Shiny Sunday

SHINY SUNDAY... it's been the earliest ~ and coldest ~ Easter in nearly 100 years. I say "shiny" ~ really it's a bright white day. Much of London (apparently) had snow yesterday, though none settled. We've not had serious, Christmas-card style snow to the best of my memory, since 1981. I remember tobogganing down the middle of the road (cars slippin' and slidin' all over so no chance of gettin' mown down and this was on a hill with a dead end up top) aged nine and drest in my first pair of jeans. (I'd been a couldroy kid up till then ~ how very 1970s!)

I went through a memoirs brainstorming session with a close friend last night. And emerged from it feeling less conclusive than ever before...

Also I was advised to publish electronically, online. The thought of selfpublishing memoirs or fiction, either e-wise or on paper, I have to say, leaves me utterly cold. Since starting this blog I have realized the essential paradox of the net: that with well over 100 million potential readers (in English) and all the clamour and confusion for attention, it really is hard to get noticed... without paying massive pounds-per-click to Google to get toplisted... I get only 80 hits ~ and that's on a good day.

I think a blog like mine with its sometimes challenging subject matter demands a level of ongoing emotional investment that most people feel unable to give. A book of memoirs requries such investment for only days... and then you move on. Far more attractive!

If my blog stuggles to make 80 hits, how on earth would I sell a book of 100,000 words ~ and CHARGE FOR IT (because that was the suggestion) and make anything like enough income for a 7-storey double-fronted house off Sloane Square with basement swimming pool? I really don't see this internet publishing thing working.

People go online for FREE information. They go to a bookshop to pay. Books are selling better than ever before (unlike newspapers, which are sinking Titanic-like into the meery gloom...)

Seeing new readers appear on my blog who might have spent two hours or more a day for several days in a row perusing my blabberings... then they mostly vanish. This convinced me that some people were reading my blog like a book anyhow.

But surely most people are still like me. They want a book they can take on the train to work each morning, eat sandwiches over at lunch, take into the bath and curl up with at night before dropping off. It becomes part of them for a week; then goes to a friend, or to the bookshelf.

In these days of pain, the socalled Misery Memoir has become a topselling category on any general publisher's list. These books sell. And I have a story to tell. If it's worth telling, it's worth selling.

My "dream", if you want to call it that, has always been to snag a top agent who will make a deal with a large conglomerate publisher with the power to orchestrate international publicity etc and get my book into every bookshop, airport, railway station etc the world over. I would be willing to play my part and go out promote promote promote on radio, on television (if they'd have me ~ ha!) and in print. Because that's the game, these days more than ever...

Books are showing no sign of any decline in sales in this so-called electronic age. It is worth bearing in mind that of all the massmedia: films, records etc, the printed word is by far the oldest and most enduring. In the last decade the highest sellers have sold higher than ever before ~ 50 million plus on seven Harry Potters and The Da Vinci Code. Distribution systems are more sophisticated than ever before. My blog gets only 20% of its readers from the UK. In other words 80% are scattered worldwide. How can I possibly selfpublish in volume format and arrange anything like such international distribution? Or even worse, e-publish and convince anyone to pay? Be honest: have ANY of you EVER paid any money for an online text-only product? I'd love to hear from you if you have.

First rule of business, as I see it ~ the customer is set in his ways. No matter how good my book might be I honestly don't see that I'd get anything like optimum revenue by putting it online and expecting people to pay ~ when there are reams upon reams of websites offering information on the same subject whether or not it's worse-written ~ for FREE.

Also, no traditional publisher would go anywhere near my work after I'd done this. When blogs have been "published", it's nearly always been on the understanding that the author adds at least 50% in fresh material.

A recent radio documentary on the future of the book surprised me in that even young children, the socalled Harry Potter Generation STILL preferred printed volumes to e-books or reading onscreen or scratting through nasty old print-outs.

I'm not against selfpublishing when it comes to roborovski books and other sideprojects. But I'm looking for a career. And I intend to make one by crafting memoirs and fiction: and by getting well paid for it!

Nobody seems to get it. I don't WANT to be a publisher. I want to be an author. Publishing is a business; authorship an art or craft. And as I said before, my ambition has always been to be an authro of heatwrenching bestsellers and to sell enough books to stretch end on end to the moon and back. Harper Collins or Random House could do this for me. I couldn't do it on my own!

Perhaps this soudns arrogant. To me it's just ambition. As the saying goes: reach for the stars and you might just catch the moon.

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EAster has so far passed me by with nary a chocolate egg. All my talk of "trotters" and I've had a dose of the trots myself (yeah: you really wanted to hear that!)

If you're enduring fractious relatives after a ten hour road trip you have my sympathy.

It's a bleary day here. What do people actually do for Easter? I've no idea. I've never done it.

OK: bleary day; cheery day. It's what you make it. I hope all goes well with you.

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Easter Bunny Doggie...

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Music of the Day:
The Specials: Ghost Town

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Hey! Spherical did a furry entertainment yesterday, when she poked her head from the teabox where they all sleep again... the hole is only JUST gnawed big enough to let a tubby robo in or out... so her head, protruding from this teabox, looked moosehead-on-plaque just like a bizarre piece of weary Victoriana ~ she was so entertaining

Radio Gledwood¬!

PHONE CALL FROM THE RADIO TODAY offering free red wine if I come in with other prized telephone contributors to go under the mic and testify how wonderful we find the show!!

I took the call in full chirping enthusiasm, saying how much I loved the presenter in question etc, not realizing at the time how every statement I made was a tick tick tick (that's a "check" to you Americans) in the mental boxes of "valued contribution-worthy listener"... I was actually being upbeat in case I'd won a million-pound cash prize. Sadly not. but I claimed I was all up for meeting with other listeners, big fat microphones and some of "the team" at such and such a time on WEDNESDAY. Which doesn't give me too much time to fret about which pair of diarrhoea-stained jeans and smelly holey socks I'm going to wear...

My initial reaction was "I CAN'T GO!" Even when I try and clean myself up I look... well I look like what I am. No contact lenses and lgasses on the skew like a walking %percentage%-sign...

Then I thought why NOT? Obviously make the effort but come as you are.

Then I thought HEY ~ hang on, I could apply for a work experience/internship here. I don't know how to explain a TWELVE YEAR GAP in my employment history ~ except by declaring the truth: that years of illness (depression and chronic fatigue syndrome CFS topped with drug addiction) threw me off course.

Maybe I could vanilla it all out, make it all anodyne and acceptable. But then I thought: hang on, talk radio is about human situations. If I'm used to life on the frontline ~ people ill, diseased, abused, uncared-for, insulted and injured and dying ~ and can meet their tales with empathy and warmth, why should I lie on my CV or resume or application?

As a writer of memoirs, I can hardly reveal all in print, yet lie on my CV and on air, can I? In the end, there can only be one truth, and as the (Biblical, I'm pretty sure,) saying goes: Be sure your sins will find you out!

Perhaps I seem a bit glib at times, a little too ready to spout out all about my disgusting injecting heroin habit. But I'm not proud of it at all. I merely made my decision, many moons ago, to be straight with people online and on this blog... otherwise imagine how it might go? Me making friends the world over under totally false pretences... I'd be leading a double life even more than usual.

Like a house of cards, such fragile situations are apt to come tumbling down at the very first sneeze...

In real life, people see me and know that something ~ they may not grasp precisely what ~ but they realize something's up, not right, quite frankly all wrong... Online I might prattle about hamsters, homes, politics, etc: nobody would be any the wiser. And yet friendships might grow, relationships be cherished... and all under totally false pretences.

If I can possibly avoid it, I'm really not one for living out a lie.

OK tangent over.

Back to the radio. What should I do? Do I turn up to this drinks and "recording how brilliant I think the show is" soundbite evening?

And do I apply for this internship? And if so, how do I handle my past?

Please: I need some experienced advice!


