Loose End

I'M AT A VERY LOOSE END. Feeling depressed. I don't get the buzz out of things that I expect to get. Example: I went into town and bought Chinese books and Paris Match and Stern magazines in French and German. I got all this stuff home and felt distinctly flat. Not depressed. Not angry. Nothing negative; just nothing very positive.

My life goals are to speak and write German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese to as near mother tongue standard as possible. To this end I am using every language course I can get my hands on. It's good to have one in German, even if it is "too easy". Really I need a teacher to correct my writing, because I know it's unidiomatic. Someone once asked in all seriousness whether my German blog was the product of Google Translate ~ which just about says everything about my writing. My vocabulary is pretty good now ~ though nowhere near as good as someone's who has put proper effort in. The Perfect Your German CDs and book promises an active vocab of 5000 words. Using a dictionary and multiplying the number of words familiar with per page by the number of pages I calculated I had a passive vocabulary (that is, I read a word and understand it) of eight to ten thousand words.

I've started my book in ernest. I'm only after a name for my central character but I think I've found one. I googled it and it's not been used. That is the big high jump for all children's characters' names. The more unique they are the less allowable it is for them to have featured in previous books, films, cartoons etc. Mine seemed to check out OK.

I've only written about a page of story but it's a children's book. Not a picture book, as my mother assumed, but a children's book like the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter are children's books. Totally unreliant on illustrations. A tale spun in spellbinding language. I know I'm not the best writer alive. But I'm unique: I do believe I'm best at being me. I am not writing in the style or genre of anybody else. I hope to bring a breath of mountain-fresh air to the fetid wizard and lesbian-single-parent-obsessed world of children's publishing. Apart from this I'll say nothing until my book is done. I wouldn't say my story is so much amazingly unique as something that's magical for the way it's told. We see the world through the eyes of our little character, who is an amazing character. So it's a magical world to see. And that's all I'm saying about it.

It's my parents I credit for kicking me up the backside and saying YOU CAN WRITE, WRITE THIS TALE. So I am doing. I'm not entirely convinced self-publishing is the way to go forward. Considering half a billion people in the world speak English well enough to enjoy a novel and many of these hundreds of millions have children. How can I hope to market my production to them. I know nothing about promoting children's literature. The way I see it, writing is an art; publishing is a business. Experience as well as everything I have read about my mental situation has told me stress is bad for me. True I find it exhilarating. But that exhilaration can trip into mania very easily. I've told myself I was being hypochondriac so many times before. Only to look back and see I really was manic. When you're up at four in the morning, TV and stereo blaring at top volume, bouncing balls on the floor you're not just "a bit excited" you're manic. Mania has left me in a real mess every time it's come. It's not that mania itself is so terrible; it's the disinhibition, the feiriness of spirit (ie uninhibited agression), and hyperkinetic distractability that cause problems. Ratchet it up a notch or two and agression turns into outright paranoia, the beautiful enhanced sensory pereception trips into hallucinations. When I was truly manic I saw spirals on the walls and ceiling. I heard voices speaking to and about me. I could not tell what was and was not real. Then of course there's the depression. Less than a month ago I felt my life was so useless that lying down in front of an express train was the best favour I could do my family and friends. I was intensely paranoid and very depressed. Then I started popping my pills again and literally by the next morning two thirds of my depression and half the paranoia had dissipated. Isn't life strange.

This is why I seek a career in writing. Not only is it exceedingly trendy to be bipolar and artistic but I know from experience that rare extremes aside, I'm capable of writing almost no matter how high or low or sideways I go.

I intend to take these languges of mine far enough to qualify as a translator at least in German to English. If you calculate languges as GDP and number of speakers; German is number two in the world after English. Chinese is number three. Japanese is number four. So if you wonder why my German obsession: that's it. German is by far the biggest business language in the European Union after English. I phoned around some agecies specializing in placing bilingual temps and headhunting bilingual administrators, secretaries etc. What language had the most openings? I asked. German German German I was told. Every time.

So that's what I'm doing. Writing my intellectual story book, improving my German. Chinese is quite frankly doing my head in at the moment but I'm still slogging away. I'd like to apply my talents to Spanish if I can.

So here's the news. I hope this isn't too much of a tangle. I'm not lost but I'm trying to break free of the inertia and lassitude and apathy that has hemmed me in like a dancer frozen in a paperweight for years and years and years. Like a cage-nibbling hamster I desire escape. I'd like to go on a City Break to Berlin. And I can't wait to finish my Amazing Tale of Adventure and Wonder!

And how was YOUR weekend?

Autumnal

THERE WERE 2 UNEXPECTED EFFECTS of becoming opiate dependent (I noticed).

1. I barely ever catch cold and

2. I hardly feel the seasons of the year any more

Autumn is the only season I still feel. I feel it now, and I feel weird. In an indistinct kind of way.

I feel vaguely excited, yet vaguely depressed. At the same time.

Also I'm craving heroin in a distant way. I haven't taken any since Sunday when I didn't feel it anyhow. I only crave heroin by association. And I associate feeling autumnal with doing gear. I'm reminding myself that it's only been about 12 years, or a couple more, depending how you count, since I went ON gear. So I've done many autumns without it. I also went down the SOAS bookshop for Japanese dictionaries a year or two ago, so I could associate that with autumn too. I'm very much into associations. I need a Chinese dictionary as well. Mrs Li has finished teaching me to tell time. I'm on Unit 5 now. I still can't do the accent at all, but I'm doing OK at writing.

I nearly was sick yesterday having that blood test, it was awful. I felt so nauseated. She kept asking me if I was alright. How a junkie could be so afraid of needles. I couldn't tell you which one she used; I didn't dare look.

I spent £5 on one pen and 100 sheets of holepunched blank paper to write my book on. Yes I'm doing it the old fashioned way as my computer is down and I write better in Real Ink. It makes me focus on High Quality.

Now I've got to go before this internet cafe terminates me.


Illustrated: a Charles Dickens manuscript

PS my blood samples were tiny drizzles compared to yesterday's illustration. My vein was so collapsed she thought it wouldn't hold out...

DARKNESS IS FALLING across London. The wet road sparkles neon. Heavy clouds, dark grey against a blue grey sky, close gradually down and around.

Hey the other day we had a shocking pink sunset. Pink against orange and turquoise Chinese dragons in the sky. That was amazing!

True, I was scared of a blood test despite my former proclivities for poking needles between digits. My feet are hammered. I once missed when shooting heroin and crack between my fingers and couldn't cross them for weeks... Isn't drug addiction fun!

