Lovely Cardboard Chips

I REALIZE I'm not using the most attractive vocabulary, but I've found a fish-&-chip shop near me that does the best, slightly greasy crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside (but slightly soggy and rubbery ~ which I really like) with a kind of cheapy cardboard flavour I also adore... British-style chips. So good are these I've been purchasing a portion a day. In Britain, fish and chip shop chips portions are about four times bigger than a McDonald's standard measure of "fries". No wonder I'm not underweight.

Now I hope you Americans realize that by chips I do indeed mean what's ordinarily translated in transatlantic word-lists as "French fries".

French fries in this country usually means spindly long overly crispy chips. Not that nice. Our English chips are thick and full-bodied, as illustrated and actually have more in common with fried potato wedges than the spindly straggly variety of "fries".

I once saw a hilarious documentary about a family of Londoners and one from Brussels in Belgium, so did a week's holiday house swap. The Belgians were advised to try fish and chips from such-&-such chippie. O! The looks on their faces as they tried to shove all that stodge down. They were very polite but said it had left them utterly nauseated. You have to be pretty hardcore to be able to nosh down an entire fillet of cod with such a mountain of yummy soggy chips...

Hmmm... I don't know what else to say. Except the local Morrisons are doing mushy peas (a must-have side-order) for 15p a tin which is joy for a skinflint like me. I get to save all of 40p by not ordering in the shop and heating myself.

Personally I've taken to eating said chips with a side order of Best-in 35p baked beans (best cheapie ones you can get in this country) and ready chopped-up and boiled halal beef frankfurters. Which goes together very well indeed. O and by the way, chicken ones taste more like pork ~ for all you infidels...

And how was your weekend..?

Fuzzy Friday on Saturday: Humble Bumbles

BUMBLEBEES are some of nature's furriest little helpers. There are about 249 species worldwide. Here's Bombus terrestris, the largest species we have here in the UK:



Contrary to popular imagination, bumblebees are not solitary creatures. But compared to honeybees' metropolitan colonies (50,000 or more) bumblebees' nests are tiny villages ~ populated by 30 to 150 workers at their peak.

Also contrary to popular belief, bumblebee hives ARE available, fully stocked with bees:


But unlike honeybees' nests, bumblebees' will never fit neatly between frames. Constructed in muddy-coloured wax, they tend to look something more like a "Village of the Mud People":



Bumblebees CAN sting. Unlike honeybees their stings aren't barbed. But they're such placid creatures they very seldom use them.



Bumblebees do make honey from flower nectar just like their more glamorous cousins the "honey" bees. Unfortunately as their waxy nests contain acorn-shaped "rooms" rather than hexagonal cells a photo isn't possible. So have a look at some more bees buzzing into their nest:



Here's a David Attenborough video from Life in the Undergrowth:





ALL ANGELS ~ THE SCIENTIST
I heard this on the radio last night and really liked it:

My House Is Worth A Million Dollars!

I JUST FOUND OUT THIS today glancing in an estate agent's window. Houses like the one I live in part of are apparently deceptively large with several "reception rooms" and more bedrooms. Asking price: just under £700,000.

(NB: It's a bit posher than the "property" illustrated...)

Which reminds me, my one remaining hamster, Spherical Roborovski (I call her "Spherical" but actually she was the only one of three with an ordinary robo-body; the other two were "runts" which probably accounts for why they died early...)

Anyway: Spherical is now lady of her own manor with a luxurious 2-storey nest comprising several interlinked cardboard rooms with doors cut out by me. With Pompidou Centre style toilet tubes linking the exterior. Very swish for a Mongolian Pygmy Hamster ...

Having lost my Gothic German Bible for several days inside a duvet (don't ask ~ I don't know) my Biblical German is coming on in leaps and bounds. Some of the words seem far more expressive in German than English. E.g. what do you think a "winestick" and an "oil tree" are? I'm also fluent in Biblical vocabulary and can now say Slave/Servant, Righteous, Faithful, Whore, Wrathful, Revelation, Tribulation, Temple, Priest, Angel, Vision, Unclean, Prophet, Apostle, Disciple ... etc etc.

The word for Revelation by the way (Offenbarung) means literally "open-baring". See what I mean about expressive.

