Wednesday and Sunday

THIS IS what I wrote on Sunday, but the (public) computer wouldn't let me publish...

THE CLOCKS went back last night so it's 7pm where it would have been 8pm before. I've taken my pill. There's nothing doing tonight except Downton Abbey in an hour or two.

My computer is kaputt! The hard drive has gone so I'm *****d; only God can help me now. I believe in God. All things are possible. I suspect it's actually the cable not the drive that's gone but that still necessitates a change of drive at £50 for 160GB + £60 workmanship ie £110 or about $170 US.

The stopping smoking is going crap basically. I am cutting down on my ciggies before switching to that gum. The gum does work but I smoked near-constantly without really realizing it... I need to cut down to 12 a day then 8 a day and then 4. I was on about 25 (own rolled) before I tried to quit on Friday things swiftly went pear shaped. Maybe I'm trying to cut down too many things but I don't think so...

I have to go now before I get terminated. Hope you all had a good weekend!

PS I've been watching some horrible films: I didn't know La Reine Margot was so "lusty" or disgusting, Elizabeth shows folks being burned at the stake; Hell lived up to its name... ukh.

Viper: Hard Techno Anthem



This poor mouse doesn't know quite where to go so he just settles down and washes his ears...



OK it's now Wednesday and I'm still coughing and spluttering thanks to the Common Cold. I'm thinking of purchasing an electronic cigarette, you know, the type that light up then you suck in pure nicotine vapour minus any tar. You even see "smoke" that is actually water vapour, a vehicle for the nicotine.

I've been watching Elizabeth The Golden Age, it's much nicer than the first film about Elizabeth, far less gory. The director said he filmed inside cathedrals because stone is permanent blah blah going down the generations etc. But Elizabethan houses were wooden! So I kept wondering why the Queen was at church... I would love to be able to go back in time and tell her "m'lady you shouldn't worry too much about that Spanish Armada ~ they'll get beaten back by the weather"... etc.

I'm wearing Opium perfume that I got at £25 for 50mls about a month ago and I've already used half a bottle. I don't think I'll be getting that one again. One person told me I "smell like a French tart's boudoir" ~ and this is the pour homme version... My favourite fragrance is Chanel's Antaeus it smells like incence...

Now I have to go else I'll get terminated. Take care everyone...

PS I JUST READ THIS BACK. BOY WHAT A BORING POST!!

It Only Hurts When I Cough

MY THROAT has been colonized by alien spawn I have been sleeping half the time. Why my throat should affect the man in the moon I've no idea but it does. I'm really tired.

The bug killers came by today. We still have cockroaches in our house. The extermination man came at about 10:45 when I had just woken up. He puts this gel down that kills nearly all of them.

I don't feel as depressed as I did before. I've seen some light.

Tonight I have a stop smoking appointment at 5, so I should come out of it with a free prescription for nicotine gum. You have to choose what kind of NRT you would like and I decided the gums would be best: you use it only when you feel you need it; and chewing gives you something to do which might substitute for the action of smoking.

I'm kind of dreading giving up but I don't want to be an old smoker. I'm scared of hospitals more because of the thought of being forced to give up than anything else. I need a new life and I don't envisage cigarettes in that life.

I have to go now and buy a cream tart from Morrissons.

Schizoaffective Disorder

AS REGULAR READERS will know I have been diagnosed with a relatively rare psychiatric condition that affects approximately one person in two hundred and accounts for approximately five percent of all patients with serious mental illness. Not much is known about this condition. Varying opinions put have it as a variety of schizophrenia, or a variety of bipolar disorder, or a cross between the two or "the unlucky convergence of two psychoses" (that is that I am bipolar and schizophrenic at the same time.) The name of this condition is schizoaffective disorder.

The name "schizoaffective" originated in 1933. And as I say, nobody knows quite what it is or how it comes about. And though it is widely considered to be a midpoint between type 1 bipolar and schizophrenia on a "psychosis spectrum" it is acknowledged that schizoaffective disorder "has a flavour all of its own". For example, schizoaffectives seem particularly prone to "seeing things" as well as "hearing things". For example, when I'm ill I can see animals in the floor. Just as one can see faces and forms in clouds, I can see them not only in clothes an carrier bags but in floors, on walls and even on my computer screen. I sometimes see pairs of eyes at the bottom staring back at me.

