Piri Piri Potatoes and a Half-Baked Novel

I MADE A PETTY IMPULSE PURCHASE last week! The first one in about ten years (not counting food, drugs, drink or necessity-type items). There I was queueing in the post office (that means standing in inexorable, interminable life-drainingly long line to you Americans. Of course we're queueing next to numerous novelty stationery items and had ample opportunity to examine them, being stood next to them so long. My eye was caught by a tiny notebook, I think it's A6 size which is smaller than I usually like ~ but it was covered in circular holograms of the most amazing motion, like a symphony of ever decreasing circles. Or increasing ~ depending on which way you hold it. "If only I could bring this back to the time of the Pharaohs this would be worth more than the finest jewels," I mused. Then I thought "well you could bring it with you if you went travelling to remote parts. Shark-spearing locals might swap it for a gobstopper sized blue pearl or something..." I looked at the price. About £1.29. Up to that point it hadn't even crossed my mind that I might buy it. To me, things in shops are like museum displays. I never want them because I never even consider them on sale to me. This is one of the many petty bridges I feel burned, or steps taken down to the stygian depths of addiction that separates someone like me from someone like most of you. Something I'd not usually recognize in day-to-day droning dullardness because I'm so used to it I forget, but it puts you and me in totally different worlds...

Anyway I bought the notebook and was nagging at myself early this morning (having woken up at the cheery hour of 4am) on having got nowhere with this book I really do want to write. Seriously it's an A1 idea, I just couldn't muster the joy to get it going. Because it's based upon actual events I'm constrained as to the course of the story, though how I plot the novel and the characters I people it with are of course entirely up to me. We're talking ancient history so I have pretty much carte blanche how I tell it. So I'm thinking, I need to put in this and that and this perspective and that happening. Then I realized if I ignored what I "think" I should put and plan out scenes I want to write instead not only will I have more fun, but I might get a better book out of it. So that's what I did and it seems to be working. In fact I came up with a slapstick comedy scene set in the dungeons that wouldn't otherwise have festooned my brains in 1,000,000 years ...

Righty-ho on to the potatoes. It was Sunday night and I was penniless and totally unappetized by the nearly-empty frozen veg packets and Iceland diddly crispy potatoes. The vinegar had nearly run out. There was no butter for my green beans and worst of all I had no Bisto gravy to slick all over it. Inspiration struck and I piri piri'd my potatoes with Schwarz Cajun seasoning mixed to two parts paprika and a generous couple of pinches of the salt/MSG mix I vandalize my food with every day. Anyway this sprinkled liberally over said diddly roasting potatoes, the potatoes being turned and resprinkled at ten minute intervals, made them gorgeously piquant and crispy. They were a bit like the wedges you used to get at KFC 25 years ago, when they also did black cherry flavour milk shake...

Righty-ho now before I go just to make it clear yesterday I was not slagging off the idea of working ~ whether 9-5 or any other hours. What I was getting at was that you can be spiritually dead, creatively bankrupt, ambitions unfulfilled and all that whether you're working or not and occasionally I realize this and don't feel quite so bad. But as I was saying yesterday, I never envisaged a life of idle wasting and hate living it now. Most of my life "goals" are what you'd call career-oriented. There are loads of things I've always wanted to do, including: become writer of popular novels of worldwide renown; get bit part in French film; design a board game; design a gameshow and get it on TV; make a "grandad and the singing gnomes" type novelty techno record if I ever live past 70; become an internet cook; set up and run a picture library and design, produce and sell a range of novelty hamster homes the like of which nobody has ever seen because they're so amazing... and so on and so on. So there I'm not lacking in ambition I'm just manured in a morass of drug-addicted apathy I cannot seem to clamber out of so what am I going to do? It's all down to me it's all down to me I know. That's what makes it so scary!