Anyhow I must dash. This stingy internet caff only rents out by the half hour and I am soon to be "terminated"...

PS: Yes ~ my Lutherian Bible has pages exactly like the one shown. No wonder it took me over a month to get used to the swirly Gothic typeface...

My Favourite Poem

... (IN GERMAN!!)

Wanderers Nachtlied II (Wanderer's Night Song II) by JW Goethe Germany's "national poet" who has been deified more perhaps than any other poet who ever lived. He wrote it on the evening of September 6, 1780. "A moment preserved in history" (you could say...)...

Here goes:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

An internet-found translation:

Above, all the summits
are still.
In all the tree-tops
you will
feel but the dew.
The birds in the forest ceased talking.
Wait: after walking
you shall rest, too.

I'd translate it (prosically) thus:

Over all the peaks
is peace.
Over all the treetops
you feel
barely a breath.
The birds silent in the forest;
just wait
... soon
you
are calm too ...

Isn't that excellent?

Prior to my Central European escapade, I'm reading all the German I can ...

Boo-Hoo... I'm Scared!

FEAR. YES! FEAR AND SHEER TERROR!! It's the lifeblood of addiction. If we weren't so terrified by the sheer looming drop into the seeming void of life without drugs ~ trust me, addicts to heroin, crack, drink and any other head-in-the-sand substance would tend to show far more willing to give it up.

Perhaps I ought to scrawl out several pages of deep psychological reasons WHY all this? Why why why?

On the face of it (from an outsider's point of view) heroin addiction, for example, seems very straightforward. You just stop taking the drug, feel a bit fluey for three days and then you're fine, right?

Well that's not right. As anyone who's had the flu, which is pretty much anyone, can tell you, however horrible you feel it's a pretty self-contained condition cushioned by sleep.

Opiate withdrawal is anything but "contained". You become fretful, hyperactive. Typically you don't sleep at all for days on end. It feels nothing at all like flu, though an unempathetic doctor may fixate on certain similarities, like feverishness, sweating, running eyes and nose, etc. But the actual experience of "cold turkey" is nothing like flu at all.

Another myth: it is not over in three days. It takes about a week to be over the physical syndrome, but residual anxiety and insomnia take a month or more to pass. This is far outside the junkie's 24-hour scope of survival, so of course it feels like an eternity and they can't cope.

The deeper you get into addiction the more you lose certain strengths and skills the rest of the population take for granted. The attention span is fractured. Sleep gets scattered all over the place. Food is utterly unpalatable without heroin. But crack causes extreme anorexia ~ so somebody on both will barely eat at all.

Heroin kills pain, both phsysical and mental. It's the strongest painkiller there is ~ as is testified by the fact that in the handful of countries where it is licensed for medicinal use (including Britain), it's the analgesic of choice in terminal cancer and other dire conditions. In the beginning, once initial distractions like nausea and skin-itching are pushed to the side, heroin flushes its users full of sensation and enchantment. By this point the experimenter will typically have tried pretty much everything else going, but in comparison to these substances, the effects of heroin feel totally natural and not forced. Heroin is a deceptive beast.

As time marches on and use of the drug becomes constant and relentless the enchantment fades to dust and all you know is that taking heroin feels far better than going sick without it and quite a lot nicer than methadone. And so continues a twilight state of living that can go on for decades. Nothing is really done or achieved. Periodic crises are averted with great effort. But most of life feels too great a task to take on. Heroin, once a great antidepressant, now leaves you in a continuous state of low grade misery.

So what's stopping me or anyone from taking that final leap into the dark?...

SHEER TERROR!

KEIRA KNIGHTLEY ~ DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AD
This was considered too strong for British TV, even after nine pm:





I know this is a corny choice of song, but it's what came to mind... When this came out I thought "bloody hell ~ same look, same sound; do something new, Lilly"... but I really like this ~~

LILLY ALLEN: FEAR

Sachertorte!

THIS WAS YESTERDAY'S "ACCIDENTAL OMISSION" ... Austria's most famous "tart" ~ Sachertorte:



It's very chocolatey, in a refined type of way:





It would go really well "mit einer Tasse Kaffee"...