Song of the Day:
Captain Sensible: Glad It's All Over

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21:16hrs COLD FEET!
I'M TOO SCARED TO GO! I DON'T WANT TO SET A BAD IMPRESSION. I don't have nice clothes (really don't)... no confidence at ALL in my appearance. My hair needs cutting. I desperately need (a) contact lenses or (b) a proper pair of glasses that don't need a hat to sit vaguely straight on my head (that's how bashed up my current glasses are ...) I only TOOK to wearing glasses because of rock-bottom self-esteeem (I feel about 10% as good in them as I do in contacts)... it all feels too rushed, too early. The internship/work experience is a totally different issue: I've obviously set a good enough impression on air; I really feel (no exaggeration) that I would destroy this if I admitted who I was in person and I won't meet the producer tomorrow but some other person.

The two issues:
A) recording praise and
B) applying for work experience
are totally separate. The latter is my focus.
You're all sure I should be 100% frank? I could fudge my career "gap" by saying I'd been travelling and working fleamarkets in Goa and Thailand and no-one could prove otherwise; but as I said earlier, I'm writing memoirs that will tell everything. In the long run I don't see any gain from lying (and hate doing it)... my bad experiences might stand me in good stead

aargh I don't know what to do I'm not dying of pressure to turn up tomorrow (it IS just a thing to record listener soundbites that is ALL) I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know aaarghkkkhhh! Maybe I will bring Baby Itchy in my pocket. She can bite me for good luck...

Authorship: Harvest Mouse Ship!

PEEPING IN AT MY HAMMIES on Sunday afternoon, imagine my surprise ~ between the two Parmesan tubes ~ to spot a gargantuan ball of fur with three faces. Yes! The tiny trotters had set up a nest out in broad daylight. Between those twin bed-come-"toilet" tubes; right underneath the waterbottle. All three in a row, blinking dumbly at me in late afternoon's sheer sunshine; Itchy, perhaps, might take to licking at the bottle. Bashful, by natural instinct, joins in. They look so funny there, a symmetrical pair of robbies licking simultaneusly at their mouse-bottle. Then Spherical really does clamber across the room for a poopoo and climbs straight back home on top of the other two... The tubby pair just close eyes as pink paws tread over ~ they're quite used to this. And so my furry pyramid, eyes open, ears pricked up alertly up top, two thirds slumbers, one third washes self. Looking so entertaining, it's a strain not to laugh in their treble-faces. (See top photo to see how their sleepy pile appears...) Such cackles must be restrained, else my tiny tubbies can get offended and scared.

What they do like is a poke from a fried-ricey chopstick-end. Unlike Naughty - my rottweilerien former snow white Campbells Condensed Russian hamster, who used to grab said stick with arms and jaws and perform a trick by allowing self to be picked up and waved around the room as he savaged into the hapless wood with assertive teeth... These present whiskery gremlins grab half-heartedly, or stare in asonishment and the MSG-and-eggs ponging end and nibble as it comes close enough... And of course, now and then take horror and ping off in astonishment to tentatively sniff out of hidey-toilet-tubes with quivery fat pink noses. The swines!

And how am I? Thankful for the interminable weekend's eventual end. Druing which I ran so totally out of money I didn't even have the other 30p to add to 29p to purchase cyder not-on-tick yesterday...

On Satruday nite I was happy since I found a clingfilmed lump ~ a £10 deal of crack! ~ on our front doorstep! That really made my night.

I scrawled out a single halfbaked stanza, a "quatrain" ~ four lines of a 14-line attempted sonnet about heroin adiction. On reperusal next night I found it wasn't actually so very terrible. So I'm sticking with the attempted poetry. Because I love poetry. I think I have an ear for it @ a real ear for it; a facility @ and not so very many people do. Poetry is a high art. And merifully compact enough for me; hopefully ~ eventually ~ to churn out & be able to declare: look! A polished, all-completed Work of Art. By me!! What a blast THAT would be!

I haven't pushed any further with my book of memoirs yet, however. I had riginally hoped to have completed draft one by now: I can't though. I need to finish my book. I see it as my passport out of this drudgesome morass of a cess-heap ruined, bombed-out, self-destructed void of a life...

When done; once out there, my book shall declare:~

1. that I have talent enough to warrant taking seriously as an Artist in the Literary Sphere, and

2. it shall hopefully accrue me advance finances enough to pay my way through express detox (which costs several thousand pounds) ~ plus buy me a multimedia Apple laptop and all the facilities I need not only to wordprocess, but to document my life in audiovisual clips. These I would collect either to youtube or to put towards a wizzy selfmade documentary of myself or both. Or summut like... and... be able to pay rent on at least a 1-bed preferably (bc I could do with the space) 2-bed flat ... (or even better get a £5 million advance and be able to buy a pokey flat outright (well that's all you get for £5 million in London these days...)...


3. most obviously, basically of all ~ authorship sets me, at long last, on the road to a proper and fulfilling career...! (Yes it does!)

TA-daa! And now I must go! I do hope y'all loved Saturday's harvest mouse montage. MICROMYS MINUTUS ~ I love that Latin! ~ a very teeny-tiny-mini-mousie... how can you get cuter than that~?!?

PS How's everybody like my new "avatar"... I got fed up with tiny nervous roborovsky baby on hand; I tried to be tubby old "I ran 10,k00 miles/16,000 kilometres ~ as far as Paris to New Delhi in my 3.5 human years/120 hamster years too-brief-lifetime Pandable! But poor Pandable wouldn't take... so I'm a tiny gingery harvest mouse instead ...


ps Take a peek at the top pic to see how the dismantled pile of mass-groomers appears ... don't the robos look gremlin-like..??

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this is a really good photoblog: joannwalraven.blogspot.com

Robo Water Crisis!

FOR TWO DAYS NOW my robbies have been lacking a reliable water supply. They used to get water from a bottle taped to the glass quite securely. The tape ran out and I made alternative arrangements, balancing the bottle over cardboard etc... this didn't work the bottle fell down and Bashful and Spherical nearly beat it up, biting and nudging at it to try and force water out. When of course my Giant Hand came to their aid they gazed up at its celestial appearance and scrambled away for sheer terror! Then I set it up again but the tape was too thin and came down. Their only reliable water these past 2 days has come from fresh cucumber! And the sogginess left by a slowly leeching out waterbottle.

I once tried them with water in a pot, like Pingpong the excellently behaved Chinese hamster. These roborovskis are not well behaved at all, however. Nary had it been down half an hour than Bashful tried to go swimming in it - sploshed in! - then pinged out in astonishment as if shocked that so much water could be so wet! If it had been Itchy I'd have wrapped her up in warm towels, but Bashful by name; Bashful by nature. She shot into the teabox to dry off alone in the fluffiness that fills it ...

My last efforts at reattaching the bottle have also failed. Said bottle is on the floor, leaking into the sawdust - where at least they have enough moisture to drink even if it's not ideal. They are after all desert critters and are supposed to be adapted to make to without any supply of moisture save the morning dew... but I heard a sad tale of someone who went away for a week to find their rebellious tubby had taken on himself to rearrange his home, pushing the plastic hammyhouse up against the water bottle, which either blocked it off or caused it to empty out... either way, the poor hammy had already died.

So I've invested in ultra-secure thick tape this time so no more waters-spills, so to speak and hopefully Spherical, Bashful and Itchy will be pinging happily for a long time yet!

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Xmas is approaching and I think I have got an invitation to do Xmas lunch at Mother Hubbs's. They weren't sure whether they weren't going out to eat this year... but the way it's going I expect they will do Xmas at home after all.

So I shan't be stuck on my own with a turkey sandwich and a gnarled copy of Dickens!

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Talking of literature I'm still on the trawl for something OK to read.

Three books I do have are:
~ Dickens' Bleak House (as frequently mentioned) ...
~ Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov. My English teacher at school said this was the most boring book he'd ever opened, which personally I take as a contrary sort of recommendation as he recommended Joseph Andrews to me which I found wafflesomely longwinded!
~ Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. This one's quite good and I'm already about two thirds of the way through. My problem was the poor paperback falling in half! And a necessary hunt for the unknown second section ....

I also think I have Dostoyevsky's The Idiot somewhere lurking in a corner... however I really could not say where ...

