A Late Wakening

I LAID IN BED ALL DAY TILL 5PM then defrosted for an hour (ie smoked cigarettes in front of the television) then HAD to go out to the bloody methadone chemist. Strangely the methadone made me feel much better. Yesterday I was manic in the morning, depressed in the afternoon. So depressed I had to go to bed I felt lousy. Couldn't even eat, so I had to buy a shish kebab. I get the couscous version in the box with salad. A full meal of smoky lamb chunks for £6. The shop that does the less salty salad is shut over Xmas. Lazy bastards!

I nearly had a big row in the library just now for phoning a friend. Some Asian guy kept coming up to me asking me to keep it down. Then he told me to stop talking when I was trying to LISTEN to a very involved story so I yelled I'M NOT TALKING then the rude woman who tells the homeless man not to sleep in the library said "well I can hear you" so I deliberately spoke as loud as possible as I gathered my things and left. Amazingly I didn't feel the biting cold that had me in sweats of misery walking down. That's because my methadone is finally working.

The poor girl in the room next to me has bought an LCD TV and expected to get Freeview channels out here in the twee suburbs where we get the worst TV reception I've ever experienced. I said you'll be lucky. Then she asked me how to tune it in I said highlight analogue tuning and she got 4 channels of snow, just like I get. The other night Gladiator came on ITV. I slammed in the DVD and compared scenes. The DVD was normality. On ITV it was snowing in Rome!

I'm feeling ill. I don't know why. Is it just manic depression again? I don't know. I feel like I want to puke. I have an abscess on my right foot. The abscesses on my legs have gone down after I stuck surgical blue needles in each one and drained them but this one on my foot is too painful to mess around like that so I might have to go to casualty (that's the ER to you Americans) to get flucloxacillin, which is the normal antibiotic for drug abscesses. Yes I'm afraid I was using every day over the Xmas break (and what sane person wouldn't?) but now I'm back in the routine of knocking back methadone like a 40 year old baby in under the chemist's "supervision" I somehow find it easier to keep the old nose clean.

I'm fretting about what I'm going to eat tonight or should I just get drugs instead? I don't really want to do anything. I wish I could have general anaesthesia. I wish I could have £10,000 to put my magazine together. I worked out start up costs would be a mere £1000 for computers and phones but several grand to pay the printers to knock out the things. In this country WH Smith are the main distributors of periodicals but I need more information about how you persuade shops to order more copies. Can you do offers like buy 20 get 20 free? Please if anyone knows anything about the magazine industry please help me. I really need a detailed book on the subject that goes into the mathematics of print run costs and advertising revenue. Websites and links please. BTW I have looked into the idea of publishing online and for various reasons it's a non-starter. The entire point of this magazine is that you take it home and read real words on a real page. Even Dickens published a magazine "Household Words". Not a website. Did you know when American newspapers went online they garnered a mere TENTH of the advertising income from the internet as from paper. Please someone who has edited or better still been advertising or circulation manager on a magazine get in touch and tell me how it's done.

Well I've got to go else I'll get terminated. Happy New Year to one and all. (Just in case I'm not in the mood to post between now and then....)


Illustrated: the standard of technology in my house (except you can't even have a set-top box in my house) ~ the landlord who takes in over £200 PER ROOM per week ie SIXTY THOUSAND POUNDS A YEAR income from this house cannot even be bothered to fit an operational high gain television aerial to our chimney!



HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 4



HARDCORE TECHNO VOL 3

A Big Day Out

INSTEAD OF DOING THE USUAL thing I inevitably find myself doing on Monday morning, I got up late and ventured to Central London in a hunt for German magazines.

I got off the tube at St Pancras International, where you get the Eurostar train to Paris and Brussels. St Pancras is surely the most beautiful station building in London if not Britain:



I found Der Spiegel and Stern on a newsstand outside. The hubbub of French voices drew me into the hi-tech inner hall where screens displaying 13:28 Paris Nord set off a frisson of excitement and longing inside me. It's been such a long time since I travelled anywhere at all except just down the road...



The last time I saw a newsstand with a half-decent selection was near Baker Street tube. Baker Street of course being famous for Sherlock Holmes... Madame Tussuad's museum is right by the tube station so the place is thronging with tourists (unlike in this snap!)...



Madame Tussauds is next to the Planetarium:



I picked up a weekly Take-a-Break -style magazine called Freizeit Revue. It is an old woman's magazine but I bought it for the endless crossword puzzles sandwiched next to advertisements for piles ointments and surgical support stockings ...

Then I meandered down to Regents' Park which is a Royal Park and so extremely well manicured.



The houses overlooking the vast greens are pretty impressive too ...



... then it was nearly rush hour so I had to fly home before the trains were too crammed to breathe.

And there we are! My first day out in London-London in over a year!

*******

Have a look at the arrogant French woman in the bottom clip ~ this is absolute classic telly!!

THE LATE, GREAT KEITH FLOYD was one of the most classic TV cooks of all time. There was a retrospective on his life and work on TV last night and these were the best clips shown:

Here from his best series Floyd On France, is his attempt at a mushroom omelette ~ with "angry dragon lady" "simmering" behind ...



And here's the most classic clip of all. This wasn't a set-up ~ the French-Basque lady was for real! "FLOYD CAN'T COOK!"