Och aye! Ye'll never be a stenographer, ye cannae write fast enough! PLUS: Intellectual Chinese Food

WARNING: THIS POST HAS A SAD SPODDY PART, THEN THE INTELLECTUAL CHINESE PART:~
I'VE JUST BEEN READING the most fascinating site about shorthand. The site-writer's biog tells how as a child he was fascinated by secret codes (I was too; invented one I could write nearly as fluently as ordinary writing). He says he learned shorthand from sheer fascination, rather than as a business tool. I found his writing interesting because I also learned shorthand (though I did have a practical reason: I always wanted to be a writer of some sort and knew that for journalists shorthand is essential. You're not allowed recording equipment in British courts. And for music journalists dictaphones are nearly useless in concerts and nightclubs where background noise makes anything you've recorded virtually incomprehensible.

I chose Gregg's, the American shorthand, which is barely used over here. In this country most budding journalists are taught Teeline these days, which is very easy to learn but to my mind simply not fast enough. Pitman's, the main alternative is exceedingly fast but really difficult to pick up. Also you need to use a pencil or special shorthand-nibbed fountain pen and lined paper is essential as the positioning of penstrokes on or through the line varies according to vowel sounds. I really couldn't be bothered with all that: I just wanted something I could scrawl with a pen on the blank paper I've always favoured and so I taught myself Gregg's system. I say "scrawl": strangely, Gregg's shorthand looks just as scrawly as my own longhand. And it's just as hard to read back unless you really put some discipline into jotting the outlines precisely.

I look back on my old straight (and yes geeky) self who taught myself shorthand. Fair enough it's not like conquering Everest but I've never met anyone else who learned shorthand from a book and can actually use it. I had all this determination and some sticktoitiveness and look what my life has come to!

I really have to write that bestselling novel then all my problems shall magically be solved.

O yes and remember to kick drugs first...

PS: if you're wondering what the squiggles mean, they begin:
Dear Mr Dean: It is essential that I have three copies of our mailing... blah blah blah blah.... Shorthand courses have never featured the most rivetting of dictations...

stop press the Chinese food bit has to come in a minute as I gotta run...

Sorry: had to dash up the rd where my dealer did me a massive block of "B" for £19. To be honest it was so big I was wondering whether it was real but it looks right, smells right...

CHINESE FOOD:
My Mum bought me some shopping from Waitrose (homeland of the foodie bourgeoisie) and Tesco (supposedly our best (though less posh than Waitrose, who do quail's eggs next to normal ones) though I shop at Sainsbury's). Now I have everything for a plush Chinese meal including straight-to-wok noodles, toasted sesame oil, proper nondisposable chopsticks (x about 18,000,000 with Chinese writing atop saying "Westerners are berks!" (well that's probably what these things say: who knows? One man got a permanent tat on his upper arm reading "Coca-Cola": it was all over the Sun newspaper... Rice crackers, plum sauce, blackbean sauce, szechuan sauce, chili sauce, a far better soy sauce than the last one I had (even though that had Chinese writing all over it (I'm a sucker for a bit of exotic calligraphy...) that went into my old mattress: remember? like very runny black diarrhoea)... and some other sauce. The upshot being that even though I had no other stir-fry ingredients apart from newborn noodles, parboiled diagonal-chopped carrots (so "authentic"!), some crushed unsalted cashews (must be careful not to eat entire lot direct from packet) and a bit of (non-spring) onion, plus a sprinkling from my half kilo bag of MSG (I'm such a devotee now), tiny bit of dark soy and that toasted sesame oil... it came out amazing! Even better than the local Chinese's efforts, I'd venture to say... That sesame oil certainly is something... Adds a liquid toastiness I had assumed the takeaway achieved by lightly burning everything at one stage... so you can imagine what resulted from my naive attempts to replicate that little effect...

