Better ...

I AM MUCH BETTER TODAY than I was yesterday and far better than all last week. Akh I hate to admit this but I had genuinely forgotten to take my medication and that was part of the problem. I wish I could find a doctor who would prescribe what I WANT only a small change to a different type of the same thing. As it is I HAVE NO DOCTOR. (No psychiatrist, only a GP outside whose catchment area I actually live). Thank you London Borough of Evil for messing up my life in yet one more aspect. I am housed by one borough yet live in another. I would rather live in the (more innercity) borough I am housed by. At least inner cities are funky and full of life. As for drugs they are never more than a bus ride away so it's just as druggy here. I don't happen to know the local dealers as I never bothered getting introductions to any bar two. One who seemed to have forgotten me last time and another who sells crap. I don't care about drugs now anyhow. I'm spending my money on foreign DVDs and a book. The DVDs I bought were I Have Loved You So Long (French, starring Kirsten Scott Thomas); The Lives of Others (German ~ about the East German secret police and with the same female lead who played Ulrike Meinhof in The Baader Meinhof Complex and Michael Jackson This Is It this last one was on offer for £3 or I wouldn't have bothered and frankly although I do like Michael Jackson I think for even that money they could have done better. The first two were on a two for £10 deal and it took so long to find the Kirsten (or Kristen) Scott Thomas film to make up the deal.

Tomorrow morning I take the tube into town to pay for a book I have already ordered over the phone from Waterstones. There is no Waterstones, the nation's biggest bookseller by far, anywhere close to me and I'm not saying anything about the locals. I tried WH Smith, which sells magazines and stationery as well as a selection of the most obvious titles in each genre and the man rather ridiculously said of Piaf: la verité (which means Piaf: the Truth) "it's not a book we stock on our shelves". The fact that WH Smith do not stock French language titles is painfully obvious. Can you order it specially? No. So I rang this other shop who took the ISBN and said yes for £25 and a 3-week wait you can have it. I have a thing about Edith Piaf after watching that film about her La Vie En Rose.

Now I have to go else I will get cut off; my computer is still in hospital.

Here is a high quality pop video of Edith Piaf singing la vie en rose...



Milord

thank you Buggerlugz for this one... this and la vie en rose sont les deux chansons that have been going round my head...

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?

The Michael Jackson of Literature (truly BAD!)

IN WHICH Gledwood speaks of health and social issues and the Chinese language yet again as well as:~~~~~~~

MY INTELLECTUAL BOOK is brewing in me like finest beer. I can't reveal ANY points of plot, character or setting but suffice it to say it shall be the finest and most amazing book ever written. I have to big myself up. Let's face it if I levelled my ordinary standard of self-esteem at my book I'd think it the worst thing since unsliced bread! I am taking inspiration from Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand. Two entertainers at the top of their game. When they perform a song, everybody else's version becomes redundant. I've always seen my writing as the way of turning the sour old lemons of my personality into artistic lemonade. And the sour grapes of my past into finest wine.

There shall be NO heroin in my children's book. No social problems. No divorce. No lesbian single parents battling the social worker. No miserable children passed like an unravelling parcel between parents at mind-wrenching "access" weekends. I might one day write about an unhappy child because I was one myself. But it won't be my first go.

Duta my druggieworker asked me the secret of my plastic surgery-style skin improvement. I admitted to her it's just a £3 tube of "soap with bits of sand in it"... Otherwise known as Facial Scrub. Use it five times in a row after not bothering to wash your face properly in months and the effect is as drastic (if not more so) than dermabrasion or a chemical peel on a rich and overpampered female. I would have imagined that exfoliants work better on male skin than female as men have tougher skin that needs smoothing. Take a look at a middle aged woman, compare her soft skin to a craggy old man's and you'll get my drift.

The recent London riots were fuelled by Facebook and Twitter ~ so Channel 4 News was claiming tonight. I'm a bit behind the time as regards both of these social networking sites I'm afraid. Twitter appears to be like Blogger with an extraordinarily stingy words limit (how could someone like me blog in 150 characters?). As for Facebook that is not a "blog" at all. A blog is an account what one ate, of one's bowel movements and what colour toilet paper they buy. A blog is linear. Not spider-shaped, as Facebook appears to be.

A 27 year old man died after being sprayed in the eyes with chili pepper then shot and tortured three times with an electrocution device. Now this is why so many people have grievances against the police. Not necessarily that they have been abused and nearly killed in this way, but that they know that in the wrong circumstances they might be. CS spray and Tasers are used against the mentally ill with impunity ~ usually in the name of bringing a "disordered" person to a "place of safety"! Torture them first, then give them the psychiatric care they need. And wonder why they have lingering paranoid ideation and issues of trust! Mental hospitals chuck people out far too early. I remember meeting a manic woman my doctor's car park. We were both pacing frantically. I because I was detoxing off heroin (on nothing) and so was slightly "agitated"; she because she'd just been discharged from hospital following a bout of psychotic mania. If this was considered fit to go home, what on earth was she like when she was "ill", I wondered. I heard an Indian doctor, who practises in India spouting off on the benefits of care in the community. But did anyone ever ask the patients what they want? Most long term mentally ill ~ and I'm talking of severe ongoing conditions here ~ actually prefer being in hospital to the cold wide world that shuns them so cruelly. But does anyone ever ask the mentally ill what they think? I think not. Tht's why I'm only half joking when I talk about a nice retreat to the nuthouse being easier to arrange and cheaper than a CitiBreak to Paris or Brussels!

By the way I found out my local psyche unit (and I have no idea where it's actually located) is a building on the grounds of a general hospital. I'm far less put-out about the prospect of going there now. It means when I go out for a ciggie break I can go for a wander amongst the population with broken legs, drips and haematomas and those who have just given birth. I once saw a man take his drip down to the smoking area. He looked like a troll dragging a parrot's cage.

