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 ...

Cajun Chicken & A Real Ink Pen

I MISSED MORRISONS' special deal roast chicken legs yesterday lunchtime so I bought two raw drumsticks from the butchers by the MSG-chipshop (they have some secret recipe thing going on and I suspect MSG in the frying oil is surely it). These drumsticks were so enormous they looked like they'd come from a turkey. If not a swan. Anyway, rather than bang them in the oven 200C for 40 mins plain, I did a home-rapid-marinade consisting of Schwarz Cajun Seasoning in Value rapeseed oil Rapeseed's normally 10p a litre cheaper than sunflower or soya, is homegrown and lower in baddie-fats than either of the other two. Anyway I was quite liberal with the spicing and slavered on at least a flat teaspoonload on the two megalegs. These went in for the appointed time, after which I turned off the oven and let them cook inside as it cooled. Imagine my disappointment when, a full hour later, I knifed one open only to find a suspiciously pink interior. Unwilling to touch chicken that's even slightly underdone (and it would have been slightly undercooked if at all) I sliced the chicken off the bones, spread it out on the plate and oven-cooked for a further quarter hour.

This time, if anything, it was over done! But the cajun spicing and the skin came out amazingly crackly and gorgeous.

I will have to try this recipe again. for next time I have another lot of spices hardcore marinating in my cupboard (or should I slam it in the fridge?)

I was thinking of mixing this amazing cajun seasoning ~ which is quite similar to tikka masala, if you know that ~ in with flour to do home-made KFC. Can you do KFC in the oven? I don't really want to deep-fry because of the fire risk.

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Sorry about yesterday's post. I was so down and tired and empty nothing came to mind. bar what I'd seen on the previous night's Big Brother...

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I FOUND a fountain pen on the street outside a public toilet. A real live fountain pen! Yes: it was running around on its little legs, then stopped, peered up at me with sad eyes and implored, "Please help me find my owner. Pretty please!"

And it is quite pretty and girlie. Covered in rainbow stripes and stars. But it's made by Parker and they're the best (after the Swiss brand Lamy). Lamy nibs write as smoothly as if broken in 10 years ago ~ right from the day of purchase.

When I was younger (and pretentious enough) I wrote in real ink all the time. I was thinking, maybe I ought to take up that habit again. It might inspire me to pen a mighty work of Great Literature..(!)... (Or something)...

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AMY WINEHOUSE has been found not guilty of common assault after she gave a black eye to a "burlesque dancer" (stripper) who "shoved a camera" in her face without even asking...

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And how was your day?

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Illustrations: top ~ my chicken legs came out just like this. And I roasted them in a thing that looked exactly the same... Yellow pen by Lamy. Best fountain pens in the world. Amy Winehouse... looked far more sober than this at court today...

Rip Van Gledwood

I FEEL LIKE RIP VAN WINKLE. (Why does Magnus Pyke keep coming to my mind?) Yes I certainly could sleep for 20 years. I slept most of today, after getting up at 8:30 sharp I went to the chemist, etc.... Went back to bed... Missed everything. Didn't bother phoning in. (Appointments.) I am sick~ boo-hoo. I'll say I was ill. I have a disease called tiredness.

Run-down-ness./Terminal slothful junkiedom./Whatever....

I've been doing a bit of writing. But more to the point, inspiration's been pouring in re future projects. Gledwood cart-before-the-horse is determined not to get into Dan Brown or Bridget Jones syndrome where a highly successful book terrifies you so much of not being able to repeat such success that a massive writer's block ensues and nothing at all is published for years and years.

I broke my usual taboo and did some reading about book publishing. What I read was faintly depressing (don't expect too much, blah blah) ~ hence the taboo. They say you'll hardly make enough from your first novel to wallpaper the back bedroom, let alone retire to a 10-storey palace in the vicinity of Harrods (well you have to dream). These facts just shoved deeper into my head the maxim that books are like sausages. As soon as one's popped out the next one's coming. I've an entire lifetime of writings-not-written with which to torture the world...

WOW! This is a blast from the past. I wasn't expecting to get comments back on beloved stationery items, but here's two of mine. To the left we have the only fountain pen ink I know of that doesn't run when champagne is poured across the manuscript; to the right a Lamy fountain pen. These are the best I've ever come across. Far better than anything in silver and gold costing several times more. You can get one plus ink converter (who uses cartridges? ugh!!) for less than £20 and it writes as if it's been worn to your hand for over 20 years. No word of a lie! These are by far the best fountain pens I've ever come across ~ and I went through a phase (right up till I got on the heroin actually, and then I didn't care about anything any more) where I used fountain all the time. There's something about a nice pen that just makes you wanna write... (even shopping lists)...

The icing machine's gone berzerk at the Hobnobs Creams factory, filling them right to the edge. Which is well yummy for dunking into deep caramel-colour British Rail-style tea...

Last night on Channel 4's Shameless, as well as seeing a DSS Fraud Investigator get dragged down the pub and plied with ecstasy-laced drink so, in love with the world, he ended up (eventually) in the local brothel puking over the madam's shoes: as well as this I saw an evil Irish heroin dealer called Paddy (do they have white heroin dealers in Manchester?) get tied to a bed and forcibly injected with his own wares! I was cheering at the TV!! At the episode's end he'd still not been released. I just hope they keep him there long enough to get addicted. Oh that would be such poetic justice..!