When I was in the mental hospital years ago I saw an angel staring in at me through an upstairs window. At the time I had contact lens problems so I had in one constact lens. So through one eye I saw a blurry angel and through the other the angel was clear. Just as if a real form was at the window staring in at me. What shocks me today is that I never saw fit to tell my doctor about this. I think I was minded at the time to get out of there as quickly as possible without saying too much.

Oh and just to complicate matters there are two subtypes of schizoaffective disorder: a depressive type and a bipolar type. My hyper, manic phases are higher than my depressive lows are low. It's totally normal for mania to be more florid an psychotic than depression but my mania has reached, for short periods of time, the outer extreme of how manic it is possible to go. I'm so grateful that I don't go as depressed as you can go. And, because its quite possible to be schizophrenic and depressed at the same time, it's necessary to have more serious depression than I do to qualify as socalled "unipolar" or depression-only schizoaffective. My friend Pinky is depressive schizoaffective. She gets the faces in the floor thing; but her depressive episodes are generally worse than mine. And I don't think she's just describing them more "dramatically" I think she really does get more intensely depressed. Another difference is that her system will tolerate antidepresants while mine goes haywire on them. My mood cycles quickly. I can be quite horribly depressed, suicidally so, for just one day (an would usually have some degree of mania each side) whereas Pinky's depression is like mine used to be: constant lasting months on end. (Some of my depressions lasted years on end.) Another difference is that if you plotted it on a graph, my depression would be a wobbly line "under the water" as it were (that is under the line of "normality" in other words it used to cycle even back then. Now I cycle between high and low rather than merely different levels of low with infrequent flashes of high (I've had bipolar [manic] symptoms off and on (mostly off) since my mid-20s.)

I found the best schizoaffective stuff by googling "schizoaffective bipolar". The best link so far is from McManWeb: http://www.mcmanweb.com/psychosis.html

I've had a couple of comments expressing surprise that I'm not on a mood-stabilizer as well as an antipsychotic. I now know why. My doctor suspected I was schizophrenic not bipolar when he first saw me "ill". So he treated me using antischizophrenia drugs to see what progress I made. And sure enough I have stopped hearing voices and my mania is damped down. But it doesn't seem to do much against depression. I'd rather NOT be on a mood-stabilizer as no mood swings would just make my life too vanilla for words. If he thinks I'm OK on just risperidone, I'd rather go on purely on risperidone, experiencing some mania, because I love being a bit manic. It's like purely natural excitement (this is why it doesn't fit any drug signature if you wanted to be really precise about it, it doesn't match any upper even though being hyper is like being on uppers. I'd say being mildly hypomanic is like being on a bit of amphetamine; being moderately manic is like cocaine; being ultra high is like trippy Ecstasy type drugs; you could go raving in this state on nothing and actually be the most vibed-up person in there). Mania does take you higher than drugs. You just have to think: how many times have you or anyone you knew thought they literally Ruled the World, or felt like they were literally changing into an angel, because they were high on drugs? These feelings are par for the course in severe mania. In other words severe bipolar (or schizoaffective) takes you higher than drugs ever do. You'd fit out, foam at the mouth, and eventually die on uppers before you ever got that high. Which explains how I could stay awake as my head eventually went into a brainfrying high when on drugs, as I say, you'd just fit out or even die.

Sounds lovely, doesn't it!

Well I'm finding out what I can about this mysterious syndrome named bipolar schizoaffective. I can see that I match it perfectly. All I saw before was that I was bipolar. As a "patient" it's the pattern of ups and downs that is easier to grasp than the fact that you actually are in a mania or a depression or a (mixed state). The mind has a way of convincing itself it's not severely ill so I was in depression for months and seriously considered myself not to be ill and not to be worthy of any psychiatric diagnosis. That would have explained behaviour that was to me inexplicable.

My psychiatrist is a consultant who specializes in dual diagnosis (that is diagnosing people with drug problems and serious mental conditions) and he can weed out drug psychosis from bipolar or schizophrenic psychosis. Schizoaffective disorder has socalled negative or deficit symptoms for example you can spend hours or days staring into space. This is a part of my illness. I avoid social contact with people and I have impaired motivation, meaning I'm content to do very little, despite being largely off heroin. All the stuff that was blamed on heroin turns out to be "what I was like anyhow". As I myself was starting to suspect. I only had to look around at other addicts to see that no matter how badly addicted they were, they weren't in the mess I was in. They tended to be experts at taking psychiatrists for a ride which is why my "not bothering to try" attitude got me written off. I wasn't going to come in presenting a picture of misery just because I felt down. They only got a florid primary-coloured portrait of me when I was manic, highly expansive and unrestrained and very vocal. Then they saw who I really was. Acting manic must be one of thee most difficult psychiatric states to "put on" because you can't fake the presence of excess energy. It's just too exhausting. Another sign that I was real not faking. I grew to suspect that they considered me a fake or an exaggerator. I used to say that I needed to address my mood issues and I'd get nothing but nods and more nods. Then I went floridly mad and suddenly help is forthcoming. I'm just annoyed it had to get THAT BAD before anyboy listened.