Today I learned the numbers one to ten in Chinese they are: 一二三四五六七八九十 that's yī èr sān sì wǔ liù qī bā jiǔ shí. I had problems with wǔ, liù and qī especially. I am not very good with numbers, days of the week or months because there's little to visualize when you learn the word. I don't have a numbers brain. That's why I never pursued a career in medicine ~ my absolute ideal vocational job. I cannot describe how much pleasure I would get lancing and draining abscesses, cleaning wounds, not to mention banging up old ladies with morphine! Seriously I adore medical stuff. But I'm just too thick by far to get accepted on a medicine course because not only do you need A Level biology and chemistry (and if you don't have biology you need MATHS ~ ukh! ~ but A Level PHYSICS is a necessity. I'm absolutely lost with physics. The only subjects I was any good at were English literature, modern languages and law. Law, interestingly, was the only subject I was outstanding at. I'm only averagely good at languages and literature. I persevere with the language studies because they motivate and inspire me. You are, after all, only learning to speak, listen, read and write. I know I will succeed in Mandarin Chinese, not because I'm brighter than anybody else, but more persistent. Just remember that 500 million Chinese speak Mandarin as a SECOND language and you realize there really is no excuse for calling Chinese "difficult". Different would be the operative word. German, on the other hand, is not that different but extremely difficult. As is French. Every single word is male or female in these languages and the Germans have a neuter gender on top! Now THAT is HARD. Learning pretty pictures to go with every word inspires me to eat more Chinese food. And I love Chinese food.

I'm eating Asda's own Chinese chicken curry and egg fried rice. They've made the mistake all the supermarkets seem to make; they douse the curry in five-spice to make it Chinese. This is NOT what takeaways do. Why can't they just copy the takeaway? Every single time I buy frozen takeaway-style supermarket food I have to add my own monosodium glutamate. Indian food and most especially Chinese food without MSG is like nonalcoholic beer: a total waste of time. I absolutely love MSG and have just finished a half-kilo packet. I also heard somehwere it could have triggered my manic episodes. As mania and psychosis are linked to dysregulation of the brain's glutamate receptors. So whether Chinese food drove me potty or not, I'll probably never know in this lifetime, but it does make an attractive theory...

WITH ONE LOOK




NIGHT OF MY LIFE (Freak Brothers mix)




Illustrated: Michael Jackson ~ didn't look so terrible with the original nose, did he?; the taser: officially sanctioned torture; Chinese chicken curry always contains onions and peas and lashings of monosodium glutamate!

Bipolar disorder and glutamate: research link
"The gene, GRIK2 (glutamate receptor, ionotropic, kainite 2), encodes for a glutamate receptor, specifically glutamate receptor 6 (GluR6). Glutamate is the predominant excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system."

崩すKuzusu

I AM IN A SOUR MOOD. I'm sitting here, flicking through lists of Japanese characters, thinking about food I would like to eat (except I don't really wanna eat any). Wondering what I'm doing alive.

Do you know I only need learn 2100 characters to be fluent in Japanese. Kanji are about as difficult to remember and to distinguish one from another as highway code signs. If you know nothing about far eastern writing, you'd assume Chinese characters are uniquely bizarre, each and every one. But they're not. A small number of elements corresponding to the sun 日, the moon 月, women 女, mouths 口, water 水, fire 火, trees 木 and mountains 山, etc crop up again and again combinging together eg as two moons under a mountain 崩 kuzu(su す) (kuzusu) 崩す "to demolish", so it's possible for Chinese and Japanese people to dictate unfamiliar characters to one another over the phone by spelling out the radicals. A character's radical is the unit of meaning, usually on the left hand side, under which it's looked up in a Chinese dictionary. I used my Japanese dictionary to look up the sign outside my local Chinese takeaway. They were most surprised when I came in telling them what it meant (it means a tower of wealth and prestige: in fact you'll see the sign 金 ~ "gold" or money again and again. 金魚 (goldfish) appear in Chinese takeaways time and again, because they're supposed to draw money into the shop. 鮭 this sign says "salmon" in Japanese. Note the fish radical 魚 down the lefthand side. The character is pronounced sake, like the drink 酒 sake. The three drops down the left side are the water radical. Anything with those three droplets down the side is watery, fluid or drink.

I really wish I hadn't slept last night. I slept all day as well and lay there with the telly booming, wishing I didn't have to get up for methadone before 6pm.

I did some research into sleep that confirmed what I already know. Now this only applies to people with bipolar and bipolar-type disorders (as far as I know) ~ because in normal depression people tend to complain of insomnia. But when I'm depressed I nearly always oversleep ~ once it gets going I can easily do 16 hours or more a day, every day. Not sleeping is said to be both a symptom and a cause of mania. In the past when I've really got going I would stay awake for over 40 hours, then sleep for a mere 5. Then carry on going higher and higher, more and more irritable, more and more excitable and so on. I wish I was dead when I think about this. I would rather be hyper than depressed, but I'd rather be happy than hyper. I'm not surprised I turned to drugs, namely heroin. It's by far the most reliable thing I've ever encountered in life. The problems surrounding heroin are problems in getting the stuff and enough of it. Even the Australian nurse down the druggyclinic told me "people feel better on heroin than off it, which is why people go on and on taking it once they start" so I said, why not sell it with the cigarettes in corner shops, and she just smiled wryly. I am thinking of going back on heroin until I die. Heroin is the only thing that ever made sense in my life.