Wish I Could Find a Good Book To Read

LIFE'S NOW FLOWING thanks to the exciting new pen I bought this morning. It's called a UniBall Vision Needle in black, fine point, "waterproof/fadeproof" by the Mitsubishi Pencil Company, I love UniBall rollerball pens, I wrote an entire first draft of a novel in one... hang on what am I saying "one"? It was "only" about 70,000 words (ie would have filled out 200-250 pages as printed) and yet I got through at least twelve of these Mitsubishi rollerballs! The waterproof ink is a must, because in the great tradition of Hemingway and Steven King I'm constantly "tippling" as I write (even if it is just tea these days ~ though it always used to be white cyder...)

Hang on who am I trying to kid? I still drink white cyder, just considerably less of it. When it got to the point when I was imbibing an entire week's alcoholic "units" every day of that week and having alcoholic blackouts and I came to realize that, for months on end, I had drunk nothing but alcohol ~ not a single soft drink apart from the very occasional chocolate milk. I used to gaze longingly at the chocolate milk and Coca Cola as I queued at the till with my cyder ~ but no way was I about to waste my money on them... I used to quite like coffee. Tea, once a constant companion and punctuator of every day became a distant memory. I didn't have the tea, nor did I have any sugar (and I've tried and tried to resort to sugarless tea, as I used to drink it years back but simply cannot abide it). I never bought milk (never had any cause to ~ unless it was a rare week when I'd indulged in a tub of chocolate Nesquick so I'd have chocolate milk galore... In the end I didn't even own a kettle.

Sometimes, in the very thick of all this drink drink drink Id find myself drinking straight from the tap (often semi-conscious in the early hours) in sheer desperation for some rehydration...

I wasn't the "worst alcoholic" by any means and the period of relatively heavy drinking was quite short. What lasted longer was my rather ditzy attitude to soft drinks, which seemed a waste of money compared to alcoholic ones... All this tea drinking I do now, complete with chocolate cream hobnobs dunking seems awfully civilized in comparison!

Yeah so this new pen of mine has made life complete. OK seriously though it did impress me in that I spat out an entire paragraph of my novel without feeling it. I gazed back at it, all spidery scrawl and tiny letters and thought: wow! Perhaps the magic's in the pen and not me...

On a further inspirational note I went out just now and randomly bought four books of liberating fascination from a local charity shop. Liberating fascination? I mean they open (well hopefully open my) mind... These are: Agatha Christie Curtain: Poirot's Last Case; James Lasdun
The Horned Man, a thriller set in the alienating mysteriousness of Manhattan. It's the sort of book that might be brought out by Albert Knopf in the United States edition. Next I got a tome entitled How To Draw Anything by Mark Linley. The slightly over-eager lady behind the till informed me she had bought this one new. "It's quite good, really it is. But I still can't draw anything. Anything at all. No, I can't draw for toffee!" And she flung back her head and cackled unnervingly... The last volume is called Give Me Ten Seconds and it's the autobiography of John Sergeant, the BBC's top political correspondent until he retired in the early 1990s. His most famous episodes were an on spec interview live with Margaret Thatcher live during the Nine O'Clock News. He caught her as she exited a meeting in Paris during the leadership challenge that marked the end of her days in power... and being labelled "Winnie the Poo set to music" for his efforts at the passa doblay and other cha-cha type inconveniences during his stint on celebrity Strictly Come Dancing.

I'm hoping one of these tomes might inspire me if the pen doesn't. Well the pen's meant to capture my inspirational flow of words for this great novel I'm penning slowly... very slowly... as we speak. Hey that's a lie. Not as we speak. About one paragraph a week at the moment. So I did a week's writing in my kitchen on unpackaging that UniBall pen this afternoon...

All Righty I'd better go. Carrot-Nose Roborovski says hello to yous all. (Oh the indignity of being a rodent and having to bear such names!) She's working (or being worked on) a trick where she'll grasp savagely hold of the chopstick and get lifted about 300 robo-feet pawdangling into the great blue yonder...

(Why does that make me think of Tiscali Broadband?)

Oh I know, because before Virgin Media took them over, cable tv's broadband was, I do believe, named "Blueyonder"...

Righty ho, in the words of my childhood letter-writing days, I "must run and catch the post"~!!

STOP PRESS
My blog hop's taking me to waters hitherto unchartered, ie blogs about finance either to do with clearing debt or (more interestingly to me) making pin money.
Here's some
Debt Chronicles http://chroniclesofdebt.blogspot.com
Fabulously Broke http://fabulouslybrokeinthecity.blogspot.com
Debt Free Kid http://debtfreekid.com
2 Nickels Making a Dollar http://2-nickels-making-a-dollar.blogspot.com
and
True Adventures In Money-Hacking http://trueadventuresinmoneyhacking.blogspot.com
and
Budgets Are Sexy http://budgetsaresexy.com
and
Wide Open Wallet http://wideopenwallet.com