Loaches

...Fishy Friday on Saturday...


LOACHES were always my favourite fishes in the community tank; more for personality than looks.


This is a sucker loach. The cleaner of the deep. Like most loaches they live on algae, come out at night and are highly territorial, lurking moodily in any cave you care to construct out of slate or bogwood and thoroughly enjoying being out of view! If anything or anyone dares disturb them they can shift themselves with truly astonishing rapidity.


I used to have a Borneo sucker or hillstream loach. This fish lives in ultra shallow water and likes a stream of air against the glass. They're agile enough to be able to swim directly down the flow of bubbles, which replicates the splashing mountain streams they inhabit in real life. Nubia, our Borneo, used to sleep upside down on a piece of slate. Whenever I wanted a good look at her, I'd just pick up the slate and she'd stay stubbornly anchored.


Unlike ordinary loaches, which hold on to rocks or the glass with their mouths, the Borneo has a sucker almost the entire length of its body. Meaning that it can withstand extremely strong currents in the wild.

Easily the fastest swimmers in the community fish tank; it once took the fuming pet shop lady a full 20 minutes to catch the last hillstream loach between two nets!


My favourite loach of all is the reclusive kuhli. This strikingly stripey eel-like creature is only 4"/10cm long in adulthood. Rarely to be seen during daylight hours, they burrow under the gravel, only to emerge by the pale light of the moon (or your moon-effect nightlight).


The kuhli loach's expression reminds me of a certain member of my family who I once, at the tender age of 12, likened to "an old hornet" in an official document!

Kuhli loaches don't live long. They are very sensitive to water quality and only survive in well-tended, established tanks. My two both died... yet the Old Hornet lives on!


WISHING A FANTASTICAL WEEKEND TO ALL THE FAMILY!

Meet Nubia

NUBIA was one of the best pet fishes I ever had. She was a Borneo Sucker or hillstream loach. These stealth-bomber-style fishies live in shallow pebbly streams where they zip along the shallow aerated water, sticking to rocks as the tumult swirls about them.

Relative to her size, Nubia must have been the fastest-moving most agile swimmer I ever had. The lady at the fish shop was totally exasperated trying to catch her between two nets in an empty tank as she pinged back and forth in great commotion. She looked like a flying ribbon.

Nubia lived in a special cave that I built her by hollowing out the gravel at the front and placing a flat piece of slate over the dip. Here she spent her hours of repose, happily suckered upside down ignoring the world (it takes all sorts). She didn't seem too offended when I picked up the rock to have a good look. She just stayed anchored down. And then whooshed away in a flurry of bubbles.

We had an air filter streaming against the glass at the side, and this was her second favourite place. She was a strong enough swimmer to actually move vertically downwards against the air-and-waterflow.

Loaches are my favourite sort of fish. They skulk about in the shadowiest, most secluded zones of the so-called community tank, eschewing the company of other fish, preferring to dart about very quickly at selected opportunities. They don't eat fishfood, but feed instead on algae on the glass, which means you should never place one in a brand-new tank or it'll starve.

It took me a while to realize that Nubia's most striking characteristic was one I'd previously attributed to a trick of the light. Sometimes she seemed to go light and then dark as if a shadow were passing overhead. Then I realized she was actually changing colour, more according to mood (so I assumed) than anything else.

How amazing is that.

So there we have it. The Borneo Sucker: the most amazing fish known to aquarium-kind!

Male Sewellia lineolata and Gastromyzon ctenocephalus having a scuffle on a cobble (as you do). Well as gripping viewing goes it beats Larkrise to Candleford hands down:~

Kipper Addiction

I HAVE JUST REALIZED I AM ADDICTED TO KIPPERS... haddock, mackerel... smoked fish of all kinds. this is terrible! What am I going to to?!

Like a clucking junkie this morning I trawled the supermarket in desperation along the chilled meats isles. Finally I found smoked mackerel with peppers all over it (coloured and black, yes you can even get chili-peppered mackerel these days)... my eye drifted along to haddock and then "kippers". There is no such fish swimming in the sea as a "kipper". It just means smoked herring. Tescos yesterday wanted £3 for 200g ie £15 a kg. Morrisons own were 78p for 200g ie £3.90 per kg or nearly a quarter of the price.

I took them home gleefully and indulged in my habit with toast, behind closed doors.

What am I going to tell Narcotics Anonymous? Hi I'm an addict and I'm addicted to heroin, crack (as was, gave that up January 1 2009), drink, the odd Valium and KIPPERS! Ukh. But they're so moreish....