I wouldn't need to kill myself until every vein in my body is done in and I can't take it any more (I wouldn't smoke it; I can't feel anything at all from smoking it and no it's not bad technique: I take heroin for the intravenous rush; the residual high, that lasts all day, is just a bargainacious by product. If I did want to take heroin for another 10 years I'd need to inject in the femoral, which I don't want to do. Most people I know who inject there walk with limps and/or have holes big enough to stick fingers in up the crook of their thighs. I only know 2 people who actually lost legs. It's all nasty.

Well this is miserable crap. Does anyone read this any more? I doubt it. I think my blog has degenerated to a series of protracted death-bed rantings.

Whenever I think about life in former times I think how lucky people were. Half of all people died before reaching a year of age, so the true horror of life was never revealed to them. Those who lived longer knew however healthy they were, they need only catch an infectious disease to die away. Now those illnesses are wiped out and only nasty ones remain.

The modern concept of mental illness, by the way, has expanded immensely. I read a book by the head doctor at a Victorian lunatic asylum. It's titled Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia by Emil Kraepelin. The descriptions of my "school report" were also by Emil Kraepelin, but they come from Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia.

Back to Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, almost nobody I know would qualify as depressed under Kraepelin's descriptions of profound melancholic psychosis. To be hospitalzed for depression in the 19th century you needed to be in depressive stupor, which means you had lost, or nearly lost the power of speech. Most depressives hallucinated and were delusional, believing they had committed trecherous crimes and brought poverty on their families. The worst depression was the agitated type where patients were reduced to screaming and banging their heads on the wall.

I asked somebody I know whether she had ever been so depressed her head was literally devoid of any thought at all (as the book describes) and she said yes, for weeks on end. That was when they ECTd her. I've only been severely depressed for a very short time. I remember afterwards realizing I had gone beyond suicidal. To be suicidal you need a life to terminate. Once you get to the very end, no life is left. Hey but I did come back.

Then I got to the descriptions of mania which were an exact match of mine. Thoughts flying through the head in vast numbers only to evaporate as quickly as they appeared. Walls and floor talking. Fantastical sights everywhere. Great excitement. Yeah I matched that one all right.

And just like drugs, it leaves you with nothing. From what I see the choics in life are: to have happiness without foundation through drugs and/or insanity. Or money without happiness.

To have everything you want in life you need only adjust what you want.

Anyway how did I get on this subject? Who cares.

When I think of all the suffering in the world I wonder whether anyone wants to live at all. I think most people are just conning themselves that their lives mean anything at all. Most people are arrogant, puffed up with emptiness. Think back to the times you were wonderful. In actuality you probably looked shit and people were laughing at you. When I was younger all I wanted was to take a great big bite out of the world. Now I know how sick the world actually is I'm almost glad I didn't. I only regret not making loads of money when I might have done. Because I would use that money to lock myself away from the world. If I were a multi-billionaire I'd live behind 40ft high walls and never ever go outside. I used to want to be clean, but I don't think there's any chance of that now. Darkness surrounds us.

Akkkh I'm starving. I've got to go. If I read this back I know I won't post it.

Eating eating eating me alive!

STUPIDLY I went and downloaded the most up-to-date PDF Broschüre for the course I have set my heart on.
I hate setting my heart on anything, because I might not get it. But I've set my heart on this. The desire to do it is eating me up inside. In fact I feel like I'm festooned with army ants and being eaten alive. I feel like a hydrogen bomb inside me is about to detonate at any moment.

This is what they say about the languages on offer, re the application process:

3.2 Zulassungsvoraussetzungen
Für das Bachelorstudium besteht in den Sprachen Englisch, Französisch, Spanisch eine Zulassungsbeschränkung (Numerus clausus). Der NC-Wert ergibt sich für jedes Semester neu aufgrund der freien Studienplätze, der Abiturnoten, der Wartezeiten und der Anzahl der BewerberInnen. Eine Vorhersage über die für das jeweilige Zulassungsverfahren geltenden Grenzwerte kann daher nicht getroffen werden.
Als Zugangsvoraussetzungen für das Studium am FTSK sind neben der allgemeinen Hochschulreife oder einem äquivalenten ausländischen Abschluss fundierte Kenntnisse in Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Englisch, Französisch und Spanisch und Grundkenntnisse in Chinesisch erforderlich, falls diese Sprachen als Fächer gewählt werden.
Genaue Informationen zu den Eingangsvoraussetzungen für alle Sprachen entnehmen Sie bitte den Merkblättern der einzelnen Sprachen, die Sie auf der Seite http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/261.php finden.

Well I have to read it in German ~ so can you!!

To summarize, English, French and Spanish ~being so highly popular, are subject to entry restrictions in numbers. Being as English is my mother tongue and the only language over which I feel I have some genuine mastery, I don't have much choice in the matter. But I can avoid French by not applying for it, and doing Russian instead, as I've already decided. Some basic knowledge of Chinese is required. So I'm determined to trounce the other students by achieving A Level standard (or higher) before I even start.
As you cannot fail to have noticed, I have a genuine fascination for Chinese characters. I already know about 2-300. If I could multiply this by a factor of ten, I'd have a pretty good basic reading knowledge in Chinese.

I couldn't find any entry restrictions or requirements for Russian, but would feel compelled to reach at least GCSE (lower school certificate) level, simply to underline my interest (and distinguish myself from the vulgar hoardes I'll be up against in the application process). The greatest novelists of all time wrote in Russian ~ Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenyev, Pasternak... imagine how amazing it would be to read those in the original?!

My biggest worry of all doesn't concern waiting lists because I'm English or beating others at Chinese: it's the German language test to which I'll be subjected. I tried on before on the Goethe Institut website (admittedly when my German was clagged up with 18-years of unpractised rust) and got a dreadful score.