UNFORTUNATELY I cannot use the public library, cheery idea as it is, as I've still got overwhelming debts to them from nearly a decade ago. I'm reduced instead to trawling the charity shops and ordering notable books from the budget classics ranges from the local "stores"... this part of London is disgustingly badly supplied with bookstores though, I have to say.

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ALL MANNER OF VULGARITY was going on in my house late last night. I reckon I was the only one to get any rest in there. I dread to think precisely what was going on... and so I don't want to know.

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I'm busy summoning up characters for my own novel. Which I wrote out once; but for various reasons I'm unhappy with the haggard old plot. And so I'm going to perform something midway between a common rewrite and a total reworking; just keeping some of the same characters and situations but making a totally new construction out of it...

Last night I got a little paranoid about my powers of characterization. I believe that in fiction the portrayal of character is far more fundamental and important than even a good story. Why? Because in a great story it's the characters we remember as much if not more than what happened... It's the characters that make us want to come back to their wonderful world... I could go blithering on but will leave it for later. I need something to start penning directly the very second my memoirs are over!

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Have you ever seen a white robin? This one was photographed in an East Dorset garden and got in the Times and Sun newspapers this morning....

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Here's the link for the BBC's brand new Oliver Twist adaptation. Typical me to have mist the 1st 2 parts but what the heck. Mr Bumble's getting married tonight!

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IF ANYBODY WANTS TO EMAIL ME YOU CAN GET IN TOUCH AT
HAMMYNUTTER@LYCOS.COM

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I had a peer in the tartan washing bag just now. All three gremlins are rambling on the wheel, two at a time with the spare one pinging around the perimeter. Spherical has packed her pouches so exceedingly she is seriously globular and sending Itchy looping the loop round and round again ...

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SO THE GREAT READING POLL CLOSES...
Charles Dickens wins the day...
The one I really want most is Great Expectations as that is the story I know second best after Oliver Twist...
I'm also hunting out my copy of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky but cannot presently find it anywhere...

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NOW I'M PUTTING UP A NEW POLL...
My forthcoming fiction shall feature a giant, ill-tempered slavering hellhound of an English Mastiff who spends her time savaging pram wheels, dolls, etc; pulling soft toys apart... growling at houseguests, baying at the light fittings etc etc. She has a total personality change, however, when she gets "raped" down the park by a local rottweiler... leading to a howling, baying, snaggle-toothed litter of puppies!
Anyway, which of these three names do you think fits best?
(In alphabetical order)
Gwendolina
Pansy
Tinkerbelle
???
Vote now (up top)...!!

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Video:
My Lil Turkey Farm

Odd Dreams Dickens Robo Pings...

I HAD TWO PARTICULARLY BIZARRE DREAMS IN THE NIGHT... first one was of trying to escape somewhere, trying to travel through countryside when the railway was out of action. So I decided to get there by flowing down the river... which I did quite successfully swirling in cold water with the current... until I fell asleep (and literally did fall back asleep in my dream) only to wake up horribly claustrophobically enclosed deep under ground having been swept down a dank dark cave-tunnel. And could not get out until great fortitude dragged me shivering and freezing cold up against the current and back into sunlight (wonder what that symbolizes...? Hmmm!)

Dream number two ~ I'm sure a dream-interpreter would have a field-day with this particular one ~ I was in a large rambling house belonging to a friend, it was being cleared out and to this end they decided to throw a huge party, not caring whether the place got trashed now since no remaining possessions there... There was a vile atmosphere in the place, lots of sleazy horrible men. And lots and lots of girls. I particularly remember one who looked like her nose had been in an Apple Mac Pinnochio Elongation machine - it was so long and ridiculous. Actually all these girls were prostitutes and I'd managed to get "inveigled" (if that is the right word) in a brothel. Right to the very end I took no part in their "services" (and didn't want to either)... until, just before waking up, I discovered the only service they offered was a last-supper-style footwashing. (No I'm not bowdlerizing my own dream: that really was the service on offer. The straightforward washing of feet...) Eventually I let Miss Pinnochio Nose (who vaguely reminded me of a girl in my violin class in primary school) wash my feet and it was so good I had her do it three times. Then I woke up.

Wonder what on earth that could mean!

I AM READING CHARLES DICKENS' OLIVER TWIST. (His second book.) It is nowhere near as waffly as Bleak House (one of his last books, by which time he must have got a liking for the sound of his own literary voice and flattered himself that his audience did the same...!) It's far briefer and to the point.

But poor Oliver Twist! A ten year old boy and small for his age. (So many of Dickens' characters are little boys small for their age. I wonder why?... Does this make them more sympathetic to the hard-hearted "get up the chimney you horrible little sweep" audience of the day? Do you think..?) I was nearly in tears at some bits when everybody was being so cruel to him. I'm glad I didn't go for Anna Karenina now (though I should point out that, despite the title, AK is not really a girlie book. It has about four main characters, two of which are male and two female. It's about being upperclass in Tsarist Russia and having affairs and divorces. A very modern read!)

Tolstoy is a more sophisticated writer than Dickens. More naturalistic; less pantomime! There's little Dickens says that he doesn't verbally treble-underline in shocking pink to ensure we get the point ... I must confess I've never finished a single one of his works either!

What really put me off Dickens for years was his habit of caricaturing, quite hideously, nearly every character he portrays. Although this makes the stories a lot easier to grasp on first reading, it's not actually as "realistic" as it purports to be. For all his literary "greatness" I would say Dickens is actually a top writer of pop fiction of his time rather than the pretentious "literary" works, for example, for which the more fungoid and ponderous like George Eliot was famed ...

Reading such fiction has made my memoirs seem even more unattractive than they already were, and simply illuminated all the sparkly advantages I could gain from a fictional account of the junkie life... For one thing every other person apart from myself in my current MS is deliberately thrown into soft-focus and misted over. I have to do this bc they're all real people - and with a few exceptions all still alive! If I portrayed their faults in too fine a detail I'd wake up being garotted by my own affronted supporting cast! In a novel however - because the characters are not real the novelist has carte blanche to dig up their sordid motivations, personal secrets and inner life as much as he or she likes... I hate to shillyshally but the more of Oliver Twist's pickpocketing exploits I peruse the more inspired I am to tell my own modern-day tale of shoplifting junkies!

I will let you know how I get on.

If I do ever get on ...

I TOOK BABY ITCHY OUT FOR A RAMBLE LAST NIGHT. Problem #1 was I accidentally mistook Bashful for her and had chaos scrambling and skydiving out of the longest lavatory tube in panick!

Then Itchy finally was captured and grabbed in my hands. I don't know if she was in a bad mood or had just heard my say "you're so tiny and furry" one time too many or whether she got startled by something like my putting one foot down on an extra-crinkly and startlesome carrier bag (roborovskis startle really easily; that's just what they're like. They're never as calm as normal hamsters. They're also ten times more pingy and curious than normal hamsters so that's the compensation...) One particularly amusing time they even got terrified when I poked some fresh parsley into their tube when they were sleeping. O! The kerfuffle! Three balls of fur went shooting out the other end like bullets from a machine gun. You'd have thunk I'd poked tendrils from an evil hamster-eating space-alien in there. Not a sprig of fresh herbs!

... anyway silly old Itchy got startled and literally dived in a treble back somersault - like the high divers at the olympics. And splotted down on my pink and yellow psychedelic blanket, didn't waste a nanosecond and went straight into a turbo-ping for freedom. Thankfully I was onto her in a flash and caught the wildly heartbeating little swine and squeezed her bum at the end of her magic wand - which kind of makes her shoot up through it at 120 miles per hour, appearing at the other end just head showing and an astonished look on her furry face!

Right I have to ping myself now as I've things to do. Have an entertaining weekend everyone!!

PS Do have a look at today's vids. Esp. Engelbert. I can't work out whether it's original 1967 footage or a mixture of then and now or what but he looks like a German talk show host and it's really tacky. Utterly hilarious!! ;->...

