Crossing the Water

I HAVE ITCHY FEET. Telling me to get the hell out of here. To clean up, ship out, escape... to give you a clue where, the above illustrations represent: top~ Berlin Hauptbahnhof (their new Grand Central railway station) left~ La Défense (Paris's office building that echoes the Arc de Triomphe (and is further along, if you fly off the end of the Champs Elysées) right~ Berliner Reichstag (German national parliament building, including whizzy glass dome installed by Sir Norman Foster)...

(And the very top two: surely you know!)

Yes I actually want to be an immigrant. And there are two versions of my fantasy: the metropolitan fantasy ~ which is trundle off to Paris or Berlin and set down there.

Or the village fantasy: living in a French or German version of the Archers (Radio 4's "everyday story of countryfolk")... I'm not too sure about the latter as bountiful as the countryside is (central France was amazing: like Britain crossed with Mediterranean weather ~ crickets singing all night, glow-worms in the bushes, giant hornets (yuck!) and luminous green frogs in the river... the weather was a lot more tolerable (and the thunderstorms more spectacular)... I seemed to live on French bread (OK well it wouldn't have been English bread, would it?), soft cheeses and red plonk for three weeks... quite wonderful.

I won't spend ages and ages trying to justify my decision. Just bear in mind I do speak French and German to a stunted degree... in that I did A Levels in both, but a year in either country and I actually would be fluent. Being a stranger in a strange land, so I have found is far less lonely than uprooting in one's own country, where you could wander like a shadow and nobody would talk to you... soon as people realized I was English (soon as I opened my mouth in other words even though I WAS attempting my best accent) half the village were saying hello whenever I passed by. Also I thrive on novelty and I mean it when I say there really is NOWHERE else I think I could possibly tolerate in this green and pleasant land except for London, where of course I already am... London full of drugs.

Yes drugs are everywhere: but I am not the type to travel in search of pharmacalogical pastures new. My using is geographically ultra-conservative. I don't trust people I don't know. Don't take chances. Stick to old friends, old dealers, old haunts... crossing the water means looking at the finish-line not the hurdles:~

Crossing the water is for life anew; not a refusing-to-die abscess-ridden limping-on still-addicted foreign-flavoured continuation of the old one!

I would not even consider going unless I were well and truly CLEAN!

*

OK: I tried 77WABC again (what IS the 77? There is no frequency 77 on long, medium, shortwave or FM: and digital doesn't use frequencies...)... every presenter seems to be a more intelligent version of Rush Limbaugh (surely Limbaugh is the thickest...) I tried ANOTHER email to Curtis Sliwa on his breakfast show (it was mid afternoon here)... in reply to his ranting over how grainy the CCTV pix of that Times Square attempted bombing turned out and how much more precisely the British 7/7 bombers were captured on camera:



Hi Curtis: London calling. {My standard hackneyed international greeting...} I'm listening online.

Here in the UK we have more security cameras by a long way than anywhere else on earth... about 4million of 'em. The average citizen gets filmed x300 a day... though we sometimes feel this a bit of an intrusion on our liberties, you're quite right: when murder, carnage and major events do happen, the police collect not only publically filmed images but stuff from shops, businesses, etc (literally cameras are everywhere here!) and it has got loads of baddies busted.

Great show!

{then, ten mins later; my ps}

(further to my previous message)

ps it's past 3:30pm here... don't be behind times with your security as well. Yes our images probably are better than yours because CCTV has long been a regular part of life here and we have special digital enhancement technology. That's why you see the terrorists' zits!

07 March 2008 15:37