As I shall point out, not having a teacher here, I have focused my energies on acquiring a passive reading vocabulary. And it's working amazingly. The novel I'm reading, Seegrund, which means Lake-Bed is a thriller about a dead body found... you guessed it. In a pool of blood in the snow on the banks of a frozen lake. I was astonished to comprehend the words for river-bank (das Ufer) and corpse (die Leiche) ~ both of which I've picked up and remembered in the past couple of months. So you see reading books and keeping my amateurish German blog has got me somewhere after all. There are many expressions for which I know two or three words in German, just as I do in English. I get a real sense of achievement from this. Especially as I DROPPED OUT of a languages degree in the early 90s in disgrace and despair, convinced I would never achieve any degree of mastery over German, let alone any other tongue. Somehow, amazingly, the magic has happened.

I think my turning point came one night as I listened to BBC World Service radio. I realized that across the world there are millions of people who have never set foot on Anglophone soil, who have learned to speak our language fluently by following radio broadcasts and slogging their way through English literature, dictionary in hand, referring and re-referring constantly to every word they're not entirely sure about. So I did this and look! I'm seriously considering applying to uni in Deutschland. How amazing is that. Six months ago I wouldn't even have been able to read the prospectus...
Well enough of my babbles.

It's 5:34. The clocks went back last night, meaning darkness now falls not long after 4pm. It's dead romantic ~ like a Siberian goods train yard full of onion-picking babushkas, with immigrant workers hiding in the cattle trucks smoking Cyrillic cigarettes and babbling away in Chinese. (I must fit the two new languages into this silly fantasy.) German, Russian and Chinese are also, of course languages of the former Communist Block. Life behind the Iron
Curtain has long held an enduring fascination for me. That was a big reason why I so loved German doing at school. When I started the A-level course Germany was separated by 200 yards of watch-towers, searchlights and tripwired minefields. By the time I actually sat the exams the wall had come tumbling down and a new world order was upon us.

What the future world order shall bring, I shudder to think. It's capitalism capitalism capitalism everywhere. I'm a capitalist, but I see excesses everywhere. And greed is not always good, despite what Gordon Gecko would have us believe.
Anyway I must ping. I wonder if anyone actually read this post to the end? If so, I commend you with a 金奖章 jīn jiǎngzhāng ~ a gold medal!



PS Here's an entertainment for you: the oldest recording JRR Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, et al... he appears in this early English Linguaphone course in units 13 "the wireless" and 20 "at the tobacconist's"! What a blast from the past. (He was well into his "pipe-weed" as anyone who's seen the films will know...)

Link: Sprache, Kultur und Translation - Chinesisch

I will go on taking heroin till I die...

... SO YESTERDAY I SPENT MY DRUG MONEY ON BOOKS (and food). £10 got me a 972-page German tome called Der Turm (The Tower") by Uwe Tellkamp. £3.50, beautiful hardback with acid-free cream paper. Set in the former DDR... well I can't tell much about it as I'm only on page 7. But it's set behind the Iron Curtain and I have a thing about life in former communist states. The other books were give up smoking for 50p, Byron Childe Harold/etc 30p special offer (minuscule hardback) and Peyton Place (80p) by Grace Metalious, who died of alcoholic cirrhosis at 39 and sold well over 20,000,000 copies of this book about moral degeneracy in a drab New England Town. This reprint comes with intellectual introduction by some academic and I have to say Metalious's literary style isn't bad (nowhere near as bad as Jacqueline Susann's, if you're into trash fiction of the 1950s and 60s).

The rest of my tenner went on food.

I was actually hoping for Teach Yourself Mandarin Chinese book and CD set for £5 (well I can hope, can't I?) but Mandarin will have to wait till next week.

The urge to educate myself is eating me up inside. An all-consuming craving, far worse than any drug-craving I've experienced for a very long time.

Today will be a test day. I KNOW a friend who will come to me in need (he always does) and how on earth I will get out of that situation without scoring heroin I have no idea.

By the way there is a terrible drought on at the moment. The drug purity has fallen ~ even in the best stuff I've found ~ to less than a third of what it normally was. I can tell this by the way methadone holds me so much better than any street heroin I've bought in weeks.

My favourite hobby is complaining about the lousy gear. So people assume I'm being ripped off, introduce me to their dealer and I'm even MORE BITTERLY DISAPPOINTED with minuscule bags of even poxier gear!

In my opinion anything that's not China white is rubbish anyhow. Heroin is properly white, not brown.

The worst stuff that was around can't have been more than 1% pure ~ if that. And it was full of some sort of resin that re-congealed on cooling, making the stuff uninjectable unless you filtered it three times.

The root of the shortage is blight on Afghanistan's poppy crop, reducing this year's opium yield from around 8000 tonnes (enough to make 800 tonnes of heroin) to something like 2500 tonnes opium (250 tonnes heroin). The UK alone uses an estimated 35 tonnes annually (at import strength), so if there's blight next year it's curtains for heroin (hurrah!)

Hurrah, because I can be free. I feel like a pan of boiling water, seething with pent-up energy and furious steam. One day I will go out and smack the world right between the eyes, because the world deserves it.

Meanwhile I have to 1. give up heroin 2. learn fluent German 3. write several bestselling books 4. learn fluent Chinese 5. learn fluent Russian 6. get on course I've been wittering on about 7. graduate with summa cum laude or whatever the phrase is.

Then at long last I will be qualified to do something.

When I was little and heard foreigners going blubble-blubble-blubble, I thought they all spoke one language called Foreign. I was determined to learn this mystery tongue, so nobody could prattle over my head again.