I got money today and didn't even think of spending it on drugs. I drugged myself nearly to death now my occupation has to be life. I would rather focus on something obscure yet useful like Chinese calligraphic character-writing manuals than heroin. Those dictionaries and manuals only come from one bookshop in Londn that I know of: the one near the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (oh if only I'd applied there! And not to the university that I did... ho hum.) There's also a secondhand bookshop near the shopping precinct by SOAS that sells ancient Chinese and Japanese "grammars" as probably used by lost missionaries and soldiers of a bygone era. I haven't been down to this bookshop lately. I'm steeling myself to stock up on complicated dictionaries. I feel totally lost in the Chinese language by the way and not at all confident. I can barely pronounce it at all, unless I'm literally repeating after the CD. I can write a lot of it, but probably have the handwriting of an 8 year-old girl. What it has in precision it lacks in spirit. Chinese calligraphy is all about spirit. I'll illustrate this post with the heart character. That's the most spirited of them all.

I can't track my real feelings any more! I want to, but I'm never sure what's my real mood and what might be a Mood Swing. Maybe I shouldn't worry about it.

Time's short; must run. Thanks for the answers yesterday.

Clipped Wings (Still)

I'M still feeling like a bird with clipped wings, who should be soaring on a manic high and now, bar the vaguest tinges and little flashes of it, is reduced to sheer drudging normality and laboured workaday ordinariness. This is quite beyond the pale. I know now why I threw my antipsychotics out the window (metaphorically; the only thing that literally went sailing out of my window in mania was a PORK flavoured pizza ~ ukh. Only thing it was any good for was frisbeeing...)

The reason why is I enjoy being primary coloured, bright and brilliant ~ and that's how the manic state makes me not merely feel but be. You have to bear in mind the TWENTY YEARS I spent in various grades of depression (mostly mild). I was so accustomed to feeling depressed that people who "knew" me thought my depressed self was my real self. Which it most definitely is NOT. If anything I'm far more myself as a maniac than a depressive. Which might not say much nice about me, considering how inconsiderate, irritable and overblown I am in that state ~ but it is TRUE.

Of course I don't really think sick and disabled people should be shot. I only believed I should be shot for being a drain on my country and a disgrace to my family. I'm surprised they even want to talk to me. Then I get letters off my Mum saying I appear to have no goals in life at all. This is SO untrue. I am a serious student of Mandarin Chinese and intend to speak Japanese as well as French German and Spanish. All to mother tongue fluency. French is a really good language for those into reading books. German is superior in every way. Spanish is useful. Japanese is famously whacky. And if you don't speak Chinese you're not a citizen of the 21st century world, let's face it.

I just can't believe how LAZY I have been ~ to be NEARLY 40 and not even fluent in Chinese, let alone Japanese or Spanish. I really have been a wastrel. Of course heroin had a large part to play. First thing that put me against heroin was that it made me so incredibly lazy. But what was good about it was that heroin made life, for the very first time, make sense. Then again it made me weak and cowardly. I used to be very strong. Considering how strong-willed I used to be against my weirdo self. Everybody who knew me knew I was a weirdo. And you wonder why I talk about suicide!! Heroin was the only thing that made my warped personality fit. Even my psychiatrist said this when personality disorders were mooted.

Unfortunately I it no personality disorder except Cyclothymic Personality (ie bipolar lite). I have bipolar lite whenever I don't have bipolar heavy. That is I have a mood swing of some degree almost all the time. I only speak to my family between them, which means waiting weeks to call, sometimes.

My mother, who has "major depression" says she never feels fully 100%. This is called "dysthymia" (a mildly low mood). I heard that first degree relatives of someone with unipolar depression have a 25% chance of having a major mood disorder 50:50 recurrent major depression or type 1 bipolar. I would be type 1 bipolar (if I'm not schizoaffective). Schizoaffective disorder and type 1 bipolar are almost identical and the treatments for them are the same. So there's not very much in the name. Anna Grace has bipolar I and her symptoms and mine are nearly the same. Maybe I get a bit more manic than her, but she's on more medication damping that mania down...

Schizoaffective just means I meet full diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia when I'm severely manic. It means I have Kraepelin's "delusional mania" (which is actually marked by vivid hallucinations, not delusions, but that's what it's called). I've been reading Emil Kraepelin's Manic-Depressive Insanity And Paranoia to find myself. And I don't like what I found. He diagnoses me as a moody so-and-so with manic and hypomanic attacks on top. I don't think I ever get depression, not by the standards of the early 1900s. My depression is only a mild case. And suicidality can be a rational act of someone with nothing left to live for ~ even psychiatrists acknowledge that.

Note I'm not saying I want to commit suicide. My moritorium is on. I feel about 5% manic and not depressed. I was quite manic last night but the risperidone blanked that out, when I took it. I get the daily Risperidone Mood Swing where I feel it wearing off each evening, going higher and higher until I bosh it back and am damped down like a Sucker Loach in a community fish tank. Sucking on that glass, bored out of my brainbox (don't loaches and catfish get bored? Skulking about the community tank as they do...?)

If you're reading this blog and still wondering about my personality I'd say I'm like Phoebe from Friends. Hippy Dippy on the outside, hard as nails on the inside (if you think Phoebe isn't hard, watch Friends again and more carefully...) I've been told a few times that I'm hard. Always by people who didn't know me so well, now know me better. Always with a note of disappointment. I say if I were as soft on the inside as on the outside I'd be a fucking lump of jelly. Better to be a wolf in sheep's clothing than vice versa. Anyway there's nothing wrong with being hard. We live in a hard world.

I had a yen to test my alcohol resolve yesterday. So I had a can of weak cherry flavour cyder. The one I used to knock back because it was "mandy drink". Dear reader: it took me THREE HOURS to finish the lousy stuff and I still don't enjoy drink. It reminds me too much of sad-sacks street drinkers. I met one yesterday. A woman who was too vulgar for words and thought "I used to be like that". Ukh. I LOATHE the image of alcohol and drinkers it's untennably vulgar. The big reason I preferred drugs was that I hated alcohol and needed SOME recreational substance. Ecstasy was infinitely superior in my book. E made me feel like Buddha on a transcendental cloud of peace and love. Drink never did that for me. And I was never one of those psycho people who has a complete personality change after one drink and suddenly insists on drinking the bar dry. That's my big quarm with NA; they believe any drug of any description sets off the entire disease process again and I don't. I took drugs to feel better. Not to be off my head. Only terminal junkies are so far gone they want nothing short of general anaesthesia. Heroin gave me what I believed to be an enhanced ability to cope with life. Of course I ended up not coping at all. So heroin goes out the window too... I can't believe I'm dumping heroin. You have to be truly mad or desperate or both to give up a drug as efficacious as heroin. So maybe I have finally lost it. My dr does after all believe I'm schizo...