Tunes of the Day:
Tina Turner: (Simply) The Best
Englebert Humperdinck: (Please) Release Me ...

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EVER HEARD OF THAT FAMOUS AMERICAN JAIL WHERE MEN LANGUISH IN 120f DESERT HEAT IN PINK UNDIES?
Well a British guy called Shaun Atkinson has just got deported back here from there and gave an interview all about it on BBC Radio 4's "drivetime" news prog, PM.
Apparently all three years he was in there his parents kept a rolling blog about it; here's the link:
http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com
Excellent stuff!
This is one I really wish I'd known sooner!
To get right back to post one from 2004 about the cockroach infestation clickonthis.

Boozing Mothers Get Thumbs Up Shock!

SO BOOZING IN PREGNANCY IS TO BE RE-ALLOWED. Experts proclaim today: pregnant women can knock back one glass of wine a day without untoward consequences to the unborn child ... big surprise! ... it's not expected to harm the baby.

As I commented on Radio 4's PM blog just now (PM is their drivetime early evening news prog) the fears about drinking in pregnancy stem from photographs originating in America in the late 1980s depicting the horrific consequences of foetal alcohol syndrome ... ie babes so soaked in booze as they formed in the womb that they're deformed and retarded. One drink per day will not achieve this. Even - perish the very thought - getting drunk once while pregnant won't...

Another point we seem all to forget is that nearly all of OUR mothers drank when they were pregnant with US because they knew no better... what harm did this do us?

The biggest dangers to kids from alcohol are the bad example parents so often set children by drinking, fighting, falling apart in front of their offspring long after birth... and more than this the danger posed to young brains when alcohol is secretly imbibed by the grossly underage. THAT is the real problem. Not one glass of wine too many while carrying a bump!

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I've scribbled so much of my memoirs now that I ran out of paper! Would you believe it? A mere 60 sides of A4 and my notebook's finished (why? Because I procrastinated so very much before starting the damn book that I'd doodled, scrawled, timewasted all over the first 80 sides!)... Also (and this was since formally starting my work) I've gone through TWO Mitsubishi rollerballs already! In the space of 2.5 chapters! So I had to go shopping for replacements today, much to the excitement of WH Smiths' security who simply couldn't believe that someone wearing my scarecrowlike outfit complete with wooly hat was actually going to pay for my pens not steal them... How can I shoplift the materials for my book? That would be somehow... very not right at all!!

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Don't worry y'all I've indulged in no more "speed". Yes I know how reckless I was yesterday taking that unknown substance... hmmm I don't know what else to say...

Except this:

wasn't I garrulous! Wow!! And I scribbled out ten pages of blustery memoirs yesterday afternoon and posted three times (OK I'd already done one post in the night)... but hey...

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My pink-nosed roborovskis are fine. They've a new broccoli treestump to amuse them. They chew on it like mini dairy-cows. Ever-entertaining little gremlins that they are!

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Videos of the Day:
Joan Sutherland performing from Rossini's Semiramide at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York City
and
Dame Kiri singing O Mio Babbino Caro... trust me you know the tune so clickonit now...

***

And last but not least:
This is what Raffi sent me.
Just put the mouse on the pictures and you'll see what months and/or years of speed abuse has done to those people...
(And you wondered why I don't use it 'cept when it's free...)

***


"DON'T LET DRUG DEALERS CHANGE THE FACE OF YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD"
This is the famous Metropolitan Police ad campaign.
The photos actually originate from Florida police's arrest records, but were used on British billboards to advertise a crime prevention hotline...

Sloane Street to Memory Lane...

RIGHT IF YOU'RE READING THIS THE FIRST TIME TODAY FROM THE TOP you won't know yet that I took some amphetamines/speed I found in a tobacco tin this afternoon, which made me really garrulous and I wrote more of my memoirs in two hours than I had done all week!! Only 8 pages of handwriting, but I've repeatedly been sleeping far too much and waking up to write a page or two then it's the next day... I'm still on chapter 3, my trip to Spain and Morocco.

I'm not sure any of this chapter is strictly relevant to my book; but if I pare it down too harshly it will be a book of drugs vignettes and nothing else and hence rather boring. I have to write about other things sometimes...! Still I'm trying to keep the main thread about stuff that relates to my subsequent addiction. I.e. things that made me depressed (almost all of life), people I met (hippie student losers a lot of them. Plus some annoying Sloanes (a Sloane, in case you are foreign, is a Sloane Ranger. A person (usually female) who ranges between Sloane Square, Knightsbridge, Chelsea and Mayfair - in other words all the posh parts of London - is highly likely to be called Hilly or Tilly or Annabel or Fiona (and hey - she might be working in publishing by now... or an art gallery: just until she finds the right man; either her British male equivalent (Miles, Giles, Spencer, Sebastian - yes I know I reeled out these names before; I'm indirectly quoting my book here) boys who work in banking/stockbroking/finance; or an American "businessman" (ie someon who's even richer than Daddy or failing that someone who'll give her a nice title like Duchess of... Countess of... etc. Art History was full of them (I wish I'd known Art History was the easiest degree - I might have gone for it myself. The other subject heavily favoured by Sloanes was French. Ooo there were so many of them crowding my seminars and crowing about how jolly a time they were having slumming it in a two up two down hovel (usually Daddy buys it and collects rent money off Jemima's friends. Rich people are always after another pretty penny. Anyway these lot were quite a contrast from the German students, who tended to be a far broader and more representative social mix. Nary a Northern accent was to be heard in French class. German classes were full of them. (Note 2: if you're a foreigner: Northerners are famously down-to-earth. Also I think their accents are much nicer than the bland swathe of southern English which runs on a continuum from Cockney (Michael Caine) through Estuary (Tony Blair when he's talking down) up to Received Pronunciation (Tony Blair when he's talking posh). Anyway these Sloanes nearly drove me up the wall. Sometimes I got mistaken for posher than I was and asked what school I'd gone to - I just replied "not one you'll have heard of!" but in general the Tillies, Hillies, Annabels kept themselves to themselves. Or kept themselves with Miles, Giles, Sebastian...

When I came to university I knew few of the social "mores" and codes... E.g. I did realize the house full of girls who lived round the corner from me were more middle class than I was as they ate nothing but pasta and had a £10 a week pesto bill (that's not much of an exaggeration either!) but I had no idea at the time that Pimms was a posh drink, for instance. Or that one person's parents visited my block by helecopter (there was a "pad" at Norwich airport next door.)

Some of the girls (it's always the girls, too) were such social climbers! This showed up most transparently when one of their brothers came to stay for a weekend. Michele as she styled herself, a la francais - complete with grave accent that I can't locate here talked all lar-de-dar posh but her brother had the voice of a Yorkshire farmer! She was dating a horrible specimen from Eaton. He wanted to be a writer as well but I googled his name the other day and - hoorah! - nothing came up. Don't tell me he might use a penname I know.

Well this has gone totally off the point. But I'm going to have to incorporate most of what I said into my book as it will explain how I managed to end up feeling so badly out of place.

In the end I got fed up on the one hand of vulgar people who told me (OK they didn't always tell me but they thought it;) "You think you're so posh." My answer: "No YOU think I'm posh!" And on the other of the haut bourgeoisie who as I said sometimes assumed I was one of them when I was not, or thought I had been one of them but was slumming it. I remember one person honestly couldn't believe I was willing to eat fish and chips straight from the paper to save washing up. "You simply must put it on a plate; really you must. They taste so much nicer that way. Do you want the balsamic vinegar to sprinkle on? What? Sarsons? Oh must you use that stuff? It's really whiffy..." And so on.

I've decided NOT to make a big deal out of my next bout of cleaning up. Wouldn't it be better if I just did it and told afterwards? Yes I think so too...

Righty-ho it's 9:56pm I'd better go.

(I got that expression from someone called Joey who came from the Wirral (Liverpool). When he was trying to get rid of his parents on the phone he'd start saying, "righty-ho then... righty-ho... righty-ho then... righty-ho... bye! Bye! Righty-ho then... bye!" Slam. Gasp of repressed exasperation. Right I am rambling like a Roborovski on a buttery wheel. Right I have to go

righty-ho then!

bye!!