I have sudden flashes of insight as I did today where I suddenly realize how deeply messed up some of the stuff is that I come out with. The glib way I talk about death. It really disturbs me to see that I'm this person in such a mess that I'd say the things I say. If it wasn't for my "no embarrassment, no deletion" policy I'd take a lot of it out to save my own face. But I just leave it all in. It's my own record of where I've been, that's my main motivation for blogging when "ill". My blog posts are my own postcards from the edge. Postcards to myself more than to you. I just am horrified at some of the things I thought. What was going through my head? It's sad, very sad to be this person so desperate he's talking about death as if killing myself shows some kind of character strength, when actually it shows desperation or even delusion. I'm much more disturbed about this than about my using heroin every now and then. All I learned from today's gear was that even though it was top-notch by today's low standards, it's still not doing the job it used to do.

All I can imagine is that being on antipsychotics that have squashed my more extreme manic symptoms and stopped me hearing voices or feeling dissociated from my own thought process (so my thoughts don't feel like my own, they feel like something I'm hearing on the radio). Risperidone stops most of this; heroin used to keep my mood on a far more even keel than it otherwise was, an it did a great deal to keep me sane. This is pretty obvious when you consider how badly I lost it when I suddenly jacked gear in last December. I had the most florid psychotic episode with both high and low mood, of my entire life. I have never ever hallucinated auditorily that vividly. Not on drugs, not on anything. When I became manic in February I was far higher, yet less "psychotic" in that I hallucinated less. All this is schizoaffective stuff. Unlike a bipolar person, I have psychotic-type experiences not related to a high or low mood. I remember some years ago feeling heavily stoned on cannabis with very LOUD thoughts, mild auditory halluciantions and racing thoughts from a COMMON COLD. This was while Maple Syrup my "it's all down to drugs" worker, the one who tried to bully me, the one I sacked. If Maple Syrup had even glanced at my files she'd have seen that I was 38 years old and hadn't become addicted to heroin until age 28. Meaning that I had 28 years of issues at that time. Meaning it was ridiculous to pin all my troubles on a drug. Meaning my intuition was right and hers wrong. I always did envisage myself losing it when I eventually came off. This wasn't "bad attitude" it was me seeing myself the way an insurance assessor would. That every single time without exception that I'd detoxified, dropped dose or switched medications I had experienced manic-depressive symptoms to some degree. I got extra meds in rehab BOTH times I was in there. I spent hours in the counselling rooms crying BOTH times. I spent all night wide awake every single night unlike everyone else who said they didn't sleep and promptly took up snoring for hours on end, BOTH TIMES. In other words something was going on with me that wasn't with them. If everybody had been as upset as I was they'd have employed a team of twelve full-time counsellors every day to meet demand. Somehow other people seemed to do a methadone or dihydrocodeine taper and though they had low points they didn't crack up. Yet somehow I did.

What I didn't expect was to go as floridly crazy as I did, or as rapidly as I did (literally the day I left heroin behind was the day I started hallucinating so floridly I literally could not tell whether I was thinking or hearing, I experienced that many voices.

In a way I look at myself from afar and feel sorry for someone who is a desperate mess. Self-pity is only useful when it gets you the help you need. Otherwise it's a waste of energy. My energy is going into finding out more about this mysterious condition with which I live.

It's diagnosed differently in the USA by the way to the rest of the world.
The World Health Organization's ICD-10 specifies that bipolar and schizophrenic symptoms are experienced together or within a few days of one another; the American DSM IV-TR insists that I must magically be free of any and all marked mood swings for a fortnight and still exhibit psychotic features. So whether or not I'm merely severely "bipolar 1" in America, I've no idea.