I've swapped alcohol for Morrisons' own cloudy lemonade; 54p for 2 litres ie 27p a litre or just over 10p a can. Very good value.



Notice no Barbra Streisand!



Video version:

I love techno choirs!

Sorry if this is yet another boring post saying nothing new; my life is boring and samey, but I do like this techno track..........

I get to see Deshane tomorrow. He's getting me a pensioner's bus pass. Wahey!!
OK it's a Disabled Bus pass but I hate saying I'm disabled. It means I'm scrounging off the state. Even though I found out I've been "disabled" for years. It's that fucking mania that disables me. Makes me too lazy for words. Schizo gives me avolition. Depression makes me not bothered. Add those 3 together and you have a wreck of a person who can blog about life yet never lives it. And that's that!

Rehousing Challenge

I'M GETTING REHOUSED and I'm living in terror. I even know where the house is. It's within easy carting off distance of the nuthouse. I say that because everybody in that house will be raving mad (like me). So now I have to pack a bag or ten and try and feel positive. I don't actually feel very positive at all. When I found out I was in sheer terror, then I fell asleep. Then I'm meant to be changing drugs clinic (again) then I'm meant to change back (again). You see why I don't understand anything? It's incomprehensible.

I've decided yet again to try giving up "gear" for good. Yet again. It does nothing for me. I mean I can't feel the bloody stuff when I take it, so I know I'm wasting my time. I wish I had never got into heroin. I can't believe I'm here now. Me! Talking about me being on heroin. How ridiculous is that. I was never like Anna Grace Young in that all my heroes were junkies and all I ever wanted to do was try heroin. True, I had a sneaking fascination and if someone had presented the naive young me with Drugs of the World on a silver platter saying I could try just one, I probably would have tried the heroin. Because as far as I knew, heroin was the strongest drug there was. So that's the one I would have tried. When I did dabble in drugs, heroin was always in a class of its own. It wasn't available. It was frowned on. The way I saw it, if drugs were bad then all drugs were bad so if you were going to try drugs you might as well try heroin. The fascination was there, but that's all it was. I never intended to become a heroin addict.

If only I could relegate that crappy stuff to the same dustbin every other drug from my past has been chucked in, I'd be OK. I feel no compunction whatsoever to take any other drug ever. My brain can produce a free high anyhow (I now know). Why bother wasting money on drugs to be high? I now get more of a buzz out of Japanese than heroin. Which either says a lot about the Japanese language or a lot about heroin, I don't know.

I keep seeing Chinese characters, not just with my eyes closed but with them open. They appear against blank walls and doors while my head is dreaming. See, I'm a clairvoyant. I can see into life's mysteries... I used to own a crystal ball, but it got left behind in an old house, or stolen. I'm not sure which. I don't need a crystal to scry into, just a blank door will do.

Today, for the first time ever, I was leafing through my kanji dictionary, this huge list of radicals (the graphic components that make up characters) and there were so many of them I couldn't name. And I briefly experienced self-doubt. Usually I view the 2200 basic characters as a linguistic chocolate gateau, to gorge into.

I learned a new one today: 獣 kemono. It means "animal". Because ke can mean fur and a mono is a thing a 毛物 kemono could be a furry thing. Just a 着物 kimono literally means "something to wear". The Chinese reading of 物 mono is 物 butsu, the old slang word for heroin: worlds apart, the words are the same... Butsu means exactly the same as the English word "gear". Another word for animal is 動物 dōbutsu, a "moving thing". I like the way they're so basic in their vocabulary. When you know these words you can actually see the constituent meanings.

Now it's quarter past midnight and my head is spinning. I'm scared to death of moving house. What am I going to do? What's happening? What will happen? I tell myself it has to be a good thing.

PS far as I know the council hasn't OK'd it. So I still might not move. Then I'd be even more disappointed.

PPS far as I know, it's a normal house, not a tower block


An American akita.



These are akita-inus. In the film Hachi, starring Richard Gere, the baby Hachi (an akita) was played by a brushwood dog...

Back to Brushwood

I'M REALLY INTO THESE BRUSHWOOD DOGGIES now. Even the sign 柴 "shiba" in 柴犬 shiba-inu has a little brushwood tree, a 木 ki, in it. Put two trees together 林 and you get a wood. Three trees make a Japanese forest 森.



Shiba-inus remind me of HM the Queen's cogis:





Originally I wanted a giant wolf-like 秋田犬 Akita-inu. They look like huge furry shiba-inus. They're used in Japan as police dogs...



Little and Large: haven't they got furry ears!



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Grrrr: I wrote this crap earlier and just wanted to save it, but blogger wasn't having that, so you get it. I'm sorry....

I found an interesting book down the library called You Don't Have To Be Famous To Have Manic Depression by Jeremy Thomas and Tony Hughes

They make some perceptive points about addiction:

Nicotine patches no more match up to the early morning hit of the first cigarette ... than swallowing a dose of methadone matches up to jacking up a decent dose of smack. Nicotine patches and methadone have a lot in common. They keep addicts off the streets, stop them injecting/inhaling, and keep them in thrall to their drug of choice.
p251

There's a good section on schizophrenia, though why on earth anyone with bipolar, which used to be called manic-depressive psychosis, needs an explanation of what it's like to be mad is beyond me. Lots of people with bipolar type 1 hear voices, though you wouldn't know that from reading this book.

With a brain prone to schizophrenia come accompanying talents and insights. For example, some people with schizophrenia have an almost uncanny way of sensing how other people are feeling. If the gift of manic depression is energy, the gift of schizophrenia is sensitivity.
p283

That's my problem. I feel too sensitive, most of the time. Heroin is a psychic blocker: it made life very much more comfortable because I no longer felt too much.

On diagnosis:

To be diagnosed a manic depressive goes to the very core of who you are as a person. It is difficult to feel good about a diagnosis that reaches into your very soul. Furthermore there are no external signs to mark the condition out as special, to get the ordinary sympathy for illness or to provide even a hint of what you experience. Suddenly, medication becomes a permanent part of daily routine. Doctors and psychiatrists become privy to every personal fact andableto judge each personal experience...

Depression is the wages of mania. Lack of energy reflects exhausted mental batteries left for dead after the multi-millennial light-shattering firework display that was the preceeding days and weeks.