***

Some good blogs

Cirkulators - intellectual photographic imagery; I've no idea where from...

Hambricks - cute baby blog from American midwest (?) - well I think it's from the midwest my American geography ain't that good...

Fi Mims Photography - Melbourne-based portrait photographer, available for weddings etc... this is fantastic stuff. FAR better than the usual run of the mill portrait photography...

Toronto Morgados - another baby blog (cute!)

Flashes Photography - more stunning (unusual) and funky wedding photos; this time from Kansas City, Missouri, USA

Monstror - very unusual, quite sinister... images by a French "graphiste"...

Slack Photography - Americans go to Mediterranean Europe

and last but not least

"anuLka" - Polish baby blog - the images are so entertaining!

Telling a Tale and Gremlins

HI! It's the early hours of the morning. The BBC World Service is still playing so I know it's before 5:30 (after which time we get Radio 4 again).

I just picked up my robotube and two furry faces appear double-decker - it's always Bashful on top, Itchy underneath. Bashful grooms Itchy's fur to near-extinction, she has a wet centre-parting nearly all the time thanks to Bashful's sisterly attentions... They are so funny and I have to strive not to laugh or they will get frightened. Even when I husked, "Come out you furry gremlins!" they sprang back two inches and woke up Spherical at the other end. Only to re-emerge this time like a two-headed beast, the heads side-by-side and equally curious.

I ned to get my hands on a video mobile phone so I can film Baby Itchy's magic wand trick. The "wand" as I described the other day, is a tube about 2cm or 2/3" wide and 6" or 15cm long. You can't force her in (you can't force them to do anything; they're almost as contrary as cats in that respect) but if you hold her and it at approximately the right angles she will shoot down it to bunnyhopper out the other end a couple of secs later. Also, if you turn it horizontal while she's inside, she pops out the end eyes bright (well, as bright as jet black eyes can possibly be), ears perked, looking utterly astonished. Which is something hamsters of all species do particularly well.

Poor Baby Itchy. I think she really is a pygmy dwarf hamster - showing absolutely no signs of growing.

When all three do "hamster Kentucky Derby" - running the wheel all at once - unless Baby Itchy's in front (which she does well cos she's fastest) she ends up clinging on for dear life doing constant loop-the-loops - seven, eight, nine of them - as the others ramble mercilessly forward. Also Itchy's something of a marvel because, despite what the experts claim: "you can't tame a Roborovski" she will not only let me handle her, but even sits still on my hands and will pause to wash/etc. For a roborovski this is quite something. They rarely stay still when they are conscious.

Because I fell asleep so early last night I'd hardly got any writing done. I've written all of my memoirs so far basically by recalling and recanting as I go... I don't even use notes now. Having said that I've only done 2.5 chapters so far. Though they are 5000 word chapters, which is longlonglong for me...

This must sound rather thick, but until I'd really embarked on writing them (the first chapter, being a retelling of my childhood I feel I've gone over so much now it's almost a set piece and doesn't really count) ... I hadn't realized how very vividly the process of telling would bring my memories back to life... in some of the obscurest details.

I'm currently on my travels from Wales to Spain (from where I went on to Marrakech in Morocco) - I went all the way by train plus one boat-ride Dover-Calais. (The Channel Tunnel had been dug but was yet to open...)

I'm calling my book "memoirs" rather than autobiography because it's not supposed to be a retelling of my entire life. Rather it focuses on my relationship with drugs. I don't know a single other book that I feel has done this well and that - rather than any sense that my own story is more important than anyone else's - is what's spurring me forward...

I have an extract I want to post up to see what people think of it. But I can't post it now because it's midday (as of keying this in rather than scrawling it out by pen) and I've gotta ping up Mother Hubbs's "yard"...

Righto, take it easy!!

G
x
;->...
x

Wordsmithing

MOTHER HUBBARD read three pages of my memoirs today and kept laughing. But she assured me they weren't written in that dreadful "I'm so witty" try-too-hard mode that certain writers adopt... you know ~ where every single sentence has to be side-splittingly hilarious or a masterpiece of wit or erudition... I'm really not into that... the style I'm into is what I called "rolling" where it just coasts on effortlessly. I did, of course, try to keep things "bouncy" but I have such horror of try-too-hard writing...

Best example I could give of this would be someone like Kathy Lette. Now don't get me wrong she's really witty, really funny. But I find page after page of her straining for this repeated effect pretty exhausting...

My horror of total "novelization" I don't think will have to be realized. "Novelization" is the hallmark especially of ghostwritten autobiographies where a stranger takes one's memories and bends, twists, grinds them mercilessly to fit the attention-grabbing form into which he shoves them. And they fit such a form because all extraneous facts have been sheared off, like crusts cut off a sandwich... I have compromised by including as much dialogue as I can, because this tends to power the narrative forward, but without dropping the artifice that this is me telling my memories in my own voice. So rather than flicking from scene to scene in a cinematic way, you flow from one to another as further memories are evoked ... I hope this makes some sense to someone!

I would print up an extract only time is low on my account... and e.g. the extract Mother Hubbs read was 1000 words long... it takes time to bang that into computer. And I've decided rather than to perfect as I go just to get the entire thing completed in 1st draft as quickly as possible, then to tinker with that at my leisure once I have a complete several hundred pages of manuscript to tinker with...

I've been given a tip for self-publishing a company called Lulu dot com that I'm looking into. I have to say really I want the biggest most powerful publishers to take on my work (because they can give it the strongest push)... if they didn't... then I have this alternative fantasy of printing out my own batch of fairly mini hardbacks and flogging them on myself... oftentimes the big publishers find these self-published books then want to buy out the author with an attractive contract... life is quite perverse in that way!

***

I hearkened to your complaints about too many youtube screens and have now dumped everything extraneous in the cyberbin!

These are today's vids:

1. Robocircus: I still have a Habitrail cage just like that, complete with spiral staircase and round running turret wheel!
2. Pinging Robbies: look how very fast they are!

Write On?

... AND SO TO BED!

Just kidding. My marathon sleeping's showing no signs of coming to an end.

The book's coming on well. I'm just getting to the bit where I have my first hangover and first try drugs... now the narrative slows down and I must write in properly constructed scenes with dialogue and all.

Ooo. I'm so excited!

By the way, if I mentioned that the student residences were "full of privately educated: Mileses, Gileses, Sebastians and Spencers not to mention Tillies, Hillies, Annabels and Fionas from upstairs"

... are people e.g. in America going to "get" that those are posh names?

I find the ultra ultra hip young Brit thing a lot of writers put on rather tiresome. I want the whole world to understand me. As I said, I always write for a sheepshearer on beer break Down Under and a career girl riding the subway to Manhattan: if both of these get my drift then I've done my job right...

Well I had better go, for as the saying goes:

It will not write itself!

(After an hour's procrastination bloghopping and commenting. Of course!!)

***

Oh PS one reason I was so upset by those (what I considered) paltry royalty rates was that Jeffrey Archer gets 17.5% of hardback cover price on his works. So why should I settle for 10% and less on export for paperback?

***

Other vid of the day:
Sinead O'Connor - Three Babies ~ I know it's been up before, but I really like this one, especially the three Sineads looking all curious and innocent in the first shot or so

Sleepy Sickness?! Royalty Ripoff

WHY DO I SLEEP LIKE IT'S A DISEASE? Too long! Too long! From midnight till midday only waking up long enough to light cigarettes and then drop them smouldering back on me... Yes.

I moved my hamsters last night. I don't know why but they took to sitting in a row kissing and washing one another, great fat furballs that they are. I had to keep trying not to laugh at them. Laughter might offend them. This morning I put a lid back on a pen and that was enough to startle one of them back to the nest. Seriously how do they survive in the wild with REAL distractions I cannot imagine... but hey.

