Things About Me You Probably Guessed Already...

Merle and Janice have given me an award!
Thanks Merle in Melbourne Down Under and Janice in Southern California for the Honest Scrapper Award. I am to reveal a collection of facts about myself so here goes.

~ I have given up smoking crack. Or injecting it. Or "speedballing" it. And have kept to this resolution for three weeks in a row now ~ wahey!

~ I only really got addicted to heroin aged 28!! I had been messing about with it "casually" for a few years before that. And I never took any illegal drugs till I was 19.

~ I made up for lost time by dropping acid within a few days of my first spliff. I didn't realize I was taking 4 at once and blew my head off.

~ 2 of my acquaintances have been murdered. Both with knives.

~ I once spent an entire night tripping stuck in the nasty nursery rhyme:
Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle;
Mix it up and make it nice:
POP! Goes the weasel!
And all the acid-spangled long night through that over-inflated weasel was just about to get it with the needle.

~ This might be the night I had a Strawberry Fields moment all of my own. The man at the 24-hour garage had decided to rearrange the biscuits displays, which were scattered wildly about the floor... so in my brainfrying state it was Custard Creams Forever..!

~ It is impossible to calculate how much heroin I've taken in my time, but in the last 8 years it's 1.2-1.5 kilos at the very least. (Yeah, and I feel so clever and proud...)

~ Roborovski hamsters (pictured) are the smallest, fastest and least amenable to taming of any hamsters. And I have three...

~ I can do typing 60wpm (actually it might be faster; I've not timed myself in years) and shorthand 70 wpm (not bed considering I learnt out of a book) ~ yeah, because I so want to be a secretary. (No journalist actually.)

~ My True Ambition is to be a pop-fictionalist writer of bestselling novels. I have an idea fermenting inside me that Jeffrey Archer would kill for.

~ I don't go in for best friends, or favourite this or that; but, as would-be novelist I do admire Jeffrey Archer. His plot-driven short stories are some of the best of our time. I know from his Prison Diaries that he has an empathy for my ilk of problems and found himself living some of the circumstances they can lead to...

~ I have never been inside and don't ever intend to go.

~ I once got so bored of television I lived without it for about 2 years!

~ I was born in the Chinese year of the "rat or any other cute 'n' furry rodent such as hamster", 1972, hence my obsession with all things beady-eyed, cheek-pouched and wheel-running like robbies and harvest mice among many others. Technically I am a "water hamster".

... and that's about all I could think of as I trawled round Morrisons for cooked chicken thighs and basmati rice...

I hereby pass on this award to: Noah from Oklahomah, USA who blogs frankly about life "using", Lucinda from New Jersey, who's given up opiates already aged 17, Melody Lee from New Mexico who's pulled herself a good deal onto the straight and narrow but will always be cool as strawberry icecream, Bimbimbie who blogs the parrots cackling and cawing wild in her garden in Queensland, Australia and Whitenoise, a real live Canadian commercial airline pilot!

Criteria of the award are to link to the blogger who gave it you, post a collection (ideally of 10) honest things about yourself and to pass on the award to as many folks as you please...