It is doubtful whether the brain ever truly recovers from an episode of mania; the world never looks the same again.
p228

When I glance over recent posts and see statements like: I cannot imagine anything that would make life worth living, I wonder if people understand what I was getting at. I meant I look to the "future" and see nothing. I cannot imagine living as some supposedly functioning independent, successful individual. Because I never did. I did jobs, but the only ones I could get were very low-key compared to the ones my grandmother thought I should have been doing. Then again my grandmother had this idea that being clever somehow got you a good job. It doesn't. Employers are looking for people full of confidence and bullshit, which I wasn't. Which is how I ended up in jobs supposedly "beneath" me. I just wish I'd gone for something I truly enjoyed and done graphic design or painting and decorating. Lots of graphic designers have been put out of busiess by the ready availability of design software, meaning small businesses just do it for themselves. There's still work for painter-decorators, just not as much of it. I'm not qualified for any of this (you don't need qualifications, do you?)

Did you know the suicide rate in manic depression is around 20% compared to around 10% for normal depression.

That's because on top of the depression, manic-depressives are suffering from something akin to hangover syndrome: when you look back to things you did in the exalted state and ask yourself: what on eart was I thinking? My Mum knows someone who lost her house because she gambled everything by hiring out an enormous warehouse with nothing at all to put in it. The woman had thought she was on the way to becoming a multibillionaire business success. She knows someone else who got manic and randomly went calling on people up the street, inviting himself into their houses for Teletubby tea and trotterdonkey Sunday roast. See that's what people do. Then they come down and have to face the consequences of being high: bad debts, malaria, repatriation costs, veneareal diseases and it's all too much. No wonder they want to commit suicide. Talking of malaria, I know someone who pretended to have schizophrenia so he didn't have to work (which annoys me, because it makes me think I should be living in a cardboard box. The government keep saying they want to cut all sick scroungers off benefits. So what are they going to do? If the government get their way, there will be over a million sick and disabled people living on the streets. When that does happen, I hope they feel proud of themselves.

Anyway, this person who pretended to have schizophrenia had a brother who was indeed a manic depressive, who married a Thai bride, not by looking in a catalogue, but by actually flying to Thailand and falling in love in a remote village where he and his wife lived happily in a thatched hut. Until malaria swept through the village and nearly killed everyone.

Strange thing about Pretending to have Schizophrenia Guy was: he most definitely WAS extremely neurotic. He just wasn't psychic-psychotic the way schizophrenics are.

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Sorry about all that.

I had a tired day. Got up. Went chemist. Scored an ineffectual tiny bit of heroin.

Waste of time. I've only the last dregs of a habit remaining.

I bumped into someone this morning with a carrier bag full of chocolate. He'd shoplifted from a supermarket ~ an entire sehf-load and was about to sell it on. How dumbfoundingly naive I used to be! Not realizing that when a small shop mysteriously stocked up out of the blue on brand-name headache pills, batteries or fairly traded chocolate it often meant they'd bought it from somebody who had pillaged Sainsbury's!



If I were a doggie I'd look like this sleeping...

Brushwood Doggies

HERE are some pictures of a cute 可愛い柴犬 shiba-inu ~ a "brushwood dog" the tiniest traditional Japanese dog breed.


I would quite like to get one of these.
If I didn't get a giant wolf-like Akita. I love Akita-inus, the furry swines!


Aren't they furry 毛皮 and entertaining 面白く and cute 可愛い?





Well I was in a bad mood and a half when I last posted, wasn't I? It probably doesn't show as I was trying to squeeze as much entertainment value from it as I possibly could. If I didn't, I probably would have gone out and shot somebody between the eyes.

I didn't really sleep last night, so I'm quite tired today. My sleep has started going all over the place

I've learned the Japanese characters for reiki 霊気 as in 私は霊気で元気を癒した。I used to get reiki every week from a friend of mine who was very attuned to the energy. I turned up the first time extremely cynnical, having heard that reiki was something anybody could pick up overnight. How wrong I was. You can really feel it: hot energy. spirit hands reaching inside me. At one point the therapist's hands got so hot they were burning; then she said "feel my hands then!" And they were cold. I was told I was especially receptive to the psychic emanations.

The 気 ki in the Japanese reiki is the same as Chinese chi.

When I still had my 3 little hamster gnomes Bashful, Itchy and Spherical, bashful's name in Japanese was 内気 uchiki "an indoor spirit". The Japanese word for electricity is 電気 denki "the spirit of lightning"... isn't that amazing! Vandalized in Chinese to 电. How vulgar.

Itchy in Japanese was 痒がって Kayugatte, Spherical's name 丸 Maru meant "round". I used to call them my little 速歩馬; my Chiisai Hayaashi-ba ~ my little Trotters.

私の小さなハムスターは毛皮のエンターテイナーです。



"My little hammies are furry entertainers!"

**************************************************************

Ukkkh: it's 10 minutes to 2. EastEnders is on. The omnibus edition: 2 hours or so of nonstop cockney accents and misery in houses furnished direct from the Argos catalogue (like (posh versions of) mine). I'm exhausted and I keep nodding off in front of the computer screen. I've a packet of chicken & veg cup-a-soups I'd love to eat as quick as they're made so the croutons have no time to go soggy). My opinion on cup-a-soups without croutons involves a bullet between the eyes!

I'd really like to get a tubby hammy. There's a hammyhouse you can get that consists of a giant wheel, so huge it resembles a washing machine drum. The tiny tubby lives in this drum and scurries away in it night after night. ButI know what hamsters are like. They'll try and build a nest on the drum, do a pooze on it, wash their ears for half an hour and then unpack their bulging pouches. And then look all surprised when they start to ramble and the wheel is clattering with flying bedding, seeds and pooings.

Onscreen, Albert Square's alkie crackhead, Phil Mitchell is going to NA following a one week crack binge half a year ago with a girl called Rainie. Watch the full entertainment of the "hardman of Albert Square" high on crack here.


小さい驢馬速歩馬; 小さい速歩驢馬
Chīsai roba hayaashi-ba; chīsai hayaashi roba
Little Trotter Donkey; Little Trotter Horse


LOVING ANGELS INSTEAD.
This man's bipolar tuned him into a different level of reality and he says he's all the better off for it.
Have a look at his mangled leg from a botched suicide attempt. He says two broken legs from being hit head-on by a truck hurt considerably less than the bipolar depression he was setting out to cure...