Also I was affronted by the way almost all foreigners appeared to be fluent in English, giving my family, friends and I no linguistic privacy whatsoever almost anywhere in the world.

My goal is to speak at least 10 languages fluently, including Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Thai ... blah blah. If I'd only not been so incredibly lazy all my life I could be a long way to achieving this goal. As it is, I barely speak fluent English!

My goblin-bitten computer cable replacement is here! Whoopeee! Now I must run in the shower. I'm so minging I'm infectious...

The Goblin is back!

THAT NAUGHTY GOBLIN has bitten my computer cable. So I've no power.

Actually no accident happened. The cable just wore itself out. Rather prematurely, in my opinion, but I know old age was the problem, as just before it went completely, you had to twiddle it so it was in one precise position to make power come through ~ like a mobile phone charger on its last legs...

So I'm waiting on a new goblin cure...

... meanwhile I've decided to pen a kiddybook. And I'm hacking through something in German by someone called H G Adler.

Must dash, as I'm on a public computer and I shall be terminated!

The News from Britain

POP SINGER George Michael is being severely punished in Pentonville Prison for crashing his 4x4 into a Snappy Snaps photo-shop at 3am while stone out of his brains on cannabis. His third offence.
The newspapers have had a field day. Best of the feast of headlines being "LOCK ME UP BEFORE YOU GO GO"!

HIS "HOLINESS" the Pope is on a State Visit to the UK. I watched the ceremonials on TV with fascination, including boring platitude-ridden speeches, thinking, "If I hear 'hallelujah' sung out in such gormless tones once more I'm gonna punch a hole in the TV set!" Thankfully my knuckles and its screen were saved when the old charlatan, who is as holy as he is young, jumped in his Pope-Mobile and wizzed off.
(Or did something like that.)
I don't know, because I fell unconscious through sheer boredom. I hope any Roman Catholics aren't too offended by my opinions. And I hope the Pope doesn't read this: perhaps he will call fire down from heaven to punish me!

ON A MORE POSITIVE NOTE, I've nearly finished my little story ~ 5000 words done. That's not as much as it might sound to a non-writer. Only about 13 pages in properly set book type. Or about 17 pages in ridiculously blown-up 300-words-a-page modern typeface.

Now I've only nine or so other tales to knock out until I've completed an entire book!

If we could talk to the animals...

... they might say something like this!

TALKING DOGS, CATS AND HAMSTER

...

BIRD TELLS CATS "YOU DON'T NEED TO CHASE US ANY MORE!"



NO BIG NEWS to report. Still working on me story. I've only done 3300 words, but I'm hoping no major goblins are in the text.

No broadband at home has helped me out in a big way. It's made me realize I've been wasting an opportunity to improve myself. To write great literature and change my life. I'm like the man who owns a Lambourghini and only uses it to drive to the corner shop for milk, sugar and a packet of fags!

Must dash ~ "darn" internet caff about to terminate me, as per usual!

Stabbed with a pear in the house of the dead ...

I AM READING NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, a cheery tome by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov (which my English teacher dubbed "the most boring book ever written") and The Insulted and Injured ~ I'm sure the authors of modern misery memoirs are peeved to find that particularly evocative title already used up!

I had some drinks this afternoon and sat under an electronic posterboard leafing through the cheery tale, which is set in a Siberian hard labour camp.

Dostoyevsky's characters ~ murderers, alcoholics, gamblers ~ remind me of some of the junkies I have met in my time ... I'm not saying anything else.

I googled various topics concerning Siberian labour camps and came up with a page from a school punishment book, detailing how many lashes of the cane various miscreants received for such crimes as stabbing someone with a pear(!) and grave robbing~(!!!) Am I badly misreading things (you can click on the picture to enlarge)~? Or was the world even crazier in Victorian times (or whenever those whippings are from)..? ~ than it is now?? (Surely not!)



I thought I would invent some comedy crimes of my own ...

The only sample offences I could come up with were:

Allowing school hamster to grow too tubby.

Allowing goblin to chase school hamster ...

I don't think I'd have done too well making up school rules in the dark ages, do you?

COMPETITION TIME ~ roll up and give your guesses, educated or otherwise, please! Tell me WHAT LANGUAGE ARE THESE SCRIBBLES WRITTEN IN?

Answers in the commentary box, if yer please...

PS the end of my HAMMY AND THE GOBLIN tale of wonder is coming soon. I bet y'all are yawning with excitement!

The Non-Secret of Novel Writing

BARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD
Not telling secrets to writing bestselling fiction.
Because she's saying "there is no formula".
Though I do agree with her philosophy that "character is plot".
All the stuff I've ever tried to write follows that maxim.
I wish I could write. I've got a golden idea that I have been scribbling down. I just feel so incredibly low down and I know even if it does get finished I won't make two brass ha'pennies out of it. But I'm going to finish this thing if it kills me. It's an original idea (not "like such and such person's work" or "in the style of someone else".
Some of the worst advice to the would-be author came from somebody I would call a wannabe, a second-rater, a "me too". This person advised you to read other authors who are already publishing stuff similar to what you want to write. O and I just... akh. No.
Anyway I've got to go and write my story. I won't get any less miserable by not writing it...



PS Do you notice how her TV adaptations are so nicely produced? That's because Barbara is married to Bob Bradford, TV producer extraordinaire...

Oriental Style Chicken Curry £1 etc

ICELAND "ORIENTAL STYLE CHICKEN CURRY" tonight. Boil int' bag (but of course). And only £1. Much nicer than yesterday's noodles, which were a bit "school dinners". Very pleasant indeed.

The me-shaped hole yesterday means not only that I felt I had a place on the shelves, but (and this really surprised me) I could find nobody else writing like me. Most extraordinary.