I know I have all the features associated with a poor recovery: mood-incongruent hallucinations, deficit symptoms between the severe mood swings, rapid cycling of the mood and mood switches directly between manic and depressed... all these are associated with poor medication response and a poorer prognosis. So whether or not I'm bipolar or schizoaffective in whatever country I am at the "severe end" of "severe mood disorders" and without medication become "severely manic". This word "severe" is cropping up far too often for comfort and it's my googling that has brought it up.

What I'm after now is to be "severely clean" with a "severe recovery" from "severe mental illness"... so there we go.

"Severely well". That's what I wish to be.


Illustrated: schizoaffectives can see amazing things in trunks of gnarly trees!
And I bet you can, too. Especially in the top one!



SCHIZOAFFECTIVE DISORDER

this guy says he took amphetamines as a youngster; but his mother is bipolar
i took amphetamines (etc) as a youngster; my mother has recurrent depression



this one is more like me
someone asked what i talk like this is the accent i have without the northern bits
without medication i go through periods of hearing voices every day
and i get depersonalization too (that means nothing is real)

Not Seeing My Mum

I'M NOT GOING TO SEE MY MUM TODAY because my stepdad has "manflu". He is in their conservatory sneezing with a common cold. In a way I'm pretty relieved as, having blown so much money ~ on books(!) ~ I can barely afford to get to the out-of-town railway station they wanted to meet at, let alone pay for anything else!

So the date has been pushed back to next week. And hopefully man-flu, piggery flu and no other type of flu will have attacked anyone else of us by then!





LAUGHING BABY:
I find this advert so entertaining!

... and the one I'm looking for isn't there (how typical) ... but this one's arguably even better:




COW & GATE GROWING-UP MILK ...
o here we are; here's the ad I find so very entertaining ~~
everything from the ting~ting~ting to the baby's face, the milk pot, everything ~ but especially the laughter and the mother's "you've done us right proud!" cheekgrabbing:~~



PS I'm reading my blog back on Firefox... does anyone else use that?
It makes my pages look like they were composited in 1825!

Shortest Ever Hair

I'VE BEEN (INTERMITTENTLY) AT MY HAIR with a pair of nail scissors all weekend; and the result ~ my shortest hair for 20 years! All the long bits, the crap bits, the straggles are gone!The remaining crop's uniform just-over-1" long and deliberately styleless. No dreadful parting anywhere to be seen. It stands up readily ~ electroshock mad professor-style with a hint of fledgling birdie chick chic.

Because it was cut with nail scissors, you can still see where it was chopped off in clumps. A look I was hoping to achieve.

THE RAZOR-BLADED EXPECTORATIONS of last week's non-piggery-influenced Common Cold are cruising smoothly to oblivion. My last cold post ~ you know the one exclaiming something like "Better Already!" ~ was, I now confess, a little over-enthusiastic. The fiery worst was over, but my airpipes were and still are cobwebbed in choking, membranous rattling phlegm. I have coughing fits an ancient pensioner would be proud of.

But it's not a rattling old peabag cough ~ and that's the point. Nothing coughs up. I just feel like five thousand grains of half-buried itching-rice are semi-dislodged by my hackings. Yet still: nothing ever comes up.

Here's Britain's "socialist" National Health Service (o yeah what a commie idea ~ not to demand a dying man's credit card before he's out of the ambulance! ) ... Pandemic Flu Service site. Do have a non-public hysteria whipping peek.

I read that last sentence back and read it wrong. But I won't tell you what I read. You can read that into it yourself...

ANYWAY I FEEL we're in the 21st Century now. man: I really feel it. WH Smith, Britain's biggest stationers, no longer sell bottled writing ink!

So now-a-days you get 6 or 8 Parker cartridges ~ containing about a bottletop full of ink ~ for £2.60 (I ask you!) ~ which is far more than a 2 fluid oz" (is that 56 mls?) bottle of Quink ever cost me.

Not to be deterred, I'm Harrods-bound ~ Harrods being my favourite shop in the world: the food halls in particular are amazing. And their downstairs stationer's dept. sells every brand and colour of writing ink imaginable. Last time I got Montblanc (click and see), which comes in a shoe-shaped container; the "heel" being reserved for a pen-shaped filling-reservoir while the toes house the swilling year's supply of ink...



Montblanc's Mickey Mouse-style Meisterstück is theee fountain-pen of choice for treaty-signing world leaders. Tradition being that upon signing, statesmen swap "Stücks" as a nod to international harmony. (Then swap straight back as soon as the eyes of the world's media are off them ~ Meisterstücke cost $800-$1000 or more depending on whether you go for gold-nibbed or platinum...