Well I didn't write anything yesterday but made up for it today, somehow churning out three entire pages... I can tell you what was holding me back now: the fact that I was writing from heavy notes and constantly feeling the need to check I had included everything etc etc all very neurotic-making. Now the notes have ended and I'm writing off the top of my head which is so much more comfortable. I think I've done 5000 words so - wow! - "only" another 70,000 to go, haha!!

Thanks for all the nice messages from people I didn't know before yesterday... there isn't really any news... oh except I took a look through the tawdry "creative writing" section in my local bookshop (which is WH Smiths - if you know the British high street you will know that WH Smiths is great at selling books by volume and great for popular choices, but if you want something even slightly obscure, chances are they will not stock it. Anyway they had nothing on biography writing. So the volume I gravitated to was called "Writing a Blockbuster"; I turned to the end, the legal contracts bit. And the author would have me believe that for my blockbuster I should accept the following rates for paperback rights:

First 10,000 copies 7.5% of cover price
Thereafter 10% of same.
Export sales (ie Australia etc) 10% of a lower figure cannot remember the terminology.

I was so ANGRY and depressed by this. It happens in the music business as well. That sales in overseas territories accrue you lesser royalties. WHY?? Why should I get less just because a book is bought in India, New Zealand, Tuvalu, South Africa or wherever. British publishers sell books all over the world (a colonial hangover) and I think that settling for less is so unfair.

Then we get to those 7.5%/10% royalty rates. NO!
If you have to sign a contract like that surely the rate should change at 5000 copies and go up to 12.5% after 20,000 and 15% after 30,000 and maybe even higher. That is why I fret about getting a good agent I hate the feeling of being exploited. Ugh! Does anyone actually know about these things who can give me some advice PLEASE!

***

Video:
Sinead O'Connor - Don't Cry for me Argentina (sorry I could not think of anything else and I've got stuff on the hob at home...)

***

RIGHT: RE THE GREAT VIDEOS DEBATE, BECAUSE there was only one vote in it, the concensus says:
The videos stay as they are now.
Ie. the first day they come out big.
Then they go to the sidebar,
then they go to my other blogs, where they came from.

Bloghop Blobberous Sergeant Itchy Memoirism

I WENT OUT BLOGHOPPING FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS LAST NIGHT and got such lovely comments back today. To "blog-hop" can mean different things to different people so let me say what I do. You CAN just press "next blog" and see what comes up but it's so very random and most of the 70,000,000 blogs have only one post or are in South American languages or nobody reads them at all so that's usually a dead loss for finding something interesting. There used to be a thing called Random Blog Button you could "press" and a blog would come up out of the ether to entertain you - and it usually WAS entertaining. No more, however. They've improved the life out of the Random Blog website so thoroughly the random feature has gone! (How typical is THAT of the modern world?? Hmmm.) The best way of bloghopping is easy: you go to someone's blog you know and click on a commentator you don't know. And you take it from there, clicking on comments upon comments friends of friends of friends and every time I see something interesting I leave my electronic calling card at least to say "hello - I coasted through, wahey!!" and on you go. (If you don't leave the callingcard you get no comments back - duh!)

I used to do that a lot. A lady called Annelisa who wears a glittery wig laughed because she'd seen me like a rash one night over every blog she knew. I DO miss the Random Blog Button... were it not for that I'd never have discovered the joys of Daniel Thompson, Microtonal Composer among many blogs of microminority interest ... nor Amazing Gracie, who seemed to pop up every seventh click!!

In answer to the queries I got last night, yes I AM a writer - as one who daily writes can call oneself but I'm not getting paid until I submit an entire manuscript to a literary agent and get my $1,000,000 advance, so until that time I remain poor and undiscovered and living (literally, yeah!) in a garett - haha! What was the other question? Oh yeah how do I find the time? Well, blogging takes an average half hour per day including replying to comments and spreading myself around a bit like herpes (you know, over the internet) not to mention posting. I always post EVERY day even though I usually have nothing to say (inherent factor of this blog, I'm afraid.) The book DOES take time... because in 4 hours I might write 2 pages. And by that I mean 2 pages in handwritten scribble on A4 33 lines per page "ruled, feint". Hmmm.

I found Clarissa Dickson Wright's memoirs (she is a former TV cook in this country, famous for the BBC show Two Fat Ladies) - in the bookshop today. Appropriately enough they are entitled, Spilling the Beans. She doesn't novelize her memories: just raconteurs them on paper the way a letter writer (or a blogger, for that matter) might do so. But Clarissa Dickson Wright is a known personality (who used to drink like a fish incidentally) who I got the strong impression really did write every word herself. She probably produced a manuscript so strong the publishers took it on as it was. I'm not known, but I still feel a bit spurious about bowing to convention and adorning my memories with novelistic dialogue that I don't REMEMBER strictly being spoken like that ...

My neighbours think I am mad. What else would YOU think if you stood at the door to hear 4am cooing, "Come out you old gremlin! Come out you swine!" (Me talking to Bashful.) Boy is she looking blobberous today, she's like a furry globe with a face racing about... Then Sergeant Itchy emerges to investigate. I'm sure Itchy really is a dwarf dwarf hamster, she hasn't grown at all since I got her - how long ago was it? Surely 2 months ago by now... Because she is smallest she still gets most washed - looks like a baby cow with wet back all prickled up. Hence title "Itchy" I thought at first she had the prickles literally...

On that note I must go. I've written no memoirs at all today and Valium Marilyn's threatening to come bellowing down my street if I don't come and shut her up first...

Wahey! Till tomorrow...

Video of the day:
REM - Losing My Religion

PS Remember I said Clarissa Dickson Wright gave great interview? Click here for her this year's Desert Island Disks transcript. Fascinating.

Quick Scrawl...

SEEING AS I HAD bugger all to tell yesterday I'm scrawling today's "piece" on paper. Hey - at least my blog's still going. I know someone who used to have a "250 comments" per post blog who has (temporarily, so he says) given up, saying the blog was draining him too much and besides he's writing a book.

Well that's not something you'll ever hear from me. I'm writing a book and (despite feeling uninspired) tapping out a couple of paragraphs a day only takes ten minutes so count yourselves lucky here. (I suppose.)

A man on the radio last week proclaimed that mastery of a musical instrument (and by extension he said: anything else in life) requries 10,000 hours' practice. Or to put it another way - doing something as a fulltime occupation for 40 hours a week for a full FIVE YEARS. Personall I use the silkworm analogy re my writing. A silkworm must spin out an entire mile of CRAP before any quality thread is consistently produced. So to extend this to my writing: I hope that my years of scrawling utter rubbish in notebooks can equate to this mile and now we're on to the "quality" stuff!

I cannot manage 2000 words a day as advised (yet). I'm still somewhere nearer 500. But at least the writing's moving along. I want a good first draft finished by Christmas. Which I can tidy up enough to have the finished product ready to dazzle my literary agents by my 36th birthday in March.

My Indian palm readers all said I would be a "successful businessman" in my thirties. I'm just hoping such success can come in the business of writing. Then I will be made up.

Jim Dandy says the full moon kept him awake all last night. Well it did the opposite to me. I crashed out late afternoon - surely no later than 5pm - and stayed in bed all night and through the morning until circa 10pm. That's 15 hours even if you do allow two hours' pottering about during the night (which I did nowhere near...)

I need to get another wheel for my robbies as Spherical's gone into hibernation - I fear boredom might be the cause - Bashful's less bashful by the day. And I've renamed my smallest Sergeant Itchy as she comes out to stomp about self-importantly at every smallest sign of disturbance. Just like the trainee robo-police sergeant that she is.

And on this scrawly note I must leave. I've a drugs clinic appointment late this afternoon and if I miss it I'm dead meat so ...

Laters my friends ...

***

Video of the day
Sound Factory (New York) Last Dance... I lifted it from M-filer's blog... the first tune I like but the 2nd... isn't that depressing... especially when you see the clear midday daylight shinin' through the "underground" haha!

The club I liked best was called Return to the Source

Laundretta Chaos II

CHAOS IN MY HOUSE. Not only is the front door smashed in yet again (Laundretta got locked out drunk), but for the past couple of days she has been staggering up and down the hallways at night in the dark (a little like a drunken human prostitute minotaur) wailing and hollering and yelling accusations at her boyf, Matran.