I deleted a big rant about the state of modern publishing, but I deleted so much of it, I deleted my main point too, ha-har!

Well the Goods Train of Entertainment trundles on, I can't go on about it. Writing's for writing. Not writing about..!

Well this is a nonpost. Tomorrow I'll tell you a true furry story about Pandable my old hammy, which is really entertaining.

The mysterious illness I have had for over a fortnight is still diarrhoeaing out, intermittently and unpredictably (as I'm sure you wanted to know). I'm so tired. I'm not in my sick bed but a sick armchair. I slept in the sick armchair, like a pensioner, all day. Ukh.



MUSICAL INTERLUDE

In the VIP. It's not called "clubbing" for nothing. A club really is a club. Like any other social group you have inner and outer circles. Nightlife is hierarchical and full of snobbery. Do you stand in the endless line, or swan right in? Do you pay? Get a comp? Or best of all, are you on the Guest List?

Then once you get in, are you just one of the common, vulgar herd, or in the "proper" room ~ the VIP room.

I avoided such clubs like the plague!

In the VIP:
WIDEBOYS & MAJESTIC (IN THE VIP REMIX) FEAT B-LIVE and BOY BETTER KNOW



The Streets: Fit (But You Know It)
He wrote an entire album about Ibiza party isle memories. Kicking off with this track ~

Me-Shaped Hole

I HAD a £1 Chinese chicken and noodles from Iceland. Boil int' bag. Hubble-bubbled away for 40 mins. Considering even a lunchtime combination box, a cheapie, is £3 minimum, for £1 this was amazing.

I checked out my nearest bookshop and found a glaring me-shaped hole where my books should be. Books plural, because I have a wealth of ideas.

Yes the project is moving at last! Like a creaky old goods train, it has shuddered to a start. The hoary old locomotive is belching diesel smoke and trundling wearily onwards ~ bringing cartloads of entertainment to the world!

Sorry I've not been visiting any of you very much at all. Nothing personal. But I must focus. I'm still not feeling too fantastic. My energy reserves are low and must be wisely invested. Talent ~ as I was banging on the other day ~ is not to be wasted!

Got to run. I hope you're all keeping well. Take care of yourselves. Just for a change, I'm trying to take care of me!

Who knows? One day this Me-Shaped Hole might be overflowing with amazing tales!

Ill (yet inspired)

I'M not feeling well. Not at all. Every day I'm in bed early, drained, exhausted and sick. Last night Valium Marilyn and I went down the pub and got bladdered enough that she proposed marriage. But I felt so bad I had to leave before ten o'clock to go to my bed.

Today I was supposed to go to counselling. I hobbled to and from my methadone chemists already and the phone rang. My counsellor asked what time I wished to come in. I said midday, then regretted agreeing to anything. I wove my way home feeling as if I might keel over any second. Then I went to bed, phoned the Centre and said I was not up to coming in.

This has nothing to do with drugs. If you remember my story you'll remember I had chronic fatigue syndrome YEARS before heroin addiction. Heroin seemed a wonderful cure for this and the depression that has dogged me for years. Heroin came second. Something Maple Syrup, for example, the druggieworker I sacked, refused to understand.

I have the feeling that this counsellor will likewise assume I'm not coming in because I was too drugged/couldn't be bothered/that type of reason.

These professionals annoy me. It's all nodding yes yes yes to all my problems. Yet when when my problems interfere with THEIR convenience, sympathy's quickly out the window.

I'm off sick and yet I'm not even allowed to BE sick. Well the world can go to hell...

None of this will stop me doing what I have to. I can write in bed. If my head's swimming that badly I have to shut my eyes, I'm still capable of typing. I can type eyes closed, by touch.

I don't want to say much about my project. It's for doing, not talking about.

And I cannot see that it will make me megabucks.

Somehow my comments (Wednesday) got on to the theme of publishing advances. As I said I really cannot think about how little I might get. Or how much writers are paid at the top end of the profession. It's devastatingly offputting.

Literature in an art; publishing is a business. I'm in the business of writing. The ins and outs of royalties, advances (if they even exist, I wouldn't know) and the blah blah blahs... these do my brainbox in whenever I turn my attention in that direction.

So I'm resolutely NOT thinking about how little I'm likely to be paid.

I am ever more fed up with heroin and methadone and addiction to them. But I cannot quit into a vacuum. Which is why I stated that I'm NOT into giving up the drugs and all right now.

As I see it, just about anything I can do will be better than nothing. Accomplishing a dearly held childhood dream might be just about the best thing I could ever do.

What's the saying...? The longest journey begins with a single step.

Whenever I think of my story, I feel inspired. I still feel horrible and depressed. Physically I feel ill and exhausted. I am going to bed early because my head's swimming. Not with drugs, with exhaustion. But I have this tale inside me of such amazingness, it DEMANDS to be told!

I have been stuck in this morass for years and it's killing me. It's time to move on.

My only hope is that this first step might be followed by another... and another...

... then one day I might look back and find myself a thousand miles away from the mire I'm stuck in now!