Because I'm wishing to move further from the takeaway and nearer "authenticity" (I use the word advisedly). And I'm not willing to stir-fry dogs, crows, slugs, wasp grubs or anything else of the non-halal variety consumed in China, I'm thining of switching to Malaysian cooking because they're mostly Muslims and I won't even eat pork, let alone anything 6-legged (lobsters have six yuk-spines and they're considered a delicacy even by stupid English people). The best foreign restaurant meals I've ever had were all Malaysian. To me it was a mix of the best of Indian, Chinese and Thai without spicy extremes or yucky sweet-&-sour (I never got the point of that one). Malaysian salads are the best in the world. Anyway I have to go now I've a bag of stir-fry ingredients calling my name.

Cheerio then!

VIDEO
GIRLS ALOUD: I'M NOT THE LOVING KIND
Their new single. This is a masterpiece. The art director's use of a limited palette is rather effective. And I like the way this video moves, like a glossy magazine brought to life... What a catchy tune too!

Furry Future

HAVING THOUGHT ABOUT THE FUTURE, my mind turned to pets. I have always wanted to get a giant rabbit, you know, the sort you can put in a harness and take out for a trot each morning (a hop, perhaps...)... then I think: hey what about a pika~?!? But you can't really get domesticated pikas (those giant hamster-like critters that live up the Rockies and bound about with flowers and grass bunched in their mouths) they are, apparently, too likely to bite (who does THAT remind me of..?) Then I come to realize in that case I might as well get the world's furriest animal, which looks like a rabbit from Mars into the bargain: yes the amazing chinchilla! They run on 16" diameter wheels and watch television in their spare time. If you haven't got satellite or get the channel or volume wrong they'll protest with a squeak... (click here and scroll down if you don't believe me!)

Then I realized I already have the world's cutest rodents: my three trotterovskis. Surely if a rodent beauty contest were held my three would win..?

When I was first a drug addict my family used to despair that they just wanted the old me back. I, to be frank, was happy to be killing him off: a millstone of a personality I'd tolerated round my neck all my life I'd grown up being told I was useless at school (not by the teachers: I mean the other pupils) and so learned self-loathing... So I had no sorrow for any personality my addiction to heroin might have "lost"...

... now, however, I do look back at some of my good points of old. I remember pushing myself through several situations (job interview type occasions etc) where I was so nervous my voice literally declined into a kind of bleat because I was trembling so much. And yet I pushed myself through. And how I did have some stubbornness and moral "fibre" (if you want to call it that)... and determination. Sometimes I want to get these aspects of the old me back, plant them in a pot like seeds and grow giant sequoias of them...

Wasn't I barking on yeserday! Like a twelve year old kiddie in a sweetshop!! I did achieve something. What I achieved was the near total (and utterly unexpected) demolition of my long- longstanding fear ~ nay, TERROR ~ of work.

Don't get me wrong; I've never been "workshy" in the sense of laziness. (Though like anyone I can be terminally lazy at selected times...) If only I could work and feel good about it and be well paid, I'd have been happy. My fear stems from bad experience. The experience of being hopelessly depressed and yet flung into work and social situations I could barely cope with (I literally had not enough hours in the day at one point to sleep, bathe and eat before getting back to start work again...)... my selfconfidence was at rock bottom and never really improved from any work experience I undertook, paid or voluntary. My last job I felt so very rotten I just wanted to curl into a ball. I could barely focus on anything I was that exhausted. I used to gaze longingly out of the stairwell windows and fantasize about flinging myself out. And I pushed and pushed and pushed against myself and only made myself iller. Then I discovered I really did have something wrong: it was called ME (so-called myalgic encephalomyelitis; though I hate that name) it is better known internationally as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) which I believe is a more accurate description... this was the same so-called "yuppie flu" of the 1980s: and it does tend to afflict people who, far from being lazy at heart, will push themselves too hard...

Then I got signed off sick... drifted... found that heroin "cured" not only my terminal lack of confidence, but all my physical aches too... and my world pretty much ended there.

All I can say is that yesterday I felt I glimpsed a vision through a very narrow crack of a newly-opened door...

SONG:
Dolly Parton: Jolene (listen to the chat she gives beforehand; it's classic!)

I Did It!

