Last Night's Drugs Nightmare...

I HAD A DRUGS NIGHTMARE LAST NIGHT. That I was stuck in Thailand in a place full of Westerners. It was a kind of shantytown hotel, everywhere I looked heroin was being cooked up, held up in works, pronged into skin. At first I had just been scared of getting involved. But by the end of the dream I was carrying a poison dart of my own full of "gear" and trying to conceal it in my hand from the police.... It all kind of turned out that the "hotel" was something of a Bangcock Hilton; ie a prison. And I woke up very glad to be in the UK.

I suppose the above IS my greatest nightmare. Southeast Asia is the one area of the world I've always wanted to go and see. But I wouldn't even consider travelling out there without being clean and hopefully having a supply of naltrexone, a pill you can take that blockades the effects of heroin.

(You cannot take this naltrexone, by the way, unless you are clean of all opiates: because if you're not it will reverse you into instant withdrawals....)

And now to change the subject:

Here in Britain we recently had the first "run" on one of our banks for over 140 years. Northern Rock is a small bank, formerly a building society... as credit became more difficult to obtain internationally following the socalled subprime mortgages implosion Northern Rock supposedly were left out in the cold one night in need of a loan of several hundred million pounds just to balance their books. It is quite normal to have to make these emergency borrowings; what was unusual was that the market refused them the loan. Which meant they had to go cap in hand to the Bank of England. When news of this hit the airwaves customers panicked and Northern Rock quickly went into meltdown with lines of customers snaking out the doors of all branches and down the streets... Thanks to government intervention the crisis is averted, Northern Rock is still in business. But they have so far borrowed £21 billion and are expected to need up to £30 billion. That is £1000 for every taxpayer in Britain.

(£1 is $2 US.)

All I can say is: imagine if another two banks went down? The poor chancellor of the exchequer would run out of money to bail them out...