Here's Stephen Fry discossing the issue of mood swings. He calls his own disorder "cyclothymia" (actually bipolar II) because it's constant mood swings that never go to psychotic extremes. From what I've heard type 2 bipolar can often be more inconvenient than bipolar 1 because generally speaking, more depression's involved and mere flashes of hypomania. Type 1 bipolars often have to put up with very extreme mania that can be more dangerous than the depression: a different kettle of fish. Type II bipolar patients get depressed for longer, but type 1s can get psychosis with the depression (and more especially the mania).



On the one hand I'm trying to get my head around this so-called "illness" of mine; on the other I'm just tired of the entire issue. I know I can get a bit obsessive. On the other hand you have to bear in mind how badly my head got addled up. I need to pick together the fragments of sense ~ and to piece them together again. It wasn't hearing voices or paranoia or conventional "psychosis" that drove me mad: it was going into a clanking centrifuge of a mental state so intense that my mind broke into smithereens while I was wide awake leaving me a verbigerating vegetable. I desperately looked up the otherworldliness that happened to me at the height of my malady; I think I was having "catatonic symptoms". Lovely business.

Never mind. I'm better now than I was. Yeah I'm depressed, but I'm sorting my life out. Slowly. One day at a time. In baby steps.

And even though I can't have a hammy now (because the nut-house risk is still there ~ and who would look after the tubby swine while I was in there)... I can still be entertained by Hammy in Tales of the Riverbank. I love his turnip accent. I love the way Hammy Hamster and Roderick the Rat can't resist nibbling the props. And how Hammy breaks into a massive ear-wash at every opportunity. And I love Hammy's surprised expression as he floats down the river in his motor boat..!

Bees and wasps and Japanese hornets

I'M STILL SLEEPING hours and hours: all night then half the day as well. I'm fighting against depression. When I wake up my head is full of horror: I cannot imagine anything that would make life worth living. I keep telling myself to take one thing at a time. My house is more of a mess for my attempts to clean it. Recently I lost an important piece of paper and tore the place apart searching for it. I still have no idea where my old passport has gone. I need that passport. Even though it's out of date, it's the only proper form of ID I have.

I keep telling myself I ought to get off my arse and get a job. There was a programme on telly only the other night telling how all the sick and disabled are to be thrown off benefits and forced to work. What job could I possibly do? I'm qualified for nothing. I used to enjoy working with people but that would be very hard now. Ever since I went psycho I can't bear to be in crowds, can't handle looking into people's eyes. They make me too paranoid. Sometimes I feel the government is trying to hound me into suicide. Nothing makes me want to live more than knowing somebody wants me to die! Yeah: sheer bloodymindedness will see me through!

I tried to do some research on whether or not methadone works as a mood stabilizer. I suspect that in many people it does. Heroin certainly does on me and far more than methadone ever did. And this is where I ran into problems. With methadone not stabilizing me, my mood plummeted. During the worst period I couldn't even handle my fortnightly appointments at the methadone clinic without first dosing myself up on heroin. I couldn't handle the pain.

When I feel the way I do now, there's almost no subject that doesn't put me in an angry or negative mood. Even the Chinese language annoys me, because they simplified their characters after World War II. The whole joy of Asian langauges is that they are complicated. So simplified Chinese is a sheeer offence against nature! The Japanese simplified many of their characters too, but they strayed nowhere near the vulgar excesses of the Chinese who, for example, hacked horse from 馬 into 马. Whoever's responsible for that travesty should be shot between the eyes.

Anything that remotely impinges on politics annoys the living crap out of me. London annoys me because it is too small, underpopulated with irritating compromise-skyscrapers: tall enough to be a blot on the landscape and totally out of character with traditional London; nowhere near tall enough to be internationally impressive. Anything to do with addiction treatment annoys me beyond the pale because addicts should be offered injectable diamorphine prescription (or else shot dead). Something drastic should be done and methadone is just a toxic compromise. Blah blah blah everything's bad. It should all be done differently and the laxness, the mediocrity, the uncaringness of everyone in society appals me.

My only joy in life, apart from Hammy from Tales in the Riverbank, is the Japanese langauge. The people who write the textbooks should be shot between the eyes, because they teach you to read in European characters! It took me MONTHS to figure out how Japanese sentences are actually composed in Japanese script (which is not entirely phonetic). By learning the script I now have a vocabulary far in excess of anything I ever knew in French or German at this stage. I know the names of 25 animals. I can talk about atomic bombs, volcanos and elements. Traditionally Japanese formed its technical vocabulary by compounding Chinese characters, so manifold new words can be formed just by slamming them together. Even there you have the issue of irritating homophonous words. Example the syllable shi し can be represented by no fewer than 56 Chinese characters: 市,詩,氏,詩,師,死,史 and so on. Sushi is written 寿司 but you could spell it out phonetically すし in hiragana or スシ in katakana.

I can't explain why I find the Japanese langauge such a source of enduring fascination, but I do. Somedays I have found myself thinking: I wonder how you say this? And I wonder how you say that? Which is how I learned the words for bee 花蜂, wasp ワスプ and hornet 雀蜂. A hornet is onomatapoeically named a soo-zoom!

Well I haven't said anything new today have I? Here are the 2 links I dug out:
1: methadone treatment for bipolar disorder
2: methadone and morphine as antidepressants

I've gotta go. It's late: past 3 in the morning and I must keep up with the Joneses. Sorry the Anna Grace Youngs and compose my memoirs!

Incurable

FINALLY I have got the computer to write Japanese 日本語の表記体系. There are 2 main ways of inputting Japanese. The main system requires knowledge of the Japanese keyboard layout because when you tap out QWERTY, you get タテイスカン (ta, te, i, su, ka, n). So I use the version for foreigners. If I want to write "mouse" I spell out nezumi I see ねずみ on screen; then I press space and the Chinese character for "mouse" appears: 鼠; finally I can highlight and F7 to get the phonetic katakana spelling for nezumi, ネズミ which is what most young children would write as the character 鼠 doesn't appear on the Japanese government's 常用漢字 official 1945-character list. So it's lots of fun typing. Far more involved than trying to find the accented e at the end of cafe.

There's no other news. All I've done re this memoir is ponder whether to start at the very beginning or go straight into the action where I OD on heroin ~ second time anyone ever injected me I ended up in hospital for 2 or 3 days. I cannot remember how many; I was too out of it.

I've wasted money on gear that was just too weak for words. I keep wondering 1: why I continue to take it and 2: why I want to stop. I do want to stop but I don't even know why. Best reason I can give is that I'm bored of it and want to try life without it once more. I lived 2/3 of my life without heroin so I'm sure I can live that way again. My biggest problem is with methadone. It's so demotivational. Knowing I'm taking something more addictive, more poisonous does nothing for the self-esteem. I don't think once they've tasted a life on heroin most people will ever find any meaning in life again. For this reason I still think the kindest treatment for junkies would be to line them up and machine gun them all down.