I DID IT! Yes I did it! I actually went in there and did not bottle out. How amazing! Everyone DID look at me like: who the hell is THAT?? But I ignored their visual jibes and gratefully took a free glass of red wine (a black woman had white: everyone else had boring old orange juice. ORANGE JUICE ~ to go on air? Honestly!)

We got split into groups. My group was the smallest, consisting of a tiny 40 or 50something year old man who is such a regular caller all the staff knew him. Plus a fat couple from Essex, with very Essexey (that is out-of-town suburban) values and opinions. Not a single person ventured to make any eyecontact or friendship with me (as expected).

While the other lot got a guided tour round the station, we were shoved straight in a studio with a mike at every chair and though it wasn't a fluent discussion, various topics, shows, presenters were brought forth. Three of us out of four looked extremely selfconscious (self included). I died on myself twice. Literally froze from nerves; had to fish myself out (very adeptly so, as well ~ if I say so myself...). I knew this was never meant to be live or even live sounding. They only wanted people's voices to mix into different adverts, trailers, soundbites and all that rubbish, so I wasn't fazed in that respect, and as I said I did fish myself out.

I hope they don't use any of my contribution. At the end we had to say each of us alone "this is blah blah blah radio". I put on my answering machine voice and made the fart woman (typo! but she was one) look at me all different...

Then, traumas over we got a tour of the building by the second in command boss at the station. I noticed he was as badly shaved as I had been before I took razor to face this afternoon. I asked all the most cogent, intelligent, diverse and basically spot-on questions so he spoke to me practically the whole time instead of the useless rest of the rabble (I don't know about you: but don't YOU notice who someone's talking to, when you and someone, or many other people are introduced to a person of note..? I ALWAYS do....)

I took his name, got free mugs and fridge magnets. Security (for once in my life) treated me like a human being and not a theif they just hadn't managed to nail (as I usually get treated by security guards)... out on the street I cheerily said "see you on the radio then!" to the fat pair; they looked at me like well we hope we never cast eyes on YOU again but forced sneering snorts of smiles.

And then I trotted the ten minutes to my bus stop feeling a job had been well done.

I got the deputy station controller's attention, I went in the building. I wouldn't be half as nervous there again (specially seeing how causual they were all turned out!)... I didn't ask about internships (asking TONIGHT had never been on the cards ~ I did try to make that clear)... yeah and blah blah blah ~ wahey! I did it!!!!!!

PS THE ANTIPERSPIRANT (badly-needed) body spray I bought smells so pukeworthy that in this netcaff cubicle the overpowering pong is seriously threatening to make me THROW UP...

Washing/Drying/Et Cetera-ing...

POST-BATH PRE-CLOTHES... OK I'm writing this in a hurry... was unable to post anything last night as fast asleep in post-shopping-for-deodorant-etc exhaustion coma...

Many thanks for all your messages of support. I've not been able to check every one yet as at the present moment I'm rather hurried between just having bathed (woo!), washing clothes in the one local laundrette (that's a laundromat to you Americans) with a spin-dryer (saves a fortune on the dryers!) I painstakingly shaved this morning... actually that's not the right word. Painstaking implies care. My experience was painful, impatient, full of mental negativity and physical blood from my chin.

But the usually-surly man at the end of my road said hello to my fresh-faced self this afternoon... plus I look nearly ten years younger... so maybe it was worth all the effort after all...

All this costing me a tenner I would otherwise have donated to my usual cause... feels so very unusual..!

Anyway, once clothes done (my hair washed, face shaved, clothes will be clean and dry including dirty old winter coat) I shall be ready about two hours ahead of time... wow!

I have the address, the main (ie business switchboard for important people not just bigots who want to spout off on air) telephone number and can get there on one single bus plus a ten minutes (tops) walk.

Barring earthquake or terrorist attack I SHALL BE THERE. Prattling in the mike about whatever floats their broadcasting boat...

yeah I still have very %skewed% glasses, my teeth are brown (at least they are THERE; unlike many a junkie I could mention)... and so on and so on. Right I'm off. If I don't dash back some particularly desperate person (well they really would have to be) might steal my clothes from the soon-dormant washing machine!