It all came to a head yesterday when she smashed the back stairs window with a sink plunger... leaving the kind of plunger-shaped hole that you couldn't do if you tried a million times...

Yes chaos rules again.

Evilstein went slightly mad about that and Mat and L's television being left outside their room for two months and claimed we all have to clear up because the council are coming round today. Frankly I don't believe that but hid my robbies and made everything look a bit smart.

I actually went out and purchased some memoirs to use as an inspirational template for mine... and reading through came to the unsurprising conclusion that yes I will have to novelize the entire thing. Ukk.

This means telling your life story as if it was a novel ie with dialogue and descriptions laid out in the traditional format... which is kind of hard to do when it's your own truth... and such dialogue, though it pulls in the focus crystal sharp and close... is inherently untruthful because as we all know it is NOT the exact dialogue from the time.... ho-hum. But you gotta live to convention. Otherwise you end up in prison.

I'm going to mess about on the internet and then will have another go at memoiring later on tonight so wish me luck again... I shall aim to complete two whole pages today! Woo!

***

I think I picked out two TOP tunes today!
1. Sinitta - Cross My Broken Heart... you poor Americans on the far side of the pond... you don't know what you're missing not having charts full of Europop... (And Sinitta IS American by the way!!)

2. Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood. I've no idea whatsoever WHAT Clint Eastwood has to do with this song. But that's the title. Hmmmmmmm......

And my 2 other vids:

3. Paris Hilton and Madonna munching sandwiches in the park...

4. Britney Bitch Revisited...***

Blog recommendation of the day:

The Captain's Blog. From HMS Somerset Royal Navy warship. Or frigate. Or whatever they call it. But it's a big grey metallic ship full of weapons. Designed for going out in times of conflict and kicking "arse"...
(http://www.hms-somerset-co.blogspot.com)

Why Can't I Write As Quick As Spherical Runs?

THIS IS GONNA BE A very short post as I've not much to tell.
My roborovskis are in hamster heaven after I discovered a stash of kitchen-roll and toilet tubes in a back bin yesterday. They now have tunnels galore to ping along...

Also I am beginning to theorize that "Baby" Itchy might not actually be a Baby at all, as he/she shows no sign whatsoever of growing... but might rather be a dwarf dwarf hamster... he/she is very tiny - small enough to fit inside a hen's egg shell...

Well there's no specific news of them really. Except yesterday I accidentally dropped a chicken bone on their heads. Wow! The palaver as they all scuttled and hid. For all of five seconds. Only to emerge in exact unison from three separate places... poking pink noses up in the air as if to say "What was THAT?!?"

Memoirs: I have been slogging away every day. (Slogging might not actually be the right word. "Trying" is perhaps better.) I've put pen to paper at least on a daily basis... and yet have yet to complete even four pages (as printed)! I don't know WHY it should seem so incredibly hard. But hard it seems....

Right I better had go and sort various "things" out....

***

TUNE OF THE DAY
(Something very different. I lifted this from Calista's blog...)
Dino Merlin i Zeljko Joksimovic - Supermen

Cats Drinking Butterwheel Whitney Stop

I WENT BLOGHOPPING EARLIER... through so many cats blogs you wouldn't believe that number of cybermews exist even..!

Anyway...

I HAVE BEEN DRINKING TOO MUCH. I know I have. Every day I drink drink drink (usually I only buy one can at a time so imagine how tired the local shop gets of my face)... It's only when I come to empty the bin that I realize just how many of these empty half litre cans have piled up over maybe three days... enough to fill the entire bin up (along with newspapers etc. I've given up recycling I used to do it SO conscienciously yet I noticed people were just chucking the entire recycle box INTO the giant wheely-bins ... #1: WHY? What harm are my newspapers doing them.... Without being "racist" that attitude IS typical of all the foreign landlord types I've had over the years. They're the type of people who would pour mercury into a river if it saved them $50 safe disposal fee. I think that attitude stinks but as I say I've just given up on trying to save paper for now also I don't tend to tidy up until things near crisis-point and so sorting the trash is just an unwanted obstacle to getting "clean" (so to speak).

Hey does no-one like Whitney? I used to LOATHE the woman's music when it first came out in the 80s. Especially the fact that... weren't her first TWO albums both called "Whitney Houston" - what genuis came up with that idea? Makes it near-impossible to put one on order. Duh. Anyway as I said earlier I found her remixes they are pretty good and the stuff she put out AFTER the Greatest Love/I Will Always Love You phase is GOOD.

My hamsters did get very excited by the buttery wheel... one big reason being they took to EATING the butter haha! Yesterday I saw two of them drinking the water at the same time they looked so funny like baby cows drinking mothers milk... or something...

Hang on what was I actually going to SAY? Well that has gone to the four winds... Better go and do something more "constructive" with my posh gel ink carbon black pens collection. (You want to see the state of the notebook it's literally falling apart at the seams (thanks to my repeated cyder-spills) ... looks more like a 12th century parish register that's been buried since 1777... Oh well beggars can't be chosers maybe one day a university will want to put it in a controlled atmosphere under dim lights so phd students can read the original MS to the top-selling memoirs of all time (won't be my MS then; hahar!!)

Too Much Sleep

I DRANK TOO MUCH EARLIER and have spent hours sleeping it off. Duh! The deadly drink. When it's not one thing it's another.

I was ranting earlier about the "horrors" of penning memoirs because basically I felt utterly lost with a notebook containing about five pages thick with crossing-outs, bubbles, loops, arrows. It looks like the blueprint for the metro system of a Tokyo-sized city.

Really I shouldn't complain. I know one day all will just "click" and smooth running shall take the place of all this trudge trudge trudge through honey.

Right I had better go. Do have a nice weekend everyone!

Gleds

***

Have a go on this.

http://play.blogger.com

You get to see just-uploaded photos to blogs round the world. You can track those blogs down and leave messages. (You know what I'm like talking to strangers, never heeded my Mum's advice NOW look at me...)

Anyway give it a click it's fun.

Oh and this is a great travel blog:


http://libby2007.blogspot.com

Autobiographical Challenge

YESTERDAY I WENT OUT AND BOUGHT three new black pens for my memoir-scribbling. When I wrote that novel I mentioned - it was only about 200 pages (or would be if printed in volume form - ie about 80,000 words) and yet I used something like twenty Mitsubishi rollerballs just to write the first draft. In other words I spent £40 (EIGHTY DOLLARS U.S.) just in INK!!

I don't know what took me so long to get round to buying proper pens. I had been trying to write the thing out in free ones meant for betting slips. Even though I purloined five or ten at a time, these can only write out one page tops... so they're useless for writing a book unless you were absolutely desperate!

Someone left me a comment saying words to the effect of "if you're going to write a book, start with decent paper. I love lovely paper." I get your point: only I'd already invested in an A4 bound notebook. Bound is essential for me. Means NO sheet of manuscript can ever go missing! Many years ago when I was in the midnight blues of depression I insisted on writing anything "creative" in permanent certified lightfast/waterfast carbon ink on 100% acid free cartridge paper... so determined was I to leave the most permanent mark on the world that I possibly could. Now, though I still like the permanent black ink (waterfast is essential to me as I drink so much!) I just use any old paper. I'm writing for ME not the museums and it frightens me even the remote thought that I could ever become famous and my every shopping list/etc preserved. To me this is intellectual parasitism. My old university was full of it. In fact that's what lecturers/professors/whatever they call themselves of anything connected with languages and literature tend to be... they are basically "novelists manque" who, because they cannot or will not create their own works, obsess instead on every obscurest aspect of the life and works of novelists long dead. I found this faintly sickening.

I don't know why but I've found this memoir-writing so painfully slow! I use the word "memoirs" advisedly because this is NOT an autobiography. It IS just a memoir of how I became a drug addict. I've read a couple of other drugs memoirs but no-one has explained even to my satisfaction what it is that can draw an otherwise intelligent and promising young person into the grip of drug addiction. I believe this is a question the general public WANT answering and I believe I can answer it for them. At least I can explain how it happened to me.