I don't know why I am bothering with any of this. They say a problem is just something you haven't solved yet, which means I have no problem except life. When I was little a paeophile tried to pick me up. It's a shame that didn't happen because if he'd had half an ounce of wherewithall about him, wouldn't be here now. I wanted to see my memoir as a cautionary tale, but that's missing the point and implying my problem is rooted in drugs when it's not. The drugs were just my attempt at a cure. Since birth there has been something wrong with me. People seem to assume because I'm humanoid I'm human, but even that's not necessarily true. Maybe I'm a totally different species. By human standards, there's something badly wrong I'm not willing to fix it I know I will only get blame blame blame when I do. So I do nothing, not knowing what to do...

There might be an answer. Maybe I haven't found it; maybe I have. Croutons. I need more croutons.

IT'S HALF PAST SIX. I'm about to go out to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. First one in nearly 2 weeks.

Buggalugz sent me a wondrous Tales of the Riverbank link. Tales of the Riverbank is about a hamster, a rat and a guinea swine who go on adventures by the riverbank where they live.

I particularly like Hammy's scenes in the diving bell and the toy aeroplane they ride in.

You can see two episodes if you scroll down to yesterday. Am I the only person having problems watching Youtube screens I've already embedded? When they don't play you can click the lower righthand corner and bring them up on a separate page; then they tend to play.

Last night I was in bed by 6pm; I slept right through and woke up in a bad mood, having forgotten to take methadone. So I took it and spent two hours feeling like a manic-depressive ice-block as I irritably waited for it to take its tardy effect. Then I went down the Post Office, got out some money and crowded home and watched Jeremy Kyle. By 10am I was so miserable I only wanted to go back to bed, so I took off my trainers and went to bed with coat and hat still on, where I stayed until 2. Deshane came round but I had no idea who was ringing the door-buzzer so I paranoidly declined to answer. I thought it was the council calling by to persecute me.

At 2:30 I got a call from my friend Pinky (Perky's ex) who wanted to borrow £20. So I lent her £20 and got her to score for me, which she did. The gear she was buying sounded crap and I would have cancelled the order if only she'd described in advance how lousy it was.

Anyway I took it home and banged up in my foot and now I'm in a better mood than before. I'm still going to NA. Everyone who has any association with AA or NA assumes I'm a terminal drunk when I reveal to them that I'm still drinking and that I drink every day and that I can't stop. By "can't stop" I mean I can't go a day without a single drink. I don't mean that once I start I continue knocking it back until I collapse in a cataleptic stupor. I had drink when I woke up this morning, but aside from one single swig, I couldn't face imbibing anything bar chicken and vegetable cup-a-soup (with croutons).

Because Pinky has the most miserable and upsetting life-story I've ever heard I offered to write it up as a book for her ~ and to my surprise she said yes. I'm also penning my own life story. Not because I think it's at all interesting, but because I want my family to profit from my misery when I die. I only had the idea in a fit of suicidal angst and thought the coroner's report would make a fantastic epilogue to my life. Maybe I shouldn't be saying this but I've told you everything else. I don't really like analysing what I did when and why, which is of course what you have to do to write a memoir. That's the stumbling block I encountered last time I tried. But if I don't write it and I die, my life will have been in vain. I want my family to profit from my death. And if I don't die and it does come out in print, I'd use the cash to get a private script for injectable methadone and morphine pills. Oral morphine is used as a private treatment for those who don't respond well to methadone (like me). The sustained release tablets need only be taken twice a day and would make you feel as though you'd hit up heroin at some indistinct time earlier. Rather than the spurious hold methadone has over you (complete with sweats, mood swings and hallucinations) morphine is well known to give addicts "a better quality of life" than rubbishy old methadone. I'd only ask for methadone because when prescribed privately you can ask for injectable 50mg/1ml amps which are of course far more likely to quench the urge to use on top as you've already had a hit. The NHS used to give out injectable methadone to intractable cases such as mine, but as my worker confirmed, nowhere in London does nowadays. In this day and age you're only allowed a chance if you go private, so it seems.

I don't mind methadone triggering mood swings, by the way: just as long as they're manic ones not depressive ones. Or that I don't get too manic, or too irritable. That's the only bad thing about mania: it's too unpredictable and uncontrollable. It isn't happiness (a good mood, versus a depressive bad mood) ~ it's excitement and excitement doesn't always feel great. I'd still rather be manic than depressed. Only a week or so ago I was so hyped up I was laughing uncontrollably at every opportunity. And there seemed endless opportunities for laughter. Now there are none at all and I fear over and over again that I'll have to give in and submit to mood stabilizers.

I can't read or watch or think about anything to do with ordinary life because everything makes me irritable or angry. Because it's not done right. The only things I can stand to occupy me are the Japanese language and hamsters. Everything else annoys me. So if I carry on in this bad mood I should be fluent in Japanese in no time at all.

I finally found a proper textbook (typically no accompanying CDs are available) that teaches the language from scatch in its proper script: that is, in standard Japanese orthography: kanji with hiragana and katakaa as appropriate. Not all in kana, like some Japanese textbooks. It's called Japanese for Everyone by Susumu Nagara and I found it here.

I also wanted to order Electroboy by Andy Behrman and The Quiet Room by Lori Schiller while I was at it. Both are psychiatric memoirs. Electroboy is about bipolar mania; The Quiet room is about schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (nobody appears to understand which). Probably I shouldn't be reading stuff like that, but I thought it might inspire my own drugs memoir. Electroboy has two covers: an electric yellow one, with the title in huge capitals, which I really like; and a really soppy arty one. If I wrote a book like that and had another manic episode I coudln't promise not to turn up at the publishers and shoot whoever OK'd that ridiculous cover between the eyes. It shows a really stupid face wearing a black hat, which is supposed to represent a the electric couplers on ECT machines. (ECT being a treatment for acute mania as well as depression; hence the title.) Poxy book covers are, in my opinion, an even worse crime against nature than cup-a-soup without croutons.

By the way the author of Electroboy claims to have taken huge amounts of cocaine while manic. How the hell he was able to do this and engage with life in even the most desultory way I cannot understand. One day when I was hyper I drank five cups of coffee in a row (I thougt I was tired). I then spent what felt like several days roaring like a wild animal, so deranged I had lost the ability to think in English. If I had taken coke in that state I doubt I'd ever have come back down to earth. (Some might say I still haven't.)