Yee-HAR!!

You can gen up more about Sachertorte here ...

Konditorei!

Vienna ~ where I'm thinking of fleeing to ~ is world-famous for its Konditorei; its quality cakes:

Schokoladenkuchen (chocolate cake)



Käsekuchen (cheesecake)



Schwarzwalderkirschtorte (Black Forest Gâteau) ...














... and erstaunliche Kuchen ~ cakes of sheer genius! ...





... yum yum YUMMM!!

Alpine Wanderings

THE BERLIN IDEA hit me because I had never been to a German-speaking country and yet I semi-speak the language. I focused on Berlin specifically because I like to be in the centre of things, so I would always think to go to the principal city of a country first... and East Berlin has long been an object of fascination.

Having said all that, emigrating was not an idea that sprang from the most positive frame of mind. To be frank, it was the only alternative I could think of, one dire afternoon, to suicide.

I still don't know why ~ and surely you can't judge a town till you've actually been there ~ but the idea of Berlin kind of leaves me cold. As cold as the perishingly chilly East winds that blow relentlessly over from Siberia in Berlin's sub-zero winters. I do still want to go, but am not sure how long I would want to stay.

An alternative town, with far more surface allure, would be Vienna. The photos I saw look beautiful and I like the thought of all that Alpine fresh air. I would love to go wandering up in the mountains and Austria is a tiny country of spectacular scenery with the wonders of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Germany all within easy reach.

Also I have heard the local konditorei (overpriced chocolate cakes/etc) is really good; and that the same number of people are spread out among Austria's sparkling lakes, glacial valleys, pine woods and cuckoo clocks as the 8.5 million crammed into London town!

And that's about all I have to say on the matter for now. It's hardly as if I've booked my ticket yet, so my travel plans remain wide open. Very slowly I am trawling the internet for the myriad details I really need to know before I get there.

It's a cloudless blue day. Fresh but not Alpine. Tomorrow's a public holiday so the main road's constipated with chugging jams of traffic on the way to in-laws, DIY-stores and Brighton Beach. I understand it's some sort of holiday in America, too.

Have a charming day, y'all. And I'll be back tomorrow...

Furry Friday-Saturday: White Tigers

White tigers are ordinary Bengal/Siberian/Sumatran tigers with a genetic mutation that causes a type of semi-albinism where the orange of their coat is bleached out yet the darker stripes remain:



Pure albino tigers do rarely occur:



The tiger-whitening gene is a recessive one, meaning the condition is relatively rare:



White tigers can do anything their orange cousins can do:



Tigers are already the biggest of big cats; white tigers are even bigger. And this tubby swine's enormous!:

At the Laundrette {+German Pop}

OR THE "LAUNDROMAT" as I believe you Americans call it...
Finally I washed my stinking clothes today. Because there is no washing machine at my new place, personal or shared, I was reduced to the community laundrette round the corner ~ one of uncertain opening times. (Every time I think of going it is resoundingly SHUT.)
So today clotheswashing was first on my to-do list from waking up. Literally everything I have to stand up in is minging so it had to go in as a matter of urgency.
Sweatily I turned up, put £2.40 in the machine (not bad, considering that's 2 domestic washloads), added 200mls of Persil highly perfumed silky liquid and smoked fags and flicked through a religious booklet for 35 minutes ~ at which point my garments emerged sparkling white (far cleaner than any rented accommodation washing machine's ever got them). Then I trugged them home to dry out on my Ikea clothes horse ...

PS DOES NOBODY LIKE GREGORIAN CHANTS "VOYAGE VOYAGE"? I bought that disc (the original Desireless version) when it was #5 in the UK charts I'll have you know and I think it's wonderful. (The only bit of French pop I know in fact, apart from that 1960s schlockfest "Je t'aime" with gasping woman and prominent "organ" that makes the listener wanna exclaim "oh get a room!"...

Here's the one German pop song I know:

~~ Nina ~ 99 Red Balloons (neunundneunzig Luftballon) ~ hit #1 in the British chart in 1984. And most remarkably, got to #2 in the USA...