HAVING SAID ALL THIS I'm in an emotional fight for survival (again!). My mood is down on the floor. (Perhaps Harrods might sell something to lift it. But I doubt it. Their heroin dept. closed down in the 1920s ...

PS Gledwood Volume 2 got 355 hits yesterday!

I can barely believe it. Perhaps my hit-counter is wrong ...

Just who from..? I'd love to know ...

Better Already

HURRAH! As Bridget Jones would say. It's going away. No more razorblade coughs. No more ashcans. My snot is clear (as I'm sure you wanted to know). My ears are clear.

O man that was the sorest sore throat I've had in a long time. All my fault for smoking cigarettes I suppose. (One reason I never go to doctors about these things; I know what they'll say ~ Give up smoking ...

Hey did you know the British Government's Pandemic Flu Service are said to have given priority the nation's junkies in the ongoing Tamiflu-handout. Anyone can get the tabs just by phoning a helpline, claiming to have various flu symptoms ~ and of course symptoms of piggie flu are no different to any other type; they're not even more severe, in fact some doctors were saying swine flu tends if anything to be milder than the bog-standard type...

The operator gives a reference number and your registered "flu friend" who could be a work colleague, neighbour (or just you in disguise) trots or hobbles along to the local "flue centre" (these are already in operation) to receive a full course of Tamiflu tabs absolutely free.

Three cheers for Britain's "socialist National Health Service" ~ hurrah!!

Yes, as I was saying, anyone on methadone will be classed as a "vulnerable person" if the pandemic really does kick off, which is nice for me to know, but I'm sure the "scientific thinking" behind it (if any) is flawed. I read in the newspaper that junkies have supposedly weaker immune systems than the general population. But ask any heroin addict and they'll tell you that generally speaking you stop getting colds and flu for years at a time for as long as you use. (But when you do get them they hit harder.) I'm sure most addicts' immune systems are actually stronger ~ by a long shot ~ not weaker at all ...

Before I got sucked into the abyss of addiction I used regularly to get two or three colds or more, every year. I must have gone three years or more without catching any at all. And now I'm sure the average is less than one per year ... Which isn't necessarily good. I never used to complain about colds (not flu: I do mean common colds, as illustrated) because I always felt they cleaned the system out. There is, apparently, some truth to this, with the common cold virus causing a massive surge in interferon levels. Interferon battles and can conquer many viruses... indeed the only known cure for hepatitis C is interferon combination treatment, which reportedly makes you feel so ill you can barely get out of bed for half the week; but when it works it works completely, clearing the virus absolutely out from the body.

A small number of people are lucky enough to be able to fight off hepatitis C and even hep B without becoming "symptomatic" (ie sick)... and that makes them very lucky people indeed.

Anyway I have to go I'm still exhausted. Bye!

British Pandemic Flu Service Freefone Helpline: 0800 1 513 513

World Pandemic Flu-Watch

I've Not Been Near The Piggery...

... SO WHY THIS COMMON COLD? Yes! I have been struck down ill! Woke up three days ago feeling like someone had put out a cigarette in the back of my throat.

This got worse until it felt like a cig burn plus entire can full of hot ashes had been poured down there.

Then ears and nose. All full of itching inconvenience...

Yesterday it got worse and every cough was like coughing up razor blades.

But now it's getting better and people aren't keeping such a wide "it's pig flu!" berth ...

And that is why I haven't been online since Monday ...

Sick!

I AM ILL, RUN-DOWN, DEPRESSED... my head spinning, I can hardly face getting out of bed. And there I was yesterday ranting about the greatness of Maggie Thatcher. Perhaps I have finally cracked. May I say in mitigation: I only fessed up to having thought HER marvellous. Not her policies. I am that entity political parties value the most: the floating voter (or non-voter ~ I don't bother any more). My beliefs occupy a centre-ground covered by all three major parties: Liberal, Labour, Conservative ~ so I could vote for any one of them. When I did vote I tended to cast protest votes for the Greens because I think it would be nice if we still had trees etc in the future. Most of their policies, in actual fact, I disagree with... If we'd only had Monster Raving Loony or Whiplash candidates in my bourgeois boroughs I'd have cast my Xs there.

Well as I said I am temporarily indisposed. It is not even a common cold, just a cobwebby smoker's throat. And I feel ill all the time. Depressed all the time. Despair has crashed all over me in a breaking tsunami.