NAOMI CAMPBELL was in a crimes against humanity court today. Hurrah! I thought. Finally the beautiful monster is getting nailed for her offences to fashion, music, novel-writing and film. But no, it was some silly case that she would inevitably answer no to, because no-one will admit in front of the taxman to a potentially multimillion pound gift, that the President of Liberia gave her a whacking great blood diamond.

She says no (quelle surprise!) But she did wake up in the middle of the night at the Presidential Villa in South Africa with two mysterious men standing over her (she didn't lock her door, what a tart!) who handed her a "bag of dirty stones".

Hmmm...

I bet she gets more in free gifts off her millionaire boyfriends than she ever earns on the catwalk or in front of a lens. I heard she only makes £2 million a year, which sounds fine and dandy till you realize her agency takes a whacking cut, then the tax man ~ 50%! ~ which can't leave more than about £700,000 a year. And how are you meant to live and buy a decent house on that!!

Those horrible "real housewives of New Jersey" were boasting of the value of their homes. Well one was. And I translated dollars to pounds and thought, hang on a minute one of my old houses was worth that.

Yes a standard £500,000 London home, housing the poor and destitute!

Illustrated: kippers, Naomi Campbell ~ mobile-phone lobbing queen of mean, Millennium Star diamond ~ 203-carat D-flawless!


Naomi Campbell talks cocaine addiction with Oprah Winfrey



Vauxhall Corsa: the new supermodel 1992 commercial
Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington et al... and a car

Fishing Cormorants

FEATHERY FRIDAY (ON SATURDAY)...

IN CHINA and Japan, man and bird have come together for "mutual" benefit... traditional fishermen keep cormorants on their boats. These sharp-eyed birds scan the waters for fish, soon to plunge in, grab a writhing carp or whatever and obediently spit it on to the old man's boat.

What this popular commercial for the HSBC bank (formerly Midland Bank; HSBC stands for Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank of CHINA) doesn't tell you is that the birds' throats are kindly bound with metal twine to stop them SWALLOWING their fishycatch ~ the feathery swines!

Craving Crack Cocaine

MISERY MISERY MISERY. Yes yes. I'm depressed out of my mind. Craving crack out of my mind. And no I didn't do the obvious to trigger said craving (which is weird, considering I've not had a single pipe/hit or anything else containing any sort of coke this YEAR)... But all last night, after a dealer gave me a free hit of heroin and has been pressing on me the fact (but not a free bag) of crack cocaine. I could go on and on about this but really don't have the energy to repeat my own boringly circuitous personal mental ramblings...

I long to be straight yet I cannot imagine a life without drugs. Or to put it another way, yes I can imagine that life, but I cannot imagine being happy. Heroin is the only thing that has made life bearable. It gives life value. And it's been like this for years.

I know many of you are sitting there wanting to headbutt the computer with rage saying CAN'T YOU SEE: IT'S HEROIN THAT BROUGHT YOU THIS MISERY AND HEROIN KEEPS YOU HERE.

Yes I have some understanding of this; but I know I don't see it the way you do. I can't do. I know I can't. I'm like a horse in blinkers ~ knowing it is blinkered yet comfortable to stay that way.

To put it more directly: I am just a cowardly junkie without the courage to get clean.

From time to time I get flashes of what it must feel like to be clean. That is to feel things, to smell things. To live in a world of vivid associations and full colour.

But here, behind my bulletproof-glassed existence, nothing's left to feel. Just the sense of so much lost that I will never grasp back. Not just because I'm too scared (and I am) but because the experience of recapturing lost territory just feels so overwhelmingly meaningless, bleak and deathly-tiring, it hardly ever feels worthwhile...


VIDEO OF THE DAY: THIS IS CLASSIC.
I only heard about it from today's Sun newspaper report...
The actual fish-catching (a dolphin-sized fish bigger than him!) happens around 1 min 30 into this clip ...



MARLIN IMPALES WOMAN'S BREAST IMPLANT!!

Utterly bizarre and yet seemingly true...