Video of the Day:
Gabriella Cilmi: SWEET ABOUT ME
Have a listen... this is one of the great songs of the year!

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

*

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...

Rainy, Clement, Dreadfully Intermediate

RAINY, CLEMENT, DREADFULLY INTERMEDIATE: it's that kinda day.

I, as I tried to write out last night, am reappraising my life.

Working out where it is I wanna go and what I'm willing to do to get there.

As the old Chinese proverb states, it's the Journey that counts ... whether or not we finally get there. Or to put it another way, life's not purely about winning: but it's most definitely about taking part. And that's been my trouble: not even taking part.

I still have the seeds of ambition within me. When I was younger I did nothing but daydream on what I would achieve and how. I was never someone to make any distinction between "daydreaming" and "planning" ~ which you can look at two ways, I suppose. It could be a tremendous weakness or it could be the strength that saves me ...

***

BOOKS I'M READING: (or attempting to read; I've not ploughed through any one of them as yet) ...
Notes from a Small Island ~ Bill Bryson. American author; but! Do any of ye Yanks know this? 'Twas a big bestseller over here.
Breaking the Trust by Lucy Clare. "The day that Jack Palmer dies is one taht his three children ... will never forget. Returning to the family home to grieve, the last thing they expect is their mother's shocking announcement: their father had had an affair and a child with another woman. Titus Palmer is the brother they never knew they had ..."
and
The Dream Merchants by Harold Robbins. This one I have the most likely chance of finishing even tho it is 500 pages of close type (I'm reading the 1974 NEL paperback. If reprinted today in that mandy type they use with massive extra leading I'm sure it would extend to six or seven hundred pages or more...) I have a weakness for dazzling rags to riches tales of passion, hatred and revenge. The "spicy" bits (as I detailed in my little critique on Mario Puzo) to be honest I often find cringeworthy. If you want porn go and look at it. It has no place in novels. So many times I've been affronted, upon reading a perfectly pleasing story suddenly to flip the page and "panting like a lion that has subdued its still living prey he diddled her doddles with his whatever ..." and I think "please!" shut up!!

Hokay dokey. I've got part the next (can't even recall the number) of my personal miniseries all ready for the typing ... by quarter past six local time all should be ready. Righty-ho then...

***

stop press no it won't :: i'm off for a mcdonalds £1.19 (what a cheek! they were 99p last year!) double cheeseburger. somehow they got the balance of meat to bread to running fat right. single cheeseburger = too bready. big mac etc = too dry (if they use the same "patties" to make expensive big macs & cheapo double cheese i'll eat my television licence) ... the double cheeseburger is delightfully swimming in grease and you get that full-on beef hit only steak and (rather bizarrely) hamburgers seem to give ...

righty ho then ...

***

ps i keep thinking of that story of the genital warts i heard yesterday. and even worse the lurid photographs i dug up from the genital warts wikipedia site. ukk!

Thinking of "Careers" ...

WELL IT'S LATE Tuesday morning: I slept for ages and ages last night. Have been wondering what careers I could do. Do you know I've always been attracted to the idea of medicine. I don't know that I'm bright enough to be a doctor but I'd be up for training to do nursing. I'm not qualified to do any career at all you see, so I want to learn a "trade" ... Of course the one problem that arises with nursing and being a former addict (I wouldn't do the course if I was still using, I'd HAVE to be a former addict) is the issue of handling painkillers. But I've met a doctor at NA who got high on his own supply of drugs, cleaned up and was still practising into his sixties. My drugs are street drugs, so the associations with medication are weaker anyhow (addiction works by associations, it turns life into one big vicious circle). I was pondering this possible career like a teenager all weekend and only at the end of it realized my addiction might affect it. But I don't know that I should let that put me off training at all. I don't know, well it's an idea ...