PS and this I found by the wayside... a 1987 Japanese hifi advert starring MADONNA:

Bashful/Itchy Postmortem {+French Pop}

BASHFUL still hasn't been buried. If my calculations are correct she lived to either 2 or 3 (time marches on!) I just don't remember... Roborovski hamsters are said to live slightly longer on average than ordinary hamsters, who will do 2 years standard, 3 if they're very lucky 3.5 extraordinarily. In exceptional cases Spherical and her ilk could (so I'm told) live past 4.

By the way I just found out Itchy probably died of cancer. After she was dead I noticed a weird black lump apparently sticking out of her belly. Because it appeared to be furry I assumed it was mould and buried her quickly.

Now from examining Bashful's dead body I can see they actually have very short black underfur and this would have been left after the lump eroded her top coat. No wonder she died so suddenly. There was practically nothing left of her body. She was like a dead hummingbird.

2 other things I noted about Bashful. 1: her teeth were worn extremely short, which is a good sign as captive rodents sometimes have to be clipped, for lack of nibbling opportunity. & 2: her back legs are extremely long ~ nearly one inch long on an animal with a total body length of two inches. No wonder she ran so quickly!

Spherical Carrotnose is alive and well and hoping to live to four!

Desireless: Voyage Voyage

Very rare for a record from across la manche to chart here. But this one, made top 10...

This is 80s French synth pop at its best. I like her voice:



This is what the words mean in English:

Above the ancient volcanoes,
Wings gliding through the ruffling flags of the wind,
Voyage, voyage,
Eternally.
From clouds in swamps,
From the Spanish wind to the equatorial rain,
Voyage, voyage,
Fly in the highlands
Above the capitals,
Look upon the ocean…

Voyage, voyage
Farther than night and day, (voyage, voyage)
Voyage (voyage)
In the incredible feelings of love.
Voyage, voyage
Upon the holy water of an Indian river, (voyage voyage)
Voyage (voyage)
And never come back.

On the Ganges or the Amazon,
With Blacks, with Sikhs, with Asians
Voyage, voyage
In the whole kingdom.
Upon the dunes of the Sahara,
From the Islands of Fiji to Fujiyama,
Voyage, voyage,
Don’t stop.
Above the barbed wire fences,
Stricken hearts
Look upon the ocean.

Voyage, voyage
Farther than night and day, (voyage, voyage)
Voyage (voyage)
In the incredible feelings of love.
Voyage, voyage
Upon the holy water of an Indian river, (voyage voyage)
Voyage (voyage)
And never come back.

Above the capitals,
Deathly ideas
Look upon the ocean.

Voyage, voyage
Farther than night and day, (voyage, voyage)
Voyage (voyage)
In the incredible feelings of love.
Voyage, voyage
Upon the holy water of an Indian river, (voyage voyage)
Voyage (voyage)
And never come back.

Hey I can't believe I found this; here's a Gregorian Chants version of the above complete with Arthurian Knights of the Round Table video...
This kinda sums up all I find dodgy and delightful about France, their whimsical emotionality.
Don't write this version off until you hear the girl singer come in around 1min19...
PS NB the little scuttling mouse on the Round Table



And last this housed-up version. I don't like it as much. The singer's voice lacks the original's "primal" quality...

My Methadone Is Going Up So I Have To Behave Myself

OR... I COULD HAVE PHRASED THAT: my methadone is going up and I'm giving up gear but things with Maple Syrup, my drugs worker, tend to be confrontational so I'll keep them as they are.

I even have to have an ECG because my daily dose will be so high. Now I've gone over 100mg, so theoretically I have no excuse not to "use on top".

As we all know by now, theoretics mean very little to the incorrigible junkie... so let's see what happens ...

I have to come off gear to get to beloved Berlin. Bear this in mind.

Apart from that, I'm saying nothing ...

Berlin

I TOOK MY FRENCH HOLIDAY IDEA and looked a little closer at what I actually wanted out of it. That is, to escape. And where I really want to go isn't France at all but Germany. And you can't go to Germany and not go to Berlin. So that is where I have decided I wanna live. As I said, I did years and years of German so I shouldn't have TOO much trouble filling in forms, reading things, etc. I will just need to get a really good dictionary.