6 Degrees Of Association
Still haven't found anyone I know though I only did about 3 or 4 hops today.
Now I find myself in "organizing your life" and "decluttering" blogland
e.g. http://overcomingbusy.com
and
http://www.organizingyourway.net
and
http://lifestylesoftheorganized.com ~ Lifestyles of the Organized
Creative solutions to help you organize your space, time, and money in today’s hectic world

Fish Repast

AN UNACCOUNTABLE CRAVING for cod in batter led me into Sainsbury's where I spent £2.99 on "4-6 pieces" of Birdseye's best... Two of these with oven chips and baby tomatoes sprinkled with black pepper. I crisscrossed the batter with a knife and drizzled with lime juice (nicer than lemon and stronger, so you need less of it, which suits an old skinflint like me down to the ground...) The tomatoes were lovely too and contributed to my "five a day" portions of fruit and vegetables, as the packaging handily reminded me. I really need to learn proper cooking one day, but industrial fish and oven chips is a start (I suppose..(!))...

No other news except I think my middle roborovski hamster Baby Bashful has a genetic fault! Don't cackle at this, but when I coo her name from on high she peers up at me craning her neck back and back and back... until she literally falls over backwards! She has done this several times and it looks hilarious. I know that roborovskis are prone to a breeding fault where, due to faulty balance, they spin furiously round and round in a tight circle. I wonder whether Bashful doesn't have a shade of this... it's a shame as I won't be able to breed her now and had always thought it might be fun one day to have an entire basketful of rambling roborovski pups...

And that was MY day: how was yours?

Sage Donkey Derby; Continuing Robo-honking Squabbles; Cod in Parsley Sauce on Mushroom Tortelloni with Broccoli Recipe...

OR TONKEY TARBY... as I'd like to say in my "retarted" so-saying...

I've been eating Sage Derby cheese grated on my cod-in-parsley-sauce on mushroom tortelloni... the granny at the counter always cuts me an especially small chunk for grating...

Here's the recipe: it's yummy. (Half-industrial, I'm afraid..!)

You need:
1x Sainsbury's own (or Birdseye) frozen cod in parsley sauce £1.09 for one
1x pack Sainsbury's value mushroom tortelloni £1.59 for about 600g
One "tree" of broccoli (though you won't use it all; not for one person)...
A cheesegrater and something to strain pasta and broccoli from water...

Cooking: (serves one: multiply accordingly for further personnages...)
Put boil-in-bag cod-in-parsley-sauce in saucepan full of hot water. Bring to boil. Do not cover (this forces water into the bag; a lesson I learned early on!) it takes at least 20 minutes to do though you can give it an hour for really tender fish. Any much less than 20 mins gives a sushi-like effect which is to be avoided. So when adding broccoli and pasta bear the total cooking time in mind. Chop broccoli, separate as much pasta as you'll need (about a quarter of a pack should do per person...) if pasta's stuck together do not bother to separate: this will make holes that let in the hot water (not ideal!), cooking will separate it naturally so don't panick... the broccoli and pasta have the same cooking time: about five to eight minutes (eight minutes according to the label) so add 15-20 mins into the fish's boiling time. Boil all up. Remove bag of fish. Lay pasta on plate. Grate one layer of cheese over. Add broccoli. Grate another layer of cheese. Add the cod in parsley sauce. It will cover it with a beautiful white sauce. Add more cheese. You can also add parmesan: I do this on top of strained broccoli and pasta in a dry pan. I also add about two large pinches of pepper. Do it this way (esp. using Sage Derby cheese) and you have a meal of perfectissimo proportions!

The tonkey tarby refers (of course) to my trotters! See that picture of a white West Highland Terrier (aka terrorizer!!) ~ lady's leg in easy gnashing distance: that sums up Baby Itchy's character. Not only her aggression, but her furry fur when all bashed up and licked to pieces. She looks ever so cute when wet...

The tonky TARBY is my poor robos running round and round like a furry trotting horserace with the tyrannical Baby Itchy chasing Bashful and Spherical both! I can't believe she goes for old Momma Spherical. That is so disrespectful. But with a honk and a squeak she pings after both larger ladies (all fullgrown robbies are larger than Itchy who just is genetically tiny)... In despair I sought out advice about Itchy the Tiny's sudden character change and was advised that since spring is springing all around she probably wants a boyfriend! If true this is hilarious.

I thought I had set this off by adding more tubes and an empty parmesan container and more places to hide, sparking territorial rows over these new sleeping places. Traditionally my three have slept in the "teabox" (which they still have: it's a lightbulb box inside another box now: nibbled out to make entrance gaping enough for even Spherical to squeeze her lumbering frame inside.) Spherical weighs at least twice as much as tiny Baby Itchy, which makes Itchy's arrogance all the more unpalatable... They used to sleep inside here, atop their seeds, quite peacably together... or go all three inside their old burrow. Perhaps by complexicating their living arrangements, so I thought, I'd messed everything else and made Itchy suddenly territorial. She doesn't half chase the others round: and see them go: in human flight they're running well over 100 miles per hour! Honking, squeaking and virulently wrestling at other times. Quite naughty Baby Itchy ~ as I told her on numerous occasions...