Well I'd better go. I have an NA group to attend and a memoir to ponder over (lots of thinking, no writing; that would be me). I've decided to write it as quickly as humanly possible just to get it over and done with. Apart from the money I'm only writing it as a cautionary tale to put the impressionable and destitute off ever experimenting with drugs the way I did. I don't think my life is fascinating and I don't think it's unusual. I just think I could tell the story well. If I set my mind to it. Pinky's story is far more interesting than mine. I'm really surprised she said she didn't mind her real name going against it. I'm not putting my real name on mine!


TALES OF THE RIVERBANK

THE DROUGHT
Hammy gets rained on and looks really cute



SAY CHEESE!
GP, the guinea swine makes a camera and a white guinea swine in a top hat takes everyone's picture...
ps has anyone noticed how Hammy looks like he's about to keel over from sheer exhaustion at any moment?
Hamsters are nocturnal and this was shot by the glaring light of day...

Sleepy Maniac

UKH. MY SLEEP IS ALL OVER THE PLACE. At 8pm I started feeling tired. I realized that, having got up at 1am, it was actually time to sleep. So I slept for one hour. Then I woke up and felt too excited to sleep again until it was light outside. I got to sleep finally at some time around 6, 7 or 8 in the morning. I kept waking up. Then I slept all day and missed my clinic appointment. I didn't have bus fare on me, so would have had to walk all the way down. I wasn't up for this, so I just skipped it. Now I've got to go in tomorrow and do penance in the waiting room.

I slept 6 or 7 or 8 hours and got up some time after 4. I seemed to spend most of the day half awake and smoking. Anyway I realized what I've been doing, instead of spending about 16 hours awake like a normal person, then sleeping 8 and going to bed and getting up at the same time each day, what I've been doing is staying awake longer than 24 hours ~ past the time I last got up ~ staying up staying up somewhere between 30 hours and a day and a half. Then I'm sleeping an average amount of sleep ~ somewhere between 7 and 9 hours. So I think I've slept OK. But I haven't. The spaces between periods of sleep have grown huge.

I wasn't in a good mood today. I still feel kind of hyped up but irritable and tired. The bouncy ball shop was SHUT when I skulked round there with my 50p. I avoided heroin and bought 3 zopiclone sleeping pills instead. These cost me £5. Ripoffsville; but I was desperate for them. I've popped one already. I'd rather sleep now and get up in the early hours. There's a slim chance I might sleep right through but I dunno. Every time I try and sleep I feel like an over-excited child I just cannot wind down. I'm definitely not full-on manic; when I am everything looks bright and luminous and incredibly textured, I feel even more excited (as if I'm on drugs) and when I close my eyes my head is lit up vividly from the inside ~ it's literally like watching a particularly luminous cine film of the most spectacular dream-imagery in the style of Michael Jackson's Leave Me Alone video. So I'm not manic, just a bit hyped up. And I have been hyped up for days. I'm not complaining by the way. Sleep deprivation and agitation aside, it's a million times better than being depressed.

For some stupid reason, instead of buying proper food I went and bought a highly indulgent chocolate cake complete with buttercream filling and heaps of milk, plain and white chocolate shavings on top. And I also think I'm getting crouton poisoning from too much cup-a-soup.

I lost my second worst bouncy ball under a car last night. I was lying on the street with a stick trying to poke it out. Thank God the police didn't drive down the road, I'd have been a gonner!

I really want to speak Japanese (again). I'm so glad I decided my language books are the only ones I'm going to keep. No novels. No crap. I've so many books to get rid of it's unreal. Anyway I have two kanji character dictionaries. One teach yourself Japanese which is falling apart. I don't know whether to buy another copy or switch brands. I need a book and CD compendium. I've got Teach Yourself Mandarin Chinese which I also want to learn, but the pronunciatio's VERY difficult (for me) ~ far harder than Thai ~ and though I do want to learn Chinese, I want to learn Japanese more. In my opinion no person can call himself a citizen of the world without speaking French, Spanish and Chinese fluently. Out of those 3 I only know French of a terrible standard. But good enough to go to Morocco and speak practically no English. African French is way easier to follow than French French.

Enough of this: o yeah German. I've got a real bug to speak perfect German (yet again). When I was at school my teacher used to lend me ancient 1970s copies of Stern magazine, which is like a cross between Time and Newsweek magazines and the best of the Sunday papers rolled into one. O man I vividly recall leafing through longing so badly to understand what was in that magazine. Finally, after doing a year of German at university, dropping out, picking it up again about 18 years later by ploughing through the original text of Christiane F (the true story of a child prostitute and heroin addict ~ which yet again, stemmed from an original report guess where? In Stern magazine! It's also a cult film in the history of heroin cinema, you can watch it here.)

Yeah so that's about that. I hope this isn't too swirly I'm not in the mood for reading back the crap I've written tonight. The Apprentice is on and I must ping and gobble more cake.

Sweet dreams y'all!!!


If you wonder why I rave on about how I love being manic, take a look at this. It's the exact manner of thing that I see when, during a particularly exalted excited episode, I shut my eyes ....

MICHAEL JACKSON: LEAVE ME ALONE

OK no doggies today I promise you.

I'm TIRED. SICK AND TIRED OF BEING SICK AND TIRED ... as the saying goes. But not, unfortunately sick and tired enough.

I don't post about my own drugs very much these days because I am bored of it. If I'm bored I'm only going to be boring... so I keep my trap shut and fantasize instead about a more perfect life with a scruffy ro-ro (OK: first and only canine reference over and done with)... I have barely any veins left. My right ankle is swollen like a bowling pin. Yet still the using goes on and on and I'm just bored of it.

I have a tiny bag of gear lurking on the sideboard. There's a crisp £20 lying temptingly on the telly... and yet I've fully decided on doing Sunday drug-free. (Well, on methadone, of course, but no illicit drugs.)

"Just for today" as they say... Not that I have any sort of track record of success. But as the saying goes: if at first you don't succeed ~ try, try TRY AGAIN!

I have been desperately seeking any online resources for learning Japanese that are FREE and of GOOD QUALITY... and haven't really found any. Surely someone, somewhere has put SOMETHING up that's decent...? Oh well.

Seeing as I'm very slowly learning to read and write the language of the rising sun, I thought I'd have a look at the Japanese Bible. I had a hunch that the first word might well be the verb hajimeru, as in "hajemimashite" ~ the basic phrase you say when you meet someone. It literally means something like "let us begin"... hajimeru means to begin and ~ ta-daa! It is indeed the first word of Japanese Genesis 1:1 ("In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"... (The Japanese say hajime-ni "beginning-in", because they're Japanese and mad!))