I would love to say, "I'm going there forever. Never again shall I set foot on British soil." (I am very much tired of Britain. This country is sinking into a morass of doublestandards. Modern Britain deals with nothing until crisis is reached (who does that remind me of?) Problems are swept under the carpet: out of sight = out of mind. Civil liberties are being eroded here perhaps quicker than anywhere else in the "civilized world" and that really gets me. The "mother of all parliaments" is utterly corrupt; the home of free speech and all that is losing free speech. Spy cameras are everywhere. The populace are rude and violent. Immigrant communities rule over us and are full of attitude. Foreigners always seem to be first on the housing queue.

Having said all that, Neonaziism is what puts me off Berlin (and Germany in general) the most. But you can't have everything. And I never said I thought the grass over there was any greener. I'm just so sick of Britain. I want to live with a different set of problems.

And I intend to run away from my drug addiction.

I was already aware there are NA meetings in English in Berlin and that little link made going there seem a little less forlorn. I'm not "emigrating", just "migrating" for a while with 2 objects in mind. These being: 1: to get references/experience so I can actually go out and get a JOB ~ wow!! and 2: improve command of German enough to have usable skill rather than semi-useless semi-fluency.

I have never been to Berlin in my life. Neither have I set foot on the soil of any German-speaking country. My mind was oriented towards the region by years of language study at school, so it seems utterly ridiculous not to have gone. Also I long had a fascination with life behind the iron curtain ~ East Berlin of course was the gateway to all this. So when the wall came down without my having ventured behind it I was secretly rather miffed. There is something oddly romantic about former Soviet bloc chic. Giant alienating concrete architecture. Cold wind from the East ...

What really sealed all this was when my Mum said at the weekend: "well if you want to go voluntary work over there I'll help you out". And I thought: Yippee! Then I'm going!!

"BIRD HOUSE" COMMERCIAL
They're selling orange squash, not that I think anybody would remember it from this... but the advert is amazing. The bird is a canary in natural coloration...
I think this is classic ...



Oh and while we're at it, here's a McDonald's ad from Thailand
Note how the English word "spicy" comes through loud and clear:



OK I promise: last one
I love this piri-piri Thai lady:

Digital Radio

MY MUM said she was buying me a birthday present. I am now 38 years old. This is far too old to be a junkie. But anyway we went through Tesco's electrical department and picked out a cheapie CD player plus (what I really wanted) a digital radio.

The FM dial in London is so jam-packed with pirate stations playing outdated early 90s drum-&-bass I find it literally impossible to get a signal on the speech stations I actually like.

Nobody uses satellite radio in this country. In fact I have never seen (or even heard of) a set on sale, though I've heard a satellite called Hotbird does broadcast to Europe. What I got was DAB, which offers crystal-clear reception subscription free from local broadcasters on about 50 channels ~ though there's apparently space for loads more. Unlike ordinary FM radio, DAB broadcasts come via a "multiplex" where the signal on one frequency, eg 220 mhz is divided into 8 or more stations, making pirate DAB broadcasting a tad too technically complexicated for the average drum-&-bass towerblock hoodlum.

The radio pirates install their FM transmitters at the top of residential towerblocks and broadcast practically anywhere they please on the FM dial. Sometimes you can just about get talk radio but with a ceaseless pulse of dfff-dfff-dffffff sub-bass. Other times the DJ's voice comes shamelessly through on top, interjecting phases like "rewind selecta" and "big up da blah-de-blah-blimblom" (their mates). There's supposed to be a taskforce tackling these illegal broadcasters, who use random flats in the area (with another, low-power frequency as link) but they never seem to go away for more than a day or two. You can usually tell which is and isn't strictly "legit" because pirate stations broadcast in mono ~ so they don't light up the red stereo light. I'm all for freestyling on the radio waves don't get me wrong. I just find it annoying when they're decimating the BBC. Personally I think the legal broadcasters should all switch to digital and leave FM for anybody who wants a go. But apparently there's a problem because car manufacturers usually install AM/FM-only radios in keeping with pan-European demand and a lot of digital-only broadcasters claim to lose money. The latest "multiplex" got no bidders and so the future of DAB in the UK is uncertain.

Meanwhile I'm more than happy with what's there!