Itchy's out of solitary. It was never an ongoing option as that "handbag box" is far too tiny to accommodate her. So I've let her back in with the others to run the gauntlet of her aggressive pinging and honking... today I am removing their extra tubes to simplify conditions to match days gone by... if that doesn't work to placify my manic donkey derby of roborovskis... I don't know what I'm going to do...

Videos:
Pendragons: Magic Trick (very well done!)
Duck Raids Campsite (exceedingly entertaining!)
Mamas and Papas: California Dreamin' (classic footage)
Scott McKenzie: San Francisco (see them flower kids play glockenspiel!!)

Reportage:
CRYSTAL MENACE: read the Sun's excellent double-page spread from mid-Feb about the horrors of crystal methamphetamine, the crack-like smokeable, injectable, snortable and swallowable super-speed that rots its users' teeth and faces within months of daily use... view the gruesome before and after slideshow...

Yangyang Robo Clawed Frog African

BABY ITCHY ROBOROVSKI IS OFFENDED because I was laughing at him saying he looks like a Yorkshire Terrier puppy ... ("You look like a Porkshire Terrier! You do! You do! You little Porker, you!"/etc) Only he is just two inches long. I've never seen a Yorkshire terrier, even a puppy, that's that small..!

When I slept earlier this evening I dreamt of albino African clawed frogs of the type I altered Clip III to fit in... Man! They are greedy little gargoyles look at that swine, already bloated to near-exploding stuffing yet more nosh (live earthworm!!) into his gob!!

In the top clip "African albino clawed frog Down Under".. does anyone know what the giant viridescent iridescent fish is called... it's the biggest one in that tank..

Also that's the first time I've ever seen a fully grown clown loach (the orange one with black stripes... so called because of their love of "fooling around" e.g. lying sideways etc.

Baby Itchy dropped almost right into Yangyang's bedroom earlier. I picked him out before he could get murdered... Chinese hamster to Roborovski is pretty much the same size/shape ratio of thunderous freight train to human being... the Chinese hamster is literally three times longer though his body's not much fatter or wider and his head's pretty much the same size... bit like a nuclear mouse (elongated in an Apple Mac) or a furry footed eel...

O wow! I actually, for the first time in TEN MONTHS of life witnessed Yangyang EATING tonight! His head poking unwittingly from the sheltering toilet tube I heard and saw distinct munching... Seriously that animal has the smallest appetite of any pet I've ever had even tropical fish and I'm not kidding... he surely eats a tenth of what the Roborovskis consume.

Right I've gotta go and compose chapter one of my autobiog now so wish me luck.

Cheerio!!, till L8Rs!

New Clips III
i Albino African Clawed Frog Down Under
ii Albino African Clawed Frog Gobbles Live Earth Worm!

Swizzly Sunday

SWIZZLY SUNDAY... Sunday morning... Sunday: lost day... I don't know!... Do you? Do you think my Mum knows I'm still using? She always talks about it in past tense... I feel so ashamed... That's why things must change.

I have been working on my alcohol consumption. I've cut my drinking in half within a couple of days. Do you know what did the trick? I took up drinking tea for breakfast instead. Because (looking back) I just realized I had been drinking nothing but white cyder for breakfast, luncheon and dinner and everything in between and afterwards! Nothing but cyder. No wonder I felt under the weather some days.

Yesterday I found myself sitting with all the drinkers at the bus stand outside a local supermarket. Only two were there, these two are the nearest to friends I have among that bunch. When I did used to hang out with street people (well: at one point, I was one) it was the junkies. But there are no street junkies left anymore. Only the shoplifters, theives, rip-off artists and prostitutes. No "crustie" street junkies after the 1990s fashion (army surplus clothing, dredlocks/halfheads/shaven/punky colours, dogs on strings) seem to be left. Many are dead. Others have gone back to Scotland and Ireland (we had a huge Celtic contingent) ... one or two have cleaned up. But it is just one or two ...