創世記 1

1 はじめに神は天と地とを創造された。2 地は形なく、むなしく、やみが淵のおもてにあり、神の霊が水のおもてをおおっていた。

3 神は「光あれ」と言われた。すると光があった。4 神はその光を見て、良しとされた。神はその光とやみとを分けられた。5 神は光を昼と名づけ、やみを夜と名づけられた。夕となり、また朝となった。第一日である。

No of course I cannot read every word. But apart from はじめに "in the beginning" (and how hard was THAT to guess!?) I did recognize 光 "light" (let there be 光) and 一日 "the first day". Who knows? At this rate by 2016 I might be able to read the rest of it..!

POOR GORDON BROWN!

The Prime Minister is in trouble... Or at least he was on Thursday. So before this is totally old news, here's the email I sent to Vanessa Feltz the other day ~ she read it on her BBC London radio show!!

For those blessed to be continents away from the British general election, I should explain that Gordon Brown had been out canvassing when his assistant set up a conversation with an old Northern lady who appeared to be a staunch Labour supporter, so with news cameras rolling they had a short chat, only for her to burst into a tirade about Eastern European immigrants and "where did they all come from?" ("well it wasn't China!" said the witty Vanessa)... Once dragged away from this the flustered Prime Minister retreated to his car and, not realizing he was still miked up to Sky News, branded the old woman a "bigot" ~ and all media hell broke loose!


Good Morning Lovely Vanessa (she always calls us "Lovely Listeners")

What a load of rot some of your callers have been spouting this morning!

My feelings towards Gordon Brown have long been exceedingly mixed ~ as much as anything because he appears to have been so loath in the past EVER to admit to being wrong ~ as he has been so many times ~ proclaiming an end to boom bust would be a sterling example. I would have loved to hear him admit he was wrong over that one and apologize profusely...

But what has he done wrong this time?

Let off steam in the privacy of his own car? The Conservatives claim this shows "the real Gordon Brown" ~ well I say, if it does then it's all to the good. All he has done is call a bigot a bigot. What's so wrong about that?

And of course he has to say sorry IF he has caused offence. Had he branded his own comments "offensive", imagine the lovely soundbite that would have made!

PS I just realized I understood an entire Japanese sentence (OK, not a sentence, a clause ~ but I understand it all!!!:
神はその光を見て
~ it means "God saw this light". I cannot transliterate I'm afraid because I only just leared 神 is "God" when I first read this entry this evening and 光 I have long known to mean light ~ look! 光 you can see rays beaming out of the top 光光光... but I cannot for the life of me remember any of its pronunciations (most kanji have at least two very different readings that mean the same thing ~ the original Chinese pronunciation and the native Japanese word ~ It would be like drawing wavy lines and saying they read "water"... but also "aqua" as per the Latin... PPS did you know the EU has recommended (but not made compulsory) LATIN-language ingredients on chemically formulated products (where chemical names are the same across languages) like shanppoos, so instead of reading the majority ingredient as "water" in perfume etc we see "aqua"..! How international...

Broiling hot

YES it's very hot indeed... I believe "broiling" is the word some of you Americans use when you mean you're putting something under the grill... and that's how hot it is today. I'm sweating like an amphibious swine, it's terrible. If I were going to be like a swine I would want to be something like a Japanese pig-dog, a buta-inu 豚犬 like those trotter Norfolk and Glen of Imaal terriers from the other day, who look like a wild boar, minus the little trotter tusks.
In all this heat I've been reading Grimms Märchen ~ meine Familie sent me a charming antique volume in the original German, so I've been reading that. It's from the early 20th century, printed in the curly blackletter type with the kind of Edwardian colour illustrations I really like (they remind me of my own childhood, reading handmedowns from my grandparents' era) ... nearly all German books were printed in Gothick type prior to World War II. I think it looks really funky. Why SHOULD everything look sanseriph and crap just because we're in 2010?
I've been trying to dig out youtube screens that teach Japanese for my language blog. There's plenty about, it's just a question of pasting up the good ones. I actually had better luck with Chinese, because the BBC ~ who usually do this stuff well ~ made some excellent teach yourself Mandarin videos for late night TV. I do want to learn Chinese as well, but don't want to overburden and lose my thread... Confucius, he say: he who chase two rabbits catch neither one...

This song reminds me of doing GCSE French at school... here in the UK it got to number 5 in 1988... in much of continental Europe, including the Soviet Union, it got to number one the previous year...

DESIRELESS: VOYAGE VOYAGE



And finally ~ how could I drop the dogs theme? ~ we have CARKIES ~~
Doggies who are Yorkshire-Cairn Terrorizer Cross




Did I say very much? Did I say what I wanted to say? Did I remember? My brainbox is too well broiled to know..!

PS I didn't think I was that fussy, but the two major doggie rescue centres I consulted had only one small mop mutt each: Eddie at Battersea Dogs' Home, South London and Scruffy (as mentioned the other day) at the Wood Green Animal Shelter, North London. I couldn't take either one as both have been rehomed, the lucky 豚犬 butas! Eddie is only about one and a half, but Scruffy is seven... I wonder what happened to them?... do you think their old owners died? Poor little swines. I hope they are happy now ... poor little furries :-)

A Hachi Type of Dog

I MET A HACHI TYPE OF DOG in the park this morning. (After the dog in the film Hachi, starring Richard Gere.) I had a good idea this breed was probably Japanese, because of the cute face. Apparently they are called Chūken Hachikō 忠犬ハチ公 which means "faithful friend". The friendly dog came right up to me. His fur was incredibly soft ~ the nearest doggie fur can come to chinchilla. I said "hello you furry old swine". Then the owner saw me and smiled. And the doggie ran off...

I wish I had a dog like that. (And about £1200 to pay for a puppy.)

What a furry entertainer!!



HACHI TRAILER Japanese subtitled:
the dog is found at the 駅, the eki ~ the railway station.
Doesn't the furry swine look all "wise" in this still..!

PS hachikō doggies are better known as Akita Inu 秋田犬



HACHI longer trailer, in English



HACHI III: how they aged the furry dogs who played the part:




PPS: I love Carol Jackson (for those of you allergic to soap operas or residing on far-flung shores, that's Bianca's mother (pictured here as scruffy mother of the bride) on EastEnders... Played by Lindsay Coulson... she reminds me of my flirtatious old English teacher at school...