Reading materiell

TODAY I found a bookshop with several shelves of foreign languages. The German section was all mixed up with Dutch and Scandinavian. C'mon ~ German doesn't have struck through Øs or Ås with little halos on top!
Every single volume of slightest interest that I didn't buy I made careful note of inside the paper bag my methadone came in. Author, title, price... I'm the character Oscar Wilde was speaking of when he famously remarked on the price of everything and the value of nothing...
But prices aside, I carefully checked everything on display. What I wanted more than anything was something nonficitonal and rivetting. For a novel to hold my attention it has to be really special. Otherwise my attitude pretty much goes: this isn't even TRUE, yet you think I should be leafing forever onwards through your tawdry tale? The only novels that have grabbed me in recent times are thrillers. When I heard you could make £20k writing romance and that top writers knock out five or more a year I bought one for 20p. I seriously could not make it past page one. I have an idea (amongst so very many) for a crime series. Who knows, I might one day even put pen to paper (or digits to keys)... As it is I'm mired in my present project which is slowly ongoing. My characters are so real to me. Their story HAS to be told....
Anyway I perused carefully through this not-too inspiring selection of German books and came away with a Collins Gem German dictionary for £1. It's tiny but I quickkly realized on getting it home that my vocabulary has outgrown it. My favourite German word, klitzeklein which means teeny-tiny wasn't there, because the book is too klitzeklein itself!
Most of the novels were translations from English, whcih seemed the biggest waste of time. I want to know I'm experiencing something unique. So I chose a thriller by Volker Klüpfel and Michael Kobr called Seegrund which means Bottom of the Lake. Paragraph one I understood perfectly... because it was somebody speaking English! But I found I also understood paragraph two just as well. This is seriously freaky.
I was about to take my purchases to the till when I realized that behind me was another mixed language pile of children's picture-books. And here, finally, the book I've long been searching for ~ an illustrated encyclopedia of science. As well as all types of animals and plants, we have the Solar System, the sun, the stars, asteroids and meteorites, comets; the weather, the human body, some amazing star maps and the cutest photograph ever of a family of golden bears crossing the ridge of a waterfall, Mummy Bear glancing back to make sure her babies aren't tumbling over the side... This is the book I've longed for ever since I took up German again. It gives all the basic vocab on everything. It's dead easy to read and beautifully illustrated. My best spent £2 in a long, long while!
Though I still feel full of unaccountable gloom whenever I stop, I'm determined to keep on running so my misery won't bite me on the bum and eat me. Perhaps there's no magic cure for depression, but at least knowing that you're accomplishing something, even if it is just learning to speak over again... That does help a little.
Now I must ping. it's nearly 4am. I'm only awake due to my broken sleep cycle.
Apart from books, my best news is THE HEATWAVE HERE IS OVER! Normal cool weather is resumed! I couldn't be happier.
Wishing y'all a cheery day :-)...
PS Chogstable the nightingale is trilling and tootling his klitzekleine head off in the cherry tree outside, the feathery swine!

Tubby trotterdonkey west highland terrier

I SAW THE BEAUTIFULLEST TUBBY TROTTERDONKEY WEST HIGHLAND TERRIER outside the methadone chemists' this morning. He was so cute (surely it has to be a "he" without bits to be that lardy in a little white dog ~ he was like a beer barrel sprouting Daz-white terrier fur!)... I just wanted to take him home. Why on earth I've become so pets-broody of late is beyond me. I am telling myself to be sensible and careful as I have every intention of publishing this bestseller, becoming FAR too rich to reside in the UK and fleeing to foreign shores as soon as possible (remember I've always had this dream ~ rich or not). I dream constantly of Paris and all things French. Monte Carlo and Switzerland are both "tax havens" and both French speaking... and it would be most inconvenient to bring pets there. Of course I have to FINISH the blinkin' thing first. But a boy can dream....
Apart from (exceedingly slowly) penning this novel, I am scheming original (and not too expensive) ways of promoting my book. I am not naive enough to believe that just because a first novel is as good as I can make it people will automatically flock to buy it. No! It needs push push PUSH ~ promote, promote PROMOTE!! And if my publishers won't do it (and I wouldn't count on them to, except in a gentlemanly publisher-like way, I shall have to take charge and bring my genius to the world's notice!
Except in teenage daydreams (but of course!) ~ I have never really wanted to be famous and certainly not a "celebrity". I would like to be a famous NAME, of course ~ like any successful writer. But tacky constantly "Hello" magazine-featured, desperate to dish the latest revelations of my boring life to a queasy public-type desperate celebrity...? No thanks. When I get old (or young, for that matter) I wish to be well known and popular enough to pack out theatres with my one-man show where I'll perch on a blue velvet armchair and proclaim philosophies on life, raconteur funny (true) stories everyone will assume are far more embroidered than they actually are, because my if I wrote my life in a book nobody would believe it (another thing I had against becoming a memoirist rather than novelist)... then I shall take questions from the audience for the last hour... and everyone shall go home in their multiple hundreds feeling that's an afternoon's wages well spent. And I shall be able to go out shopping at Harrods on the proceeds. So you see ~ far from being lettuce-limp and sappy as the nasty MAPLE SYRUP supposed I actually am brimming with ambitions. I simply refused to tell a Hitleress like HER any details at all. Bitch!
Anyway ding-dong the old cow is gone! And I'm so happy about it. I've an appointment with Maple's replacement tomorrow, so I'll let you know how things go...
The drug habit IS still going, I hope you realize. I just got bored posting about it. It just feels, increasingly as winter slowly, eventually drags to its long-eeeked out end... that a new and golden dawn is rising... I can feel it in my veins, my bones, my water. I can feel it. Heroin is nowhere near as exciting as it used to be (like an injection of life itself ~ how I adored it!) Now it only makes me feel dull and tired. And I only take it out of habit. The days off are often my better days now... which just about says everything... I only wish I could take the rest of my life off. That's what I intend to do, but getting to that point seems so incredibly hard... I don't know. I don't know. What can I do except push myself forward? What can I do? "It is what it is!" as Ivana Trump likes to say.

To any fans of Celebrity Big Brother out there (Channel 4, UK television, but you can see updates here) ~ I would say my personality is a cross between nervy Ivana and the laid-back to the point of irritating Jonas-Basshunter.


And that's all I can say for today... Cheerybye all!!