And I don't really need to fear anyone else coming up with the same book faster - because junkies, so I've found, are famously bad at explaining their thoughts, feelings, conditions of life even to people in the same boat as them, let alone to the "straight" majority.

I remember asking around "what is rehab like". The answers I got were SO EXTREMELY unhelpful.

Instead of saying: A rehab is usually a large detached house with seven or eight bedrooms. Male accommodation is in a separate house usually from female or at least confined to separate floors. You spend about three weeks detoxing. They achieve this by daily reducing a dose of methadone for about ten days though there are detoxification programs that can take you off higher doeses over a month or so.

After three weeks the rehab proper begins. This is a bit like being at school with a timetable. The "subjects" have names like "life story", "consequences" ....

And blah blah blah.

I thought you were thrown into a hospital-like enclosure and forced to sweat it out cold turkey! Nobody gave me even the faintest picture of what, for example, a day at rehab was like. Junkies are useless at storytelling. They're only good at LYING.

Well I'd better go, stop babbling and write a bit more. It's difficult because I don't know what to include. Streamlining one's own life from a wealth of memories (and blurs where memories used to be (in my case!!)) is not easy. Not at ALL easy.

I'm trying to tell my early childhood but only as it relates to setting me up to take drugs later. Really I wish I had a publisher/editor/etc but there's no point indulging in such excuses not to get to work. I just have GOT to get this finished by Christmas otherwise it's slishy throat for me!!

Inertia! I feel as inert as an inertia reel seatbelt.... right I'm off!

***

Did no-one like my Mika vid yesterday? I thought it was rather funky. Or did it get lost under so much of Somewhere!?!

Here's today's:~
Mika: Grace Kelly
Dawn Penn: You Don't Love Me (No No NO!!) This was covered by a singer called Rhianna. Who I've heard of, but she's not really known this side of the "Pond"...
Mika: Relax Take it Easy

Childhood Blizzard Persistence; Boil int Bag Fish

PEN HAS BEEN PUT TO PAPER! I HAVE PENNED ANOTHER 12 PARAGRAPHS of my book! Which is really something as all those other times I said "right I'm off to do my memoirs wish me luck" (because I certainly needed it) I did not write a single word, rather fell asleep into the dead of night and woke up usually with Sly and the Family Stone or Barbra Streisand warbling away in the roborovski-active redlit gloom. (Red lights equal darkness to small rodents so you can see them pinging about at optimum force if you install fireglow lighting by their enclosure.)

All I seem to have put to paper so far involves anecdotes about getting stuck in blizzards on the Brecon Beacons/North York Moors... on the second occasion (which actually happened first) my brother and I came down with scarlet fever. I fell asleep in a snowdrift. I vaguely remember being carried back to the van through horizontal snowfall. I spent the journey back delirious and being sick.

When we got a little better we took out metallic poster paints and midnight blue sugar paper and painted rather wonderful pictures of the November 5th (Guy Fawkes Night (do they celebrate this in Australia/New Zealand btw?) fireworks). These we popped in the post to Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace... forgot all about it only to be astonished a couple of weeks later to receive a very grand embossed envelope in the post containing the poshest typewritten letter I have ever seen (it was typed in a Times-like font, which was unknown at the time)... from Her Majesty's Lady in Waiting Lady Lavinia Whassername or whatever reading "I am commanded by the Queen to thank you ..." haha!

Oh. And here the story endeth so far...

When I was little my parents' main hobby (I mean, who actually has the requisite paragraph full of hobbies we're all meant to list in our employment resumes and CVs?) was hillwalking and hiking... on a couple of occasions I got stuck in the most severely inclement weather you get in this country... which pretty much adds up to horzontal snow flying in the face at 50 miles per hour which is not very pleasant aged 5, 6, 7... my point being I did not ever think of giving up in such a situation. Or crying. Or even complaining. All I ever did was march on. After one such occasion my Dad seemed really impressed (though I think this was through rain not snow as I vaguely recall being utterly sodden through). ... All of which resulted in an adult persistence, I suppose. Which persistence has been partially destroyed by this addiction of mine... partially has actually gone against me because (as I know I've said before) Willpower is the Power of Will. And if your Will is to Use. You will go on Using. And that is what I've done.

I feel this addiction of mine has turned on their head all my former strengths and driven them against me... Now I only want to harness them back and recapture their old power!

Right I gotta go I got boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce hubberbubbling violently on the stove and I gotta get back before the bags melt into the bottom of the pan!

Please Don't Hate Me

IS EVERYONE GOING TO HATE ME NOW BECAUSE I KICKED OFF MY LAST POST WITH TALK ABOUT DRUGS? I went bloghopping earlier and found myself at some pretty good sites by people with names like Teacher Bee and her friends... Now I bet they will hate me. Remember that guy called Path whose blog I enthusiastically commented on bc it was brimming with funky snapshots of Berlin? And who came by here leaving a snidey comment about my "boring dope stories" ... well I am an addict. And I have consciously cut down the drugtalk in recent weeks in preparation for my eventual leaving of all that nasty scene behind. But I gotta mention them sometime; specially times like today when I find them lying free on the pavement!

When I saw that psychiatrist last time I said to him I was thinking of nominating a day and just stopping from there (I do have methadone already, remember. I'm just useless at sticking it just that. Methadone should not leave you feeling at all sick. You should feel perfectly straightened out and normal on it. If you are sweating conkers or shivering or having constant hot flushes on methadone days then the dose is not high enough. This is borderline the case with me; but I don't want them upping it evermore. I'll end up drinking a fishtank full every day... Anyway this psychiatrist said quitting on a nominated day and just stopping forever from that date was a bad idea as you've been taking this stuff practically daily for donkeys' years on end... and also that is putting too much pressure on yourself over one single day. Select many single days and just do not use on all of them... That was his philosophy. He seemed to believe NA put undue pressure on addicts over the fact that using alcohol or any drug at all is considered "using" by that fellowship... I do get his point. I've known one person in particular who "relapsed" by taking sleeping pills... believed all the good work he'd put in over the predeeding two years to have been scrapped and was back on heroin and crack within a week... THAT is what I consider a dangerous state of mine. Addiction is a single condition and you're an addict no matter what drugs you take. That does NOT make all drugs the same! One thing I noticed in NA: a lot of people in there seemed to have lost sight of that particular fact. Having said that, NA is a brilliant place that does work for those who "keep coming back and work it". I've seen THAT fact with my own eyes. So don't think I'm doing them down because I'm not.

Tonight's the night I go back to my memoirs... I have a LOT more of this chapter one or two (depending whether I break the story up there)... the entire history of my childhood. All I've said so far is that basically I was born into a different age! With 3 channels on black and white television, no video recorders, no freezers in our house, no microwaves and that when I was very little I went hiking with my parents through a disused railway tunnel and saw for myself the meaning of "light at the end of the tunnel"... an experience that would come back to me with greater meaning in the light (or dark) of my subsequent addiction to this heroin ...

... And I'll tell you something else: I think I just told you in a paragraph a message that took eight hundred words and several hours of scribbling to word not as well! Maybe I'll scrap it all and just quote the above.

Maybe.

When I have something even half finished by way of introductory chapter(s) as I said, I shall post it here for yous. Only thing is I won't be able to post the entire book because, legally speaking, that would mean I had already self-published and might compromise the situation re agents/publishers. The fact that only about 60 people a day visit here would be neither here nor there if they decided I'd somehow "breached" my own copyright. You know what lawyers are like.

Before I go I will mention that - wow! - I actually saw Yangyang the Chinese hamster venturing out of his nest today. Now that is a turnup for the proverbial "books" ... He is the shyest, most retiring hamster I have ever come across. I think he has hamster depression, though I'm not sure why. His millet spray was barely touched though the Robos have demolished both of theirs... If I were American I'd take him to the vet's to get hammy-sized Prozac...

Must go and get scribbling. Wish me luck!