Anyway this lady I struck up conversation with said I looked so much better than last time. Shame about her. In a way she did look good (nice and clean. Hair recently cut and neat. She had a touch of makeup on and nice clothes considering.) But she was vague and staring into space. I mentioned something about the time I got hit by a truck and had concussion for a week. She grabbed my hand and put it on a long stitched up cut lump on the back of her head - surely about 20 stitches were there - and told how she'd just got discharged from hospital after perhaps four days. But everything she said was a bit vague... Then an Irishman who I know quite well showed up. When people wonder which Irishman I'm talking about I tend to say "he has really blue eyes"... thing is they all have intense blue eyes no matter what the hair colour. Real blue, sometimes ringed with white. (Not like my mongrel English eyes: bluey-green with circles of what someone once poetically put as "brimstone" - yellow bits round the pupil. See now you can pick me out in an identity parade!) Anyway: thing about this guy is, I've seen him reeling all over the pavements and falling and burbling and calling out... Now he is stone cold sober and all the better for it. Quite amazing. During our encounter she ran off and reappeared with a pair of large white "England" trainers (sneakers). They fit me fine. So that's what I'm wearing now... Whoever threw them away was a trainer-snob because they're hardly worn-out. But maybe they're last season: who knows?

Music playing is Amy Winehouse Back to Black. I slept with this on constant replay. This is what made me feel upset the other morning... Sometimes music goes right under into subconscious.

Thanks, Wayward especially for your dream interpretation. My "holiday camp" prison dream. Where the "jail" seemed so easy to escape from ... to any outside observer ... but of course escape was near impossible. Every time I tried I was fished back inside by (as I recall) invisible forces. Yes of course that symbolizes my addiction. And the fact that though anyone can sympathize with addiction because we're all dependent on different things to differing degrees you cannot begin to comprehend chemical dependency unless you've witnessed it first hand ... or more to the point, lived it yourself...

Yesterday I went to the fish shop where they had a tropical fish "bowl"... I use the word bowl advisedly, since technically it was bowl-shaped but if you're thinking goldfish bowl think again. This held 45 litres of water (about 12 gallons) and came complete (in glass) with heater, filter and light. When the woman saw it was me enquiring she was so dismissive; I thought f--- you and left. I've given up on the idea of fish in my present residence anyway (though I could still have dwarf frogs: two can live in as little as 1.5 gallons (6 litres!) water; they don't need a filter and aparently, providing your home is warm enough the temperature will be high enough... Anyway... no fish for me yet. I have decided to use the tank for Robo Hamsters (Roborovskis). They are social hamsters about the size and nearly as round as pompoms on wooly hats. They ping about all over ... they don't bite, they live long... My present Chinese hammy is fine he is just so shy there's nothing to see of him! So it's robos for me... of course if I do get them this blog will never hear the end of it ....

OK I better go:
These are the vids I pasted today
Amy Winehouse: Back to Black
and
The Aurora Australis ("Southern Lights") - aren't they cool??

Sparkly Saturday

IT'S A MOST SPARKLY SATURDAY MORNING. The DIY-buckets-&-mops shop across the road is gleaming. People promenade past in summery clothes not smoking cigarettes. The sky is a pale British azure (it rarely ever goes tropical dark blue in these northern climes ...) we've all been up since 5am in my house, at which time I went out to buy alcohol (oops! Honestly I forget that "normal" people don't drink white cyder for breakfast sometimes ...) at which point I bumped into my quiet housemate Elvis (who I've never had cause to write about really) and Matran the Ratman on the stairs. Matran scowled at me. I nodded and, if I had been wearing one, would have tipped my hat at a jaunty angle as I swept past. I do not speak to him at all. Not one word. Because when he last spoke to me he said "oi!" instead of my name... hey-ho...

I want tropical fishies. I want them now. That's what I did last time I went "clean" (on buprenorphine/Subutex) ... so I need them again if it's to happen all over ... Also I want cardinal tetras, a Borneo highland loach and one of those mad tropical frogs like I had last time. (Click the words for film clips.) My one fear has always been cockroaches: we had severe infestation at one point and I know from the side of the can that pyrethrum/permethrin does not mix with fish ... it says "highly dangerous to aquatic life" ... "cover fish bowls and tanks before use" ~ and because we still have straggly remnants of the roach invasion upon us, I wouldn't trust my landlord not to come in when I'm out and spray the tank down ~ even out of spite. I suppose if he did I could take water samples and get him "busted" by the RSPCA (anti-animal cruelty charity) ... but that is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted ... I don't know. Has anyone got some advice?

Films of the day: baby chinchillas
and
Dust bath chinchilla with white poodle