For months now I have had the itch to put pen to paper and scribble out a pageturning record-breaking international bestselling novel. I had the theme (nothing at all to do with drugs) and a sketchy outline of a story but hadn't resolved how to tell it (nor indeed how exactly it ended). As I did say before (convincing myself more than preaching to you) I know what works for me as a writer: that is I like to know where I'm going. I plan out the entire plot as a sketchy list in my head. If I do write it down, it would occupy one or two sides of A4. I always know where I'm going at least three chapters in advance in some detail. The one I'm working on I plan out shopping-list style almost paragraph by paragraph. This is my "mould". I pour in the words ~ these come usually fairly easy. It's not knowing what to say that gets me stuck. And page by page a book is born...

The opening I sketched out last year (and it was a rushed sketch ~ it never engaged me, my heart was never in it) I have dumped and started again. I've only done maybe three printed pages (at most) but it's a start. This time I feel the magic. I know how the story should be told. This at least gives some hope for the future.

Now they do they "feed a cold; starve a fever" and being as my malady is more like a common cold I've indulged in this advice enthusiastically nibbling my way through the chavtastic new ranges at Iceland. "Chav" is a relatively new word in this country and means something like "white trash". Yesterday I had roast beef dinner for £1.75. The kind of platter you might expect from a pretty bargainacious pub with industrially crisped roast potatoes and thin-sliced meat. Not bad: though a rugby-player could easily have eaten two.

Now I'd better go. I'm too exhausted from my literary efforts. Last night I did 2 entire paragraphs! Yes! More than enough to fill the back of a fag packet. Talking of fags I've only had one today so my body's still in semi nicotine depletion. Plus hot sweet tea is calling me, along with the vulgar delights of morning TV. Righty-ho I must dash. Take care everyone.

While I'm on a fond nostalgia tip, here's two "songs" from my formative years I still find entertaining.

THE SHAMEN: EBENEEZER GOODE
This shameful drug song topped the charts in 1991 and believe it or not this is the best quality video I could get...



THE KLF FT TAMMY WYNETTE: JUSTIFIED AND ANCIENT
... "all bound for mu-mu-land..." ~ think that's where I'm going

I'm Back!

HAVING SEEMINGLY SPENT MOST OF THE WEEKEND IN BED... sleeping a lot and sweating heavily... I got up at long last this morning stinking to high heaven and had to leave the house like this and bus to Mother Hubbard's house (I got lots of space to read the paper, which was great!) Turned up and even she, who seems to be the most forgiving person, noted I was really dirty. I felt dirty and disgusting. All I wanted to do was change clothes and jump in shower. There IS no shower at mine and even if there was it'd be broken. No plug for the bath still... except haHA! I FOUND one. Turns out the Evil Gnome who lives on the story below me had APPROPRIATED SAID PLUG FOR HIMSELF. In other words STOLEN IT FROM THE REST OF US. But last week he made a fatal wrong move and left it behind after one of his morning splasharounds. Also every morning he does an enormous turd the girth of a flower pot. I can't help querying how such an enormous "log" can pass from such a tiny person (I call him the gnome because he is so small - if he ever gets unemployed he could get a job in Disneyland wearing a red pointy hat and fishing in pools of lucky coins - he has that look down to a T). Anyway he leaves this disgusting enormous turd every morning first thing and NEVER flushes it. Also he has taken to leaving blood by the door ... in precisely the same place ... every day. Matran was right-on when he told me it's nothing to do with the gnome bleeding. It's everything to do with a silly little game he is playing with the rest of us. This Gnome is an objectionable character. If you were locked outside he would never let you in. He has never once let me in on the 2 or 3 occasions I've been locked out; though I'm sure he was in. Neither has he let in Laundretta on the scores and scores of occasions on which SHE's been locked out. But she just breaks in though... then has the cheek to blame local kids for that! I know exactly what was going on (hasn't happened lately) though I've kept this one up my sleeve. I don't want her to know that I know...

Hmmm... I really don't like my housemates as you can probably tell...

The radio has been winding me up. This lilly-livered government of ours, apologizing for being British almost... what has got into them. It was reported at the weekend that Islamic groups have complained at being targeted in anti-terrorism campaigns, implying the terrorism is all based around their religion. Yes I totally agree with them. Far more attention should be paid to the Buddhist terrorists and the Hindu terrorists who have bombed the London tube... know what I mean?