It's Bashful's funeral today or tomorrow. Oh, and I'm moving to Berlin. More about that tomorrow ...

VIDEO

It was the Eurovision song contest on Saturday night. Widely derided (here); taken incredibly seriously (in the East) it attracts transEuropean viewing figures of over 100,000,000.

I must have been out of my head because unlike former years (when I avoid it like bubonic plague) I thought to myself "this might be good!"~??!? and settled down with a nice cup of tea. Thankfully I conked out for the first half of the "ceremony" but this is what I remember:

PS If you come from lands far overseas and believe all European pop music is a tacky load of tat, see this before you cement your opinion (it will only strengthen it!!)

NORWAY (Best tune)
I was going to put this down as the best entry musically anyhow. And they happened to WIN also:



UKRAINE (Best visuals)
The singer mortgaged her flat to pay for this elaborate set. I hope she gets her money back:



UK
Musicals composer Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the tune. Whoever wrote the lyrics ("it's my time, it's my time" repeated over and over) deserves to be shot:

("Royaume Uni" came 5th out of 25, with 42 countries voting...)

And Now There's Only One!

BASHFUL TROTTERDONKEY ROBOROVSKI IS DEAD! The virus finally got her. She died on Friday but I wasn't around to post it. Spherical alerted me to the strangeness by determinedly moving nest from under the cod-in-parsley-sauce box under their wheel to under the chewed out chocolate fingers box. It is quite odd to see such a tiny creature behaving so purposefully. Grabbing mouthfuls of self-chewed bedding material and scampering to a new nest that's getting more and more luxuriously padded by the minute. Something suspiciously two-toned harvesty-coloured and white caught my eye and then I realized it was Bashful looking very dead and very bashed up. Imagine a dead cat that's been through a washing machine spin cycle and you're on the right track. I was wondering what on earth had prompted her into that corner when Spherical very officiously grabbed her dead housemate by the scruff and dragged her bodily halfway across the tank and into the her new bedding, where she took to preening her fur (not too successfully it has to be said as poor dead Bashful still looks like she's been dragged through several hedges backwards).

I was wondering whether this is some sort of strange roborovski death ritual, keeping the late cagemate in bed. So I did an experiment and moved Bashful back to where I'd found her only for Spherical to grab her once again and determinedly drag her back ~ within a few minutes.

Last night, Spherical was moving nest yet again. Sure enough poor Bashful had vanished from under the chocolate fingers box, round several very inconvenient (by roborovski standards) cage obstacles and into the cod in parsley sauce box. I took Bashful out yet again and hid her in the furthest corner. This just so happened to be at the far entrance to a very long and narrow tube that originally held a roll of clingwrap. Imagine my shock to witness Spherical grabbing poor Bashful by the back leg and hauling her right through this long, thin tube right back to the new nest again!

I didn't have the heart to remove the body when Spherical seems to enjoy "looking after it" so. I was thinking maybe in the wild, because they do of course live in burrows, they do make a special nest for dead housemates and let them rot into the ground right there.

Tomorrow I'm having the official funeral, next to Itchy in Mother Hubbard's strawberry patch. My Mum says Spherical, who came out on cue and started rambling ostentatiously on her wheel, is very pretty. She even let me stroke her without feigning horrific shock, pinging away and hiding under the cardboard sill of a box from where, when she's so inclined, she would glare at me with the most baleful black beady eyes I've ever seen.

One left! Poor Spherical ~ all on her own. I hope yous all had a good weekend... Evening all!!

Feathery Friday/Saturday: Blue Tits!

Yes! You sceptics from foreign shores; the name is for real!

Blue tits are Britain's prettiest common garden birds. Put out a feeder and more of these show up than practically anything else.





They are closely related to the even more embarrassingly named great tit. These are distinguished by more black-and-white-y coloration and a complete chest stripe:



The perky little tits are Britain's agilest garden birds:









Boy blue tits can get rather aggressive:



They'll even confront their own reflection:



Lady blue tits are very pretty birds:



Even in the wild, they have been known to become quite tame:





When milk was delivered door-to-door (many years ago, in my childhood!) these were the little swines who'd peck away at the silver tops. Or worse:



And like many garden birds, they've been known to raise new generations in bizarre places: