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

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

Feathery Friday*: Australian King Red Parrots

RAINBOW LORRIKEETS aside, these are my favourites from Bimbimie's...

The beautiful Australian King Red parrot. Less common than the squarking galahs and cockatoos that come in giant cackling flocks and a little bolder than lorrikeets, these red and green beauties are perhaps the most adorable parrots of all...

Here's film from someone's front porch Down Under...

Boys are apparently redder than the greener girls, which is so typical in the birdie-world where they love to stand out...





And here's an entertaining pet tame one...



***I wonder if they can talk..?***



*for "Furry Fridays ((usually) on Saturdays)

Here's a brilliant "birds in back gardens" "includes-parrots" link...

The Most Popular Trotters!

MY HAMSTERS GOT way more Youtube hits than the 10 or 20 I was expecting: 78 HITS in 24 hours! Whether these came mostly via my blog (which gets a goodly number of hits nowadays, however most of them are image searches and people googling stuff that really has little to do with "me"). The number of "real" hits: ie people who know me or people looking for a smackhead's blog, cannot number, I reckon, more than 70 on a very good day. In fact I suspect the figure's closer to 25 or 35 a day... So where on earth these hamster hits came from I'd love to know...

Now finally I have a proper "dual diagnosis" assessment interview booked with the nut-nut nursey, plus I'm due to go to an official drug service dual diagnostic group session.

Basically I've been forced into attending these groups with names like relapse-prevention etc etc. They used to do what they called a "crack workshop", which I did visit on a few occasions, but had to keep my mouth shut. Everyone else made out they were the type who'd go kamikaze on the supermarket for one £10 stone... would smoke crack before getting heroin, even if it meant being sick and "prang" (rattled and paranoid) and penniless and "clucking" for a hit of "B" (brown heroin). Situations I would never in a million years get myself into. I learned long long ago that heroin had to come first at all costs. No matter how much I'd rather be doing something else, whether that meant smoking crack, watching television or eating because i was starving, rustling up heroin money took priority. So entrenched was this in my mind that I don't remember EVER over the 10 years of my addiction being sick for heroin without having money to pay for it. Or being in possession of methadone or "DFs" (dihydrocodeine pills) or something that would cure my sickness, however unenthusiastic I might have been about taking it.

I'm not saying for a minute I never went gear-sick. I was sick loads of times. But it always came down to the dealer dillydallying over time, or it being night and my dealers only served up during daylight hours. (Loads of dealers work through the wee hours, mostly supplying the late-night crack market, but I never rated their wares when it came to heroin...)

I need to see a psychiatrist about these longstanding mood problems of mine. In dealing with psychiatric doctors, nurses and drug workers, generally I've taken the line of least resistance, never mentioning anything unless specifically asked. Never making any suggestions. Treating appointments on a get out the door as quick as you can basis... This has led to some pretty major misunderstanding, I have come to realize, having googled personal experiences not mentioned to such "professionals".

I really need to fess up the severe problems I've had from antidepressants. They either don't work. Or make me feel so weird I'm hallucinating. Or make me hyperactive enough to have been called "bipolar" on several occasions.

In fact it is the dreaded "bipolar" word I've long avoided even going near in conversation. My googling leads me to suspect I might be what they call "bipolar ii" (severe and milder depressions and mild mania) or "bipolar spectrum" (not clinically bipolar but closer to it than most people. It's the fact that those who've accused me of being "hypomanic" were folks with 1st-hand experience of the illness that makes me slightly worried. Also my depression fits to a T the so-called "atypical" depression "bipolar ii" sufferers typically get. That is depression with severe over-sleeping, rather than insomnia. Over-eating. A "reactive" mood rather than a depressed flatline (ie I usually can cheer up to an extent no matter how bad I feel. The problem is the depression crashes back over me within minutes of these little lifts... and so the misery goes on. The other aspect was something they called something like "hyper sensitivity to personal rejection" which I only get when depressed. It means I get into a real tailspin over small issues of friendship... and blah blah.

The nut nut nurse told me opiates make powerful antipsychotics, which is something a few of us knew anyway. E.g. one of my best friends claims to have come off years of lithium (again for bipolar, of course) having switched to heroin and methadone. I myself noticed my moods, which were up and down in and out like the tides of the sea before I got into daily heroin, were flattened out for years and still are far flatter than they were. Here's a link on the issue:

Methadone has potent mood-stabilizing, antipsychotic properties.

And another one:

Antidepressant-induced hypomania.

Oh I don't know where I've meandered to in all this chat. I hope today's navel-gazing isn't TOO annoying, but I've issues I need to face up to, but never do. I've made myself an expert at under-carpet-brushing. When I'm in appointments I just want to run out as soon as possible, and so anything not strictly on our "agenda" gets studiedly ignored...

The crux of my situation is that for YEARS, since childhood I've had ongoing (but episodic) depression problems. I don't feel I've ever had a proper diagnosis despite quite a few encounters with psychiatrists. Over most of the time I've kept this blog I've been depressed either mildly or more severely. It's just lovely definitely NOT to be down and to be normal ~ like I am this week. The senior groups worker came running up to me yesterday saying "I heard you're giving out loads of positive energy ~ and I see it too". See. This is the real me. But so so many people THINK they know me, yet have only ever seen the depressed me. THAT is why I really feel this issue needs "addressing" properly. Then, who knows, I might have a real "crack" at normal life!!
Right I'm going to shut up now.

ON THE NET:
I started a new "6 degrees of separation" blog hop this afternoon. (Though it's FAR more than 6 skips most times till you find someone you know.) Starting by googling "fruit shortcake blog" (always include blog in the searchwords), you get to a random blog. You could even use a newspaper/something to find random words to google. Find a blog you don't know and following the comments jump jump jump between blogs till you find a blogger you know! Doing this can lead to the most wondrous places... wondrous faces...
Starting at spluch.blogspot...
I never knew Niagara falls froze over in winter! Here at davehartland.blogspot are the most amazing photos of said phenomemon...
OK so far I've done about 8 hops and am nowhere near anyone I even vaguely know... stopped at Aaron Lundberg's blog "assessing the impact"

PS DOES ANYONE ever click on BloggerGoogle's "blogs of note" as trailed on the signing in/out screen?
I only had done a couple of times, until the other day my friend Mousie's blog Plumpiemousie came up. Plumpiemousie happens to be the very first blog I ever visited after getting online. Plumpiemousie is where it all began!
Here's a pretty amazing photo blog of London I found: Fresh Eyes On London

Bashful, Itchy and Spherical Online!

O WOW! I can't believe I managed to do this (with loads of help, hmmm...) For the first time ever you get to see my very own roborovskis in their scruffiest not very photogenic (Sun newspaper nibblings) nest...

(NB: the photograph is just a generic image for illustration; the film stars my own three furries!)



Video 2:
TAMING ROBOROVSKIS
This shows quite nicely just how frustrating these furry swines can be to (try and) handle when you first get them. Watch this and watch mine and see how remarkably laid back (indeed half asleep with a camera in the face) Bashful-Itchy-TrottersterSpherical have gone. Also what you didn't see was Spherical's snaggle-nose nibbling determinedly on the side of the phone whenever she was out of shot...

I AM NEVER BUYING VALUE FISH FINGERS AGAIN. I don't know what's in the tasteless white sludge dribbling the soggy batter-scabs that pass as "finger" coating on "Iceland 35 fish fingers. 875g. £2." Octopus suckers, squids' tentacles, lobsters' eye-stalks, mixed mashed fins and generalized factory drain-scrapings would be a first guess.

Never again shall I brave the rigours of "value" comestibles. Though Iceland's fishcakes, £1 for 10, which are 50% mashed potatoes (like my brains!!) go rather nicely with fried rice. As, believe it or not, do Birdseye cod fillet "Omega 6" fingers. Yes: fish fingers and rice. Very Chinese, in a "what the supermarket shoppers of Yunnan Province actually tuck into at home" type way.

Now to my wider "diet" ~ the acetylated extracts of poppies grown in the high valleys of Afghanistan. No more no more no more! If I wrote down every wobble of resolve you'd get travel-sick just reading. Ditching heroin ain't easy. Addiction means can't stop. To speak of using as a "choice" is fundamentally to misunderstand that addiction is where you end up once decision-making has gone out the window. In addiction, drug-use is automatic. Not using: that is now the choice. Easy to make; hard to live by, but a true choice nonetheless. Being on methadone at least makes that choice a viable option I've long had yet somehow never could quite grasp hold of...

So here's my plan. Not a solid plan, but something still resolving, still in formulation, but it goes something like this: I will stop taking heroin again. I will take advantage of being so unexpectedly happy (see yesterday) I suspiciously tried to dig out a "psychiatric" cause. I will go to this dual diagnosis thing I missed last week because nobody wrote it down. I will see whether the persistently tricky low ebb I spend so much time at can be treated. I am, after all, doing my bit by not drinking to excess and abstaining totally from cocaine and crack ~ both of which, I am told, fuel low moods and scupper antidepressants.

My sanity has taken some knocks at times. It feels so good to have it back.

Today I bought a Nokia charger and USB cable for uploading Itchy, Bashful and Spherical Trottester's magnificence to the worldwide web! How exciting!! Who knows we might have Baby Itchy Roborovski starring on Youtube before the day is out!

I hope I haven't bored you too badly...

High Without Drugs!

SOMETHING REALLY WEIRD HAS BEEN HAPPENING to me recently. First I get ill with, face it, not even a common cold. It was just a cough that's all. But man! It knocked me sideways like you would not believe. Tired. Dizzy. Wuzzy. Quite seriously depressed (with suicidal inclinations) and at the very depths my brain flipped like a pancake and I really went ga-ga for a while. Paranoid. I don't know whether I was hallucinating but I had daleks in my head. Thoughts blizzarded randomly about my brains like scatterings from a torn-up dictionary. It was like being unpleasantly stoned on uncalled-for cannabis-spliff. And I hate that stuff so much I've not voluntarily smoked it for the best part of five years (last time I did I was hearing voices on half a spliff: nasty). I haven't bought myself any for nearly 16 years.

Now I'm OK. I did make a serious attempt (yet again) at "no heroin" but was so very miserable it was ridiculous. Life felt so utterly valueless and meaningless once I'd gone a couple of days and let the heroin level (but I was taking methadone in compensation) slid out of me. I don't need to take much heroin at all (as I say I'm on a methadone script and have been for ages) but the little bits I do have (not even every day) compensate for what methadone does not do. Lots of people complain of a flat mood on methadone, but with me I feel depressed out of my mind. I'm starting to think I really need to get some proper "help" ie of the "psychiatric" sort (not just counsellors' interferences either. I need someone who knows what they're doing. Because if something is actually "wrong" with me, and I've had periods of crushing low mood since I was about 10, it's never properly been diagnosed.

Now suddenly I'm coasting up high. I feel lovely. No it's not just because I had heroin yesterday. I've had heroin on thousands of days and it never did this to me. This is the old high I used to get when drugs weren't in my system. Though it feels like a sparkle of ecstasy/cocaine/speed in my system I'm not sweating or heartbeating or anything like that. I think it's what doctors label that rare state: being happy..!

If you want to look at it another way, one of the popular science type books I used to have on depression and mood probs used to say lots of people have a pre-disposing temperament to depression. There were three such temperaments: 1. dysthymic ~ miserable all the time 2. hyperthymic ~ energetic, "hyper" and bubbly (can also be irritable) and 3. cyclothymic ~ constantly yoyoing between the two extremes, just like the tides of the sea. Of course everyone has good days and bad days and fluctuating energies but this is more extreme than "normal" but milder than "bipolar". This last one would be me.

Big big big irony of ironies. When I found heroin I was so "happy" I had no heavy depression for about two years. I noticed straight away opiates had a flattening effect on mood. But isn't it typical that what they did most effectively of all was to block the natural waking up on cloud 9 highs. And eventually depression did creep back.

Well whatever. I don't require a label to validate my existence and I've become increasingly cynical over the years that some psychiatry is merely medicalizing normality. But today I'm happy¬! And it's great!!

PS: ASHFORD CASTLE, Co Mayo, Ireland ~ they say an Englishman's home is his castle, well that's my ideal home ...

NOBODY TOLD ME...
I like this old Lennon tune...



WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST MOBILE PHONES COMMERCIAL

THIS IS CLASSIC! My friend Valium Marilyn laughs like her when she's impersonating the screechy gypsy lady who haunts the benches outside our local library. Valium Mal does this right to Gypsy's face and Gypsy's never yet clocked...

Tiny Trotters on Film!

I FOUND A REALLY NICE MOBILE PHONE in the internet shop an hour before closing. So I sat with it and minded it, waiting for it to ring (hoping no-one would). Nobody rang and I wasn't up for handing it in for someone else to "appropriate". And one technical hitch aside, when I turned it on and off only to get demanded some crackpot security code (Googling Nokia instructions manuals told me the default code was 12345 and I got straight in) I am now the proud owner not only of a telephone registered in FRANCE but a two megapixel camera with videotastic features for filming furries! Which is just about all I have done with it since.

So enthusiastic has been my homemoviemaking with Baby Itchy as star that the batteries are so seriously low I'm about to be terminated.

I've got all sorts of furry film of her looking tiny as a ping-pong ball and half-heartedly doing her party trick where she vanishes inside the magic wand only to reappear looking surprised at the other end. Usually she would use this juncture to clamber out, but my having to film one-handedly made things awfully awkward and every time her pink nose appeared at the other end, followed by a kindly sniff-around, she promptly reversed up to re-appear fur brushed backwards looking like a fluffy furball with beady eyes on my hand.

Oh and of course all the background clutter really shows up on camera. A certain sign that I really really need to tidy up!!

If anyone can reveal to me how on earth I get to post these up on Youtube ~ bearing in mind I know NOTHING and have never used a USB cable in my life. In fact don't own them as I "inherited" said telephone... Also how do I post my own photographs on blogger? I've a lovely over-exposed one of Itchy rambling on my hand. She's so washed out by such major flash she looks blue.

And that's all I have to say on an otherwise killer-drab Sunday. I'm missing EastEnders' omnibus to post this so I hope y'all are happy!!

Laters, peeps ~ and take it easy:~~...

The Saturdays ~ Issues
this has been going round and round in my head; it's got a real catchy "hook" this one...

I Wanna Learn How To Fly!

THIS IS SOMETHING I'VE ALWAYS wanted to do. Apart from potholing and caving the reverse pole of my fascination with has long been an obsession with flying. By flying I mean "proper" flying ~ in the open air. Not hang-gliding, which is, of course, merely gliding, but powered flight in a glorified canoe hanging from a human kite with a giant fan behind. Yes! Microlight! I would seriously like to have a go at this.

Nearest I've ever been to true flight (and I don't count being in the confines of an aeroplane: I wanna feel the wind in my hair, man!) is parakiting. This I have done about five times. Two or three times running behind a jeep in a field (which was the best) and twice on a Scottish loch behind a speedboat. Most people who do this do it behind a boat. Running behind a landrover in a field of cut wheat is far rarer. I was only about nine. Just when you'd expect to get knocked off your feet and dragged at 30mph by the knees, suddenly the knees are trailing in the air and you're 20, 30, 50 feet or more up. I can't remember how high I actually went but it wouldn't have been over 100ft. Of course you stay well away from trees, but I think I'd have been able to look down on the canopy of an English oak... This is one of life's experiences I'm so glad to have had. I was only eight or nine when I first did it and wasn't scared a bit, just excited. I had to wear a crash helmet and do emergency drop-and-roll procedures among the haybails...

The latest I heard about exciting "true flight" was an English road team who are taking a vehicle by road, sea and AIR from England or Scotland, cross Channel to France, down Spain and across to Morocco and on to somewhere near Timbuktu. There in the Sahara, where nobody probably much cares about aerial regulations (or there aren't many/any) they get the true capabilities of their vehicle in action. Basically it's a dune-buggy type thing with a giant fan behind and a parascender's chute on string behind. So, providing they can get going properly without the chute dragging in the ground, theory is they take off and fly (for hundreds of miles, I believe the intention was...) They said they were looking forward to surprising African villages. Surprising!!?! You can say that again. Then again there's no limits to the antics of crazy Englishmen in the minds of most foreigners... What I'd be most cautious about would be landing. I mean: have they had much or any practice? They said restrictions were pretty great against operating said "car" in this country and you need a pilot's licence to do it. They made it sound like they were just going to get to the desert and take off...

... I hope they don't crash into a scorpion... (Hey it might stick them with its tail and puncture their tyres...)

What can compare to drugs? They miserably ask. Well I answer you: extreme sports most certainly can and it's my intention on my multimillion pound novels' royalties to launch myself high up in the air... I'll post photographs and youtubes once I'm up there!

Link: Wikipedia's article on microlight aviation ... (also known as ultralight in the United States and former British colonies)...

VIDEOS

1. This is exciting! (To me... !!) Yeah how, geektastic is this! MICROLIGHT FLIGHT...



2. This is from a brilliant documentary I found called MIRACLES IN BIRDS. Here's part 3 of documentary 2, to see the rest on my "random" blog, click here ...



3. IN THE NEWS: JADE'S WEDDING SMILES

Jade Goody, UK television's biggest reality star by far: made famous by Big Brother and OK Magazine, caused an international incident by going back in the "Celebrity Big Brother" house and doing "racism" on Indian actress Shilpa Shetty... went on Big Brother India only to get dramatically pulled out midway through thanks to unexpected medical test results returning a verdict of TERMINAL CERVICAL CANCER. This is really nasty. The girl whose popularity soared then plumetted is now riding, media profile wise at an all-time high with even the Prime Minister offering her best wishes earlier this week and the Justice Minister overriding her fiancee's post-jail curfew for 24 hours so they can spend their wedding night together click here to see those clips. A on tomorrow's "Wedding of the Year"... poor Jade, who doesn't expect to live out this year, reportedly sees tomorrow as her last chance to wed fiance Jack Tweedy. The £1 million +plus++ she's raising via magazine and TV deals will go in trust for her kids... How very sad this all is. I'm not a huge fan of Jade Goody but I'm gutted for her ...

Feathery Friday: I Love Lorikeets

I NEVER EVEN KNEW what a "rainbow lorikeet" was till I saw loads of them on Bimbimbie's blog ...

(Bimbimbie means place of the birds in the native Queenslander Aboriginie

This one, called Eric, is mad about this ball...



And here's a huge flock of them, with sulphur-crested cockatoos



Last but not least, here's (wild) lorikeet "courtship" in Sydney, Australia

Fruit Shortcake Biscuits

NOT BECAUSE I'M "NUTTY AS A FRUITCAKE" but because fruit shortcake are my favourite non-"cream" biscuits (I have such babylike taste~ has to be sweet, preferably chocolate, etc...) but these are a grown-up delicacy that go really well with hot, sweet tea. Hot, sweet tea is just about all I've been up to lately because I'm so so ill!

Hmmm... No honestly it's just a "community virus" with exhaustion and depression sequelæ, as over-Latinated physicians like to put. So I believe. And dit-de-dit and dar-de-dar... And so an obsession with Great British Biscuits results.

I know this talk probably annoys you people, but today I am minded yet again to kick off heroin, like an ill-fitting worn-out jackboot into the trailing dust where it belongs. Not to go "cold turkey" mind (I add for those of you not familiar with my meandering, winding go-nowhere life) but merely to bump properly on to the methadone I've been on for years ~ only using still on top. Nowhere near as much as I might use without it, I should add. But still using far too much. Any using at all is too much when heroin is the drug. I am fulsomely bored of it.

Only this afternoon, as I wandered down the high road with my new biscuits, I got to reminiscing about crack and the great whooshing physical rush of the stuff, and the tidal-wave of a high you surf after your brain's recovered from the druggie equivalent of being shut in a microwave on full power for a minute or two. (This being the effect of a big pipe, at least. In the beginning when I used to smoke not realizing most people broke up the rocks into more manageable portions, the sheer intense force of that cocaine rushing my brain all at once used to sweep me utterly away. So as my ears stopped whooshing, my dazzled eyes, no longer snowblind told me I was in a calm, bright place... a place I've been to a lot on drugs. It's like floating in the full power of the sun, serene and not burning... Then I'd come shooting back from this place-non-place back to the "reality" of being 1000ft high and WHHHOOOAAH!!! It's those effects, and the very suddenness of them from unwrapping the crack, to shoving it on the pipe, to slowly burning and breathing steadily in... within half a minute at most I was totally out of it in la-la-land.

So why don't I crave that immense high? Or even miss it? Partially because it's absolutely incompatible with anything resembling an ordinary life.

And yet heroin with its effects so subtle you could easily miss them and feel nothing other than dull and tired. THIS becomes the object of my greatest adoration. Why?

Perhaps there are no answers and I'm not up for wasting the energy to find them. I just want out of this life. At long long last.

Of course this means I will have used within two days (if past form is anything to go by). But I can at least make this affirmation. And at least try...

As NA say, you can only do one day at a time...

Mashed Potatoes Brains

THE SIZZLING'S GONE DOWN on my pre-heated brains, but they are still the texture of mashed potatoes. And the cold went away only for a "secondary infection" to set up home in its place. I am lucky: I have lots of hot, sweet tea. And vanilla creme Hobnobs.

I don't have a lot to say. All the time I feel behind time and needing to catch up on sleep I somehow lost... When I do sleep I dream. One of my last dreams was of rainbow fishes ~ which scuppers that theory that we only dream in black-&-white.

I have been at the drug service trying to put myself together. Or more to the point trying to learn ways of putting myself back together. All leading up to the inevitable day when I take a deep breath and finally take that plunge leaving heroin far behind...

The drug service say I look very "tired". I feel it as well!

I had a good rant and told them how I really feel. Barely treading water a lot of the time, not too much better than drowning. So I'm to go to some dual-diagnosis appointment or meating. I'm not sure when.

I haven't smoked cannabis-spliff in years and yet whenever I get these colds lately my head goes all a-curly, swirly round-round, a-stoned-like. How can this be when I avoid nasty THC like the plague? Well mashed potatoes to the lot of it. I've got to go I'm exhausted!

Fluffy-bozed airedale blog of the day: www.toaireisdivine.com/blog
Bea Bea the white dwarf hamster's blog...

AARGH!!: I really am LOSING IT! My favourite television programme these days is turning into Hollyoaks!

How times have changed. In my day dance music very very rarely had slick videos like this... unless the artists happened to know underground filmmakers who'd knock out imagery on the cheap...

I WOKE UP FEELING NASTY IN THE NIGHT... I had heroin there so it wasn't a "no drugs sulk"... what I didn't have was alcohol, food, tea even and this did throw me in a tizzy. Yes of immature "I want I want I can't handle waiting five entire hours till the state pays me..." ilk. But also real suicidally-laced depression where I wonder how long I will last. If I do ever die, I know it will be 100% at my own hand. Otherwise I will be rescued and fly to heaven...

I did write out a post in those mournful early hours but it was so confused. Every time I ran my fingers through my hair they crackled like electricity. My head was deepsea diving in subconscious zones I'd rather not see. I felt stoned on cannabis/hashish/puff/grass/weed/whatever you like to call it~ but I hate it. But I had not smoked.

This is a consequence of breaking the mind. Rubbish continually flows into the cracks and fissures formed... Not nice.

My life is out of control and I am living it. I repeatedly have the experience of linking now to 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 years back and I'm aghast: HOW DID I GET HERE??!?

Ultravox: Dancing With Tears In My Eyes
I wanted to post something "nuclear" for a while. The premise of this vid is actually bunkum for there was nuclear meltdown at Tschernobyl and no vast explosion. So more accurately this would be about nuclear WAR~ which is coming

Sludge!

A YURKSOME yukky slumbersome, sticky, intractably drab Sunday. Do you know: either I am going crazy or the same Cinderella film has been on for over 3 hours and STILL the Royal couple have yet to tie the knot? Honestly. I have very little to say apart from this. I hope your weekend went better...

Flippers!*

Turtles are some of my favourite marine, critters. Their graceful "flight" through water, flippers on full-blast...

Camera-pecking, winking giant sea-turtle:



Cat vs TERRAPIN not tortoise, not turtle, dur!

But does the "inevitable" happen... Watch and see:



And for all yous who want a longer one, see how tiny this "giant" sea-turtle seems dwarfed by the humungous eagle ray...



*today being the day for my "Furry Fridays on Saturdays" "meme"...

Brrr!

OK I HAVE BEEN IN HIBERNATION. Every time I wake up I feel like I'm on day 2 of a skiing or adventure holiday. How inconvenient. Acheing all over, like I've fallen off a horse, I hobble about making cups of tea or gassing the place out with (fried) quarter lb-er beefburger sandwiches... I got a really chavtastic cheapo, thin, sugary-vinegary tomato ketchup ~ just the way it should be ~ from Iceland. It's fantastic. Only my bread is bourgeois: Warburton's Seeded Batch: £1 for a tiny loaf. But exactly the right size toasted for one 1/4-lb-er or 3 fishfingers drowning in said "red sauce"...

Hey do y'all remember back in the 1970s-to-early 80s when colour television was still something of a novelty or at least luxury. In this country we never had those whizzy colour tellies with turny-dials (I've looked all my life for one, only ever seen colour ones on American films), just four or five channel selectors, sticking out like giant silver cigarettes from a teak effect box with a screen like a giant goldfish bowl. The older ones used to ping! back into a quickly vanishing white dot that lingered in the end....

... sometimes I think that white dot tells the story of my life...

... even older tellies (even colour ones) worked via valves not transistors, which meant when you knew you wanted to see something you had to ensure the box was switched on a good 10 minutes ahead of time. Sound came almost immediately, frustratingly... from deep underwater greenish figures emerged, clothing themselves in layer upon layer of sparkly pixxels until (hopefully) at the set time you had Coronation Street or Opportunity Knocks! Aww, the 1970s. I do feel some privileged sense of nostalgia for having lived through these brown-swirly times.

Me and my brother used to nudge each other and laugh when we went to more vulgar people's houses who always had the colour turned up way too high! ~ do you remember that one? That was a chavtastic form of budget psychedelia for those unwilling actually to drop LSD...

What on earth I was going to say here has escaped me...

O, except my robos look like their nest has been hit by a cat-5 hurricane! Some cleaning bug has seized them and all empty toothpaste boxes (etc) are piled wigwam stylee in a corner. When I shove my head in the tank and say "oi you swines: come out!" three mini-gremlin faces emerge from said bundle of sticks looking surprised (hamsters nearly always look surprised, it's the look they do best...)

And that's about it. I don't know what I was gonna say but I'm going back to bed?

VIDEO:

#1 the candy selection featuring Leo DiCaprio and the All Saints: Pure Shores (music from The Beach)...



#2 Now this is something rarer: 2001 A Space Odyssey to the tune of Orbital's Halcyon:

I always thought Halcyon was a nasty banned sleeping pill from the United States... or >Halcion Days... some old novel..?
No! Halcion Days was a "text based multi-user adventure game" ... being I've never PLAYED a text-based multi-user adventure game but have only heard of ONE: ie British Telecom's "MUD" "multi-user dungeon" how on earth the phrase got so deeply embedded in my subconscious I've not a clue...
No it isn't. "Halcyon days" is a piece of cultural coinage, ie a expression, a cliche, if you will. The Halcyon game which I knew I'd not have heard of till just now, is some geektastic thing from times past...

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

Two Ladies in my Life

YESTERDAY I was catching up on lost sleep and, when the time came to post it was already too late. So here I am tomorrow morning!

What I did start to doodle on a piece of paper was some of the story of my life which began, as far as my public consciousness was concerned, with the Queen's Silver Jubilee in the summer of 1977 when I was 5.

I don't remember the street parties (though surely we had them) but I do remember the silver commemorative double decker bus I kept in near-mint condition. My brother (younger by 2 years) bashed his one up!

But I remember as a 5 year-old seizing on this anniversary year and wondering what and where I would be when the next royal jubilee came round ~ this being the Golden Jubilee in 2002 when I would be 30 years old. That 21st century date coupled to such a milestone age seemed impossibly futuristic.

When the biggest day came six years ago I was on the street begging money for my gear. It passed me by in such a haze I could barely remark on it, for it made almost no impression on my inner consciousness.

Had I been able to feel anything I suppose I would have wept for all the opportunities missed, the promise lost ... but I was far too lost then to indulge in tears.

The next woman to dent my public consciousness was Margaret Thatcher. She came into power in 1979 when I was 7 and was thus the first Prime Minister I remember. And she stayed so very long, till I was 19 that when she was eventually shoved out of office by snakes in her own Conservative ("Tory") party, I felt vaguely frightened. She was the only Prime Minister I had ever known.

How I loved Mrs Thatcher as she reigned over us! Before her appearance Britain had been a dusty, sluggish grey place marked by terminal decline (hey I'm nearly quoting her memoirs...) What Britain needed, so she believed, was a good kick up the backside. Get rid of the unions' stranglehold over British industry by eliminating practices like public ballots by show of hands. In the future only "proper" secret ballots into the box or by post would be allowed. Thatcher struck a crushing blow against union dominance when she smashed the longstanding miners' strike over pit closures. Unprofitable mines ought to be dispensed with. And so they were.

For all her faults, Mrs Thatcher did "get Britain working" again. And she made this country a businesslike place to be.

She started an international trend by privatizing national utilities: telephones, oil and gas, water, electricity and railways. Looking back I see this as national theft. Of course it's one of the most classic cons in the book to steal something off somebody and hoodwink him into buying it back and that's what she did with all her share offers. With the possible exception of telecommunications, there isn't real competition and choice in any of these businesses. Privatized electricity does not mean competing companies offering to wire your house. It just means they buy huge bulk blocks of the national supply and offer to sell dribs of electricity on to you cheaper (hopefully) than the competitors. This is a nonsense. Why not sell straight to US the public at the discount wholesale rate ~ THAT would be true democracy.

The great flaw in Thatcher's policy, which DID get a revived, modernized Britain moving again was that she seemed to view everything in the model of a business. Make a profit out of something and it's inherently worthwhile. But anything that just costs money is a "loss" and should be eliminated.

If she'd had her way, Thatcher would have got rid of the BBC ~ one of the jewels in our cultural crown. I think she was at heart a republican. The talk was always of how insufferable the Queen found her and "who does she think she is?"!

Now before Gledwood gets too boringly political here's some video entertainment from the magic era when my political sensibilities burst into life:



THATCHER UND DIE DEUTSCHEN

THIS IS TYPICAL entertainment from the best policial TV show of the 1980s: SPITTING IMAGE. See how lifelike those dummies are...




THE POLITICAL ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER

Frank In-scented Itchy

I HAD A ROBOROVSKI DONKEY-DERBY last night... Round and round they ran, around 2-storeys (that is robo storeys ~ 5 inches high the lot) of wandering tubes from toilet-rolls, clingfilms, tunnels from toothpaste boxes and secret underground bases fashioned from Italian Grated Cheese containers... all this concealed within their gigantic (to human-scale) house-sized nest which is 6 robo-feet deep (no wonder they like nothing better than lazing in there seemingly 18 hours a day...)... replete with multiple food-stashes in bizarre places. Everywhere I looked was a Disneyfied perky-eared "mouse" nibbling seeds, emerging from a tunnel looking surprised or trotting 21 to the dozen on the wheel. They looked so cute I really wanted to give them a good poke them with their chopstick.

All the robbies do to that chopstick is nibble at it in a vaguely interested way: when I had Russian or Siberian hamsters, one Campbells, one "winter-white", my Campbells seized upon it with such alacrity you could pick up said stick and have him dangling 50 Campbells-feet in the air... If he was a dog he'd have been growling and slavering away... It's such a shame that was before the days of Youtube as I could have got hilarious film out of Naughty's antics...

BABY ITCHY ROBOROVSKI smells of frankincense... Robbies are so cute and furry and tiny and I always bring them to my face when I hold them... they've always had a perfumey smell (not a rank mousey stale smell like... well: mice...) Itchy does indeed smell of frankincense. You might think you don't know it but you do: it's in "church incense", a sweet, calming aroma... Their we-wee is again full of perfumey "notes" (as perfumiers like to say) and nowhere near as rank as ordinary rodent pee-pee... My old Russian hamsters used to smell a bit mousey, but then they were boys and boys' urine's always yukkier than girls as girls of all species will tell you in various barks, yelps, chirrups and squeaks of their own... Or plain English, when they're not getting their nails done... Ordinary Syrian or golden hamsters don't smell at all, except when they need cleaning, and then their wee smells quite horrid and sour.

I don't know why, because they'are hardly underfed, but Itchy and Bashful, seem tiny even as roborovskis go. Only Spherical is truly as tubby eg. as the furry porn-stars of my video Roborovski Luurve..!

A lot of my blog-readers seem to lose scale of how very tiny my roborovski hamsters are. Robbies are the tiniest of all dwarf hamsters so I'll try and give you an illustration: an ordinary Syrian hamster curled up is about the size of a tennis-ball; a Russian dwarf hamster would be about satsuma-size ~ but robos, the tiniest of the lot are barely any bigger than pingpong balls!

And with that thought I'll love you and leave you. I have to fly and get a roast beef dinner in giant Yorkshire pudding £1 meal from "chavtastic" Iceland... the feeding the "white trash" frozen superstore...

Illustrations: to the right ~ a tiny furry dur roborovskis; to the left no not some dodgy smoker's middle-eastern drugs ~ that's frankincense being used as incense...

Poem of the Day: Read Experience, Strength & Hope at Storm Before the Calm...

EFTERKLANG MIRADOR

Now we're walking up strange-street...

Visually very funky and musically a little bit: what oddness! I purloined this from Let Nature Be blog...



THE PRICE IS RIGHT 1ST EVER SHOW 1984
Hosted by the original Alan Partridge ~ yes Leslie Crowther, this is the classic opening British show of that gold-plated American gameshow THE PRICE IS RIGHT: starring NORMA STUPID

The woman made such an impression on all of us that years later "Norma Stupid" is still a family catchphrase at home...

This you have to watch: you couldn't mock-up something this retro if you tried all year...