IN THE NEWS: SMITHSONIAN Institute, Washington DC, USA have, for a short time the Wittelsbach-Graff Blue Diamond, reputed to be an offcut of the same giant stone as the Hope Diamond which was stolen from the French Crown Jewels after the French Revolution and cut in two to disguise the theft... Curators have but a few days to perform necessary tests on the two 50 carat and 31 (formerly 35 but it had to be recut as some idiot dropped and chipped it ~ yes you CAN chip diamonds, they are ultra hard but BRITTLE... if science establishes the stones to be related that will be an age-old mystery solved...!

Taking Notes

THAT'S ALL I'VE BEEN DOING... all night... (somehow it feels real meaningful, staying up most of the night doing something ~~ dunno precisely why!) Making copious "notes" re this erstwhile book of mine. Or: put another way ~ huge sections of upcoming chapters written out in the wrong order ahead of time so I'm going to have to fiddle to fit them in. Annoying, but less annoying than not knowing what to say when the time comes to complete my "tome". I feel constipated with bestselling fiction. If I don't get it out of me, I'll die. I can't go on like this. Everything has to be finished, so everything can change. That's all I'm focusing on. Even Maple Syrup can see the change in me. She agrees that if you can't give up heroin you can never move forward. I'm preparing the place to move to when I am totally clean. Just bear in mind I was sick both mentally and physically for years before heroin addiction totally waylaid everything about me. In American terms, if my life is a car-crash, then I'm "totalled". And I've had enough of all this. Had enough and want out. And I'm NOT moving on into a blank void, not if I can possibly help it. All I ever wanted to do in life was be a writer of novels. I mean since childhood. Yes there have been other ambitions and distractions but in truth writing is all I really wanted to do. So I reason: if I can do that, I have my distraction from drugs already up and running. I've already noticed I write much better on methadone than heroin. I don't need to take the drug to write the lifestyle. I lost more than a decade "researching" that one... My unabridged flirtations with drugs now go back about eighteen years. That particular chapter of my life has run on far too long and needs bringing to closure ASAP.
And I don't know how to end this post, except by saying: and that's that!

Illustrated: coloured notes, as illustrated at Mouserunner.Com; the so-called Fleetwood Diary, as penned by Christian Fleetwood in 1964...

Clear Space

SEE, I'M GLAD my Mum came by now. My house now seems incredibly spacious and clear... Someone asked me why I couldn't just clear up anyway ~ but I'm never any good at that. I keep things clean for someone ~ and I'm afraid my own self isn't a good enough candidate!

So now I'm sat in a chair not really watching TV, because I'm telling my own torrid tale. I keep worrying it might sell less than 10,000,000 in the first year... what a horror that would be. But these are crosses we writers must bear.

Apart from that I've nothing else to say. My creative juices are flowing into fiction... Must dash ~ I have a funeral to describe!

Famous literary agents: Morton Janklow , Lynn Nesbit (Janklow & Nesbit, New York) Ed Victor, London ...

Breakthrough

WELL I FINISHED my endlessly reupdated chapter one. Which still probably has rough bits, but it needs looking at by fresh eyes. Emailed it to someone I trust who is NOT an addict. No point just giving it to fellow addicts to read they'll probably think it's wonderful just because at last they're reading about fictional characters who live just like them. My book is written for someone stuck on a remote farm in New Zealand and someone riding the commuter train into Manhattan. I.e. normal people who are not addicts and not English. If my points come across to people like these, I've done my job.

I had a very good counselling session. I showed the counsellor the "MS" to my book, as we like to say in the trade ~~!(***if only!***)!! ~ yes and the manuscript is just as well punctuated as that.(!) My counsellor said I was a very powerful person. And spiritual. I said how do you know that and she said she can just tell ... And apart from that I don't know what to say.

Now it's back to that book and chapter two. This is where the rewriting starts in earnest as the old chapter two is just bluster and guff about my characters' past. No dialogue. No "scene" as such. It has to be totally redone. OK I'm outta here. Have a pleasant weekend, y'all!

PS do you like the picture: a blast-from-the-past Amstrad PCW wordie!

THE STRANGLERS ~ GOLDEN BROWN
Classic song about... guess what?

A Random Day

I COULDN'T SLEEP last night. So I randomly trawled my shelves and picked up a Marian Keyes novel ~ which is non-romance chicklit and I found it on the street by the way ~ a story about a literary agent and two novelists. Reading about book publishing wound me up so I was even less amenable to sleep.

But I did learn something about literary agents that should have twigged before. Basically they are essential in today's "market" ~ publishers don't even look at work by unknowns. That's the agents' job. Anyway I learned that fledglings at the agency don't even get a cut of the deals they negotiate ~ which seems most unfair. Only partners do. One of the agents who showed an interest last time was a director at his company. So I know who to approach first next time, don't I?

I also sat up drawing plans for my own book. I need to know where the story's going before I retell it. Telling the story I love ~ not knowing what to tell is torment. Hence this planning in advance.

Once I did get to sleep I couldn't wake up. I spent nearly the whole day sleeping. And now I feel like a dinosaur. And I'm depressed (for no apparent reason).

I have told myself that once my plans take off I'll have far less to be depressed about ~ which seems logical. I just hope it comes true.

On that note I must fly. I never seem to get two minutes on a computer before it's logging me off for lack of time... so I'll see yas tomorrow xx



PS A gust of wind last night hit me so strong I nearly got hurled backwards onto someone's roof!

PPS I saw a picture of Gwendolina in the paper today! She looks just like a bear named Finn who got shot for attacking a mentally ill man who climbed into its zoo enclosure... The horrible pictures are here ... Actually that brown bear oop top looks like Gwendolina too...