil Mitchell would go from nought to multi-hundred pound binges this fast: "Phil Mitchell on Crack" (just over 5 minutes).

Scientist lady shows us how to cook up gear: "How Much Citric?" Lucky cow: her brown is 70% purity! Oddly we never see her actually do her hit... maybe she got camera shy...

And lastly:

German documentary following a life from teenage addiction to untimely death before the age of 30. The decline in this girl's appearance is truly shocking. "Süchtig: Protokoll einer Hilflosigkeit". Sorry no subtitles; this is here for anyone learning German who's after practice material a little more gripping than Lindenstraße!































Nosey Quiz! Have you ever heard voices when you weren't high on drugs?

Manic Magic

Manic Magic

Gledwood Volume 2: A Heroin Addict's Blog

Copyright 2011 by Gledwood