I rearranged my roborovskery as I was bedridden and ill and required entertainment. Every time I got bored I would rock their teahouse and say "Come out you Pink Noses! Come out!" and two or three curious pink noses duly appeared at the chewed out entrance. I took all three out for a ping in the bath the other day. The bath was totally devoid of water, I might add. O! They were so funny, shooting up and down, trying to scrabble up the nontaps end, etc etc... Bashful and Spherical both made loud squeaks of protest when I tried to pick them up... Then they were back in their tank and pinging for ages. Finally when they calmed down I spotted all three sat in a row nibbling the same crust of tomato bread: they looked so entertaining. Then Bashful at the end started scratching. Then Spherical took up scratching too. Poor Baby Itchy had been so intensively groomed by the both of them her "hair" on the head was sopping wet in spikey clumps... like a teenage boy's with hair gel. She looked really funny...

Well I've got clean clothes on and I actually got out of bed today. I know it was only a common cold but it made me feel pretty slaughtered. Maybe this is the old Chronic Fatigue Syndrome traces from years ago...

I've been writing a bit of my memoirs again. Thanks for the comments on those I know I shouldn't think about people laughing at me but I do feel I'm laying myself wide open in writing those. While I've been awfully discreet about other people's lives I've pretty much told everything about mine... which makes me feel kind of weird...

Well it's late. Nearly 8pm and I have to get some pasta and parmezan... cheery-o y'all!

All the best

Gledwood
"Vol 2"...

Videos of the Day
Remembrance/Veterans' Day
Mad World Remembrance: WWI
Sorry these are a day late in a way, but they're still very good and I could not get to a computer yesterday...

Video of the Day 3
King of Spain Tells Venezuela's Chavez to SHUT UP!

***

If you want to watch Vivienne Vyle, episode 2, CLICK HERE...

Did anyone like Vivienne Vyle? Nobody mentioned a word about her...

***

Chinese Takeaway Curry Sauce Recipe
The secret ingredient is Star Anise, apparently.

Sweaty Cold

DOES THE COMMON COLD MAKE YOU SWEAT? I had an (admittedly 2in/2min) bath yesterday morn and scrubbed quite clean. Now narly 28 hrs later I'm sweating like a swine on heat and smelling like horse trots in an onion factory.

Two nights in a row I've had the same recurrent dream: Of being trapped in an enormous event resembling an indoor sook or fancy dress bazaar crossed witha a trance party rave's pixxie room. With all the techno-shamanic characters such a gathering used to involve (dunno about nowadays, I've not been out "properly" except a couple of times in the last seven years.)

My furries are so funny. I took their lid off to witness their teabox with a double headed robo protruding. I said "Hello! Hello!" and one peered up at me while the other scarpered (if only separating real-life Siamese twins were so easy). Now I've a triple-headed furball grooming itself in the corner. All peacefulness and light. And pretending never to have been naughty...

I caught Itchy mid-magic wand (it is a very narrow cardboard tube) just now and she reversed out all unkempt like a "furry boiled egg" - well the nearest any hamster gets to looking like an egg.

Sometimes I question my ... "sanity"? Whatever it's called... at so glibly throwing in talk of suicide yesterday.

The even t I referred to took place about 14 years ago and I have to tell it (as I said) in my memoirs. And get used to telling it. How else will I cope with having my entire life laid out for everybody to laugh at? I can't really cut it out either - else the resulting story will be so boring NOBODY will want to read it at all...

Wow those evening are drawing in. 4:30 dark already. 3:30 dark within a month.

Sorry I've not too much to say. I'm out of computer time and of cash. So I may not be online again till Monday.

Meanwhile: here's wishing a charming weekend to all.

All the best!

luurve from
Gledwood
"Vol 2"....

See yers on Monday...

Cold bicycle friendly hamster loving cat and snake weekend...

SO MY NONEXISTENT POLITICAL MANIFESTO has failed to inspire y'all... what a surprise! The only "policy" I can devise for my constituency would be bike lanes for all. Yes! Up on the pavement too, not down with the dirty rumbling traffick where white van drivers will try and run you over. Cycle paths are cheaper to install than almost anything else (less wear and tear)... so that's my no 1 policy. Also when I was thinking of making a Mayor of London bid back in 1998/whenever (it was the year Jeffrey Archer finally got found out for perjuring himself in his record-breaking court case against the Star newspaper, for which he got $1 million damages and was punished for 3 years in prison)... My main policy back then was to have different coloured bulbs installed in London's street lights so it would look ultra-pretty from the skies for American tourists flying into Heathrow... See my priorities, as per usual, are in totally the right place...

My room is running alive with wild mice! They are "nesting" somewhere in my big cupboard. The one that is stuffed with binbags full of my rotting "possessions"... I haven't the heart to destroy their mousey home, but if they dare come near my robos, trust me it won't be the robos doing the squeaking...

I can't exactly ask the landlord to put antirodent stuff down seeing as I have 4 pet rodents of my own... and I hate to admit it but my own rodents have probably attracted this lot in. Before now they were running amok in Laundretta's room only. Though I did hear Matran "the Rat-Man" was putting down cheese for a particularly cute one to feast upon.

She catches hers on ultrasticky cockroach/mouse/rat "traps" (ie bits of supersticky card) and throws them out of the window where she likes to think they instantaneously die. Of course they don't. Down they sail like a mousey hang-glider to scuttle about the pavements with the dead autumn leaves, stuck to this massive sticky mouse-windsurfer-sail for days on end until some passerby either treads on them or a cat spags at them and gores them or they simply starve to death. In other words the cruelest, most horrible way to go.

Unfortunately the "humane" traps available in this area are made by a company called "The Big Cheese" and are the stupidest traps I've ever seen. Too small for any wild mouse to venture inside, they work on a seasaw motion... and in other words trap no mice. The ones we had in Wales that DID work were transparent (so the mouse doesn't feel so enclosed) and tripped shut on a garage-door type mechanism. They were big enough to capture two or three mice at once if that number happened to simultaneously venture inside. At one point my stepbrother set up a Wild Mouse Rotastak with about ten of them inside. They were so entertaining running their little wheel like hyperactive swines. Eventually even our cat got tired of and desensatized to them. Then they got tired of about 2 square feet of living space and settled down to spend their entire lives cossetted in Johnson & Johnson cotton wool abed...

Finally I gave Dodge his card. (His 89-year-old Dad had a stroke at the weekend adn died 2 or 3 days ago...) It sounds like all traumas are stretching forth amongst family, the way they tend to when someone dies and disparate relatives are suddenly thrown together and it's not even Xmas yet... Believe it or not I seem to be the ONLY person to have given in a card... And to think I was embarrassed at having left it 3 days... what is today's society coming to?

Now I've caught a thorough pipe-cleaning cold. I've always thought an (uncomplicated nonbronchitis-stylee) cold is a good thing to have as it paradoxically cleans the system out and rejuvenates the body. Nobody else ever seems to agree with me. Perhaps because they're the Lemsip, Benylin and Nightnurse posse who overdose themselves on blurry antihistamines to make themselves feel iller. Science is aparently on my side. "Common" colds (and mine's especially vulgar) do boost the body's levels of interferon which has magical effects on more serious diseases*. Better to have slews of common colds, I say, than terminal cancer!

(*Yes! Interferon is part of a two-drug hep C treatment AND has a protective role against cancers of many kinds.)

Well I'm off to go abed and feel sorry for myself as I have to blow my nose... wow! Nearly once an hour. I'm so ill!

Gotta go seriously and scribble out more of my memoirs. We're at a bit of a slow patch now - I'm writing about my first suicide attempt and my trip home when I was aparently staring at the wall and "rocking" (no wonder! After 70 tricyclic antidepressant pills... thankfully I puked the vast majority so quickly their red coatings were all mixed in the porridgey diced carrot vomit...

So I didn't die and I have to go I'm busting for a wee... Too much cyder = "personal" Niagra falls...

See yous all tomorrow.

PS I see NOBODY but one "anonymous" remarked on my "cat and hamster" from Japan. That was 100% real! They were genuine friends. Didn't you see the cat licking the hamster and then the hammy lick the cat in return and snuggle up for a sleepy evening's TV or whatever Japanese pets do...

My today's vid is:

Japanese Rat Snake and Hamster Friend

Sorry no subtitles or dubbing for the petshop manager's prattling but I do like the bit where the hammy decides to make a nest amongst the serpent's scaly coils then thinks better of it and hops out...

I wonder how long the hamster really lasted, or whether the snake just wasn't hungry that day? Or whether he'd just got BORED of the taste of tubby Campbells dwarves... who noze...?

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Have a cheery weekend everyone!

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Just for Whitenoise, here's Sylvia Plath's Insomniac poem....

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PETS' CORNER RIP SPONGEBOB, Vi Vi Voom's lionhead goldfish. Who died of mysterious infection...