The Plunge

Niagra falls, USA/Canada. I once dreamed I was on a boat such as this one ...
DEEP BREATH... TAKE PLUNGE..! I'M WRITING... I started without knowing it. Thinking I was taking notes I actually wrote out a whole chunk of dialogue. Only 500 words (bear in mind 1000 words is only 2.5 pages from an average novel in ordinarily spaced type ~ so it's not that much.) But it's a start, and remember this is my second draft. Draft 1 is already in the can and unpublishable, because it's amateurish throughout and as I said before, has a massive plot flaw that invalidates more than half of the book. This time round I'm concentrating on linking my scenes together a little better and weaving the background characters, who suddenly popped up and vanished in the first version, deeper into the story, which is very much one character's story. In a sense it's a fictionalized memoir, I suppose you could say.

The big plunge I take later today when I start my new chapter 2. (Chapter 1 can wait till the end...)

I'M READING To Kill A Mockingbird ~ it's survived four house moves (most of my books never get left behind) and I know it's a classic but I hadn't realized how good it was. Maybe that will inspire me. I tried an old Jackie Collins the other day that had been sitting next to Harper Lee for almost as much time and couldn't stand the crass language. That went sailing across the room. Perhaps I'm getting old ...

Wild Hamsters

FURRY FRIDAY (on Saturday).

MESOCRICETUS AURATUS ~ the name means "medium-sized golden hamster"...

THE GOLDEN OR SYRIAN HAMSTER many of us knew as childhood (or adult) pets is actually an endangered species in the wild.



It is said (and DNA typing backs this up) that every pet hamster in the world pet trade came from ONE nest unearthed by accident at an archaeological dig near Aleppo, Turkey in 1930.



Whether these are actual wild golden hamsters or faked up pictures who cares, but you get an idea of what some Syrians and Turks might encounter on a hiking weekend:



Some of the original captive hamster-family died, but at least two of the young did breed, and from this pairing every hamster sold in the pet trade today is descended.



Here's a family of golden hamsters out for a ramble. Don't they look cute:



"HAMSTER" is a German word meaning "hoarder" ... Watch this!

A Hyacinth Macaw Interlude

I think these are some of the most beautiful birds:

Weird Dreams*

MY BODY CRAVES SLEEP DESPERATELY, yet in bed I spent half the night seemingly in a semi-twilight state. That was last night. The night before was full of recurrent nightmares about losing things, being cornered, falsely accused (a constant nightmare theme of mine) and accosted by foes.

I probably slept so badly last night because I was afraid of going back to the same nightmare that haunted two great blocks of sleep all night between Monday and Tuesday. I don't know.

I had loads of things buzzing in my head that I could have posted. But as soon as the computer's on the old blank page is glaring at me ~ white with rage!

I'm no stranger to writer's block. It's a very real thing. But nowadays I feel all aglow, because I have a story peopled by vivid characters I'm burning to tell. It doesn't pain me to plot it, scrawl notes about it. I can't stop. My previous block was how to get round a ridiculous and major plot flaw that invalidated maybe 40,000 words of my first draft. I puzzled and puzzled about how to retell my tale and at last it came to me on Sunday. And now, though I'm still depressed, I'm at least happy to have something constructive to do... Know what I mean? And I must dash now. Computer's about to terminate me!

Dalí self portrait (title unknown); Ryman's own copier paper the type I use except not glary high white; Dalí Nude, in Contemplation Before the Five Regular Bodies
Metamorphized into Corpuscles, in Which Suddenly Appears the
Leda of Leonardo Chromosomatized by the Visage of Gala, 1954

The New Literary Agents: If Danielle Steel gets published why can't I? (Big question. Have you read any of her works? I once tried, as I knew she'd sold over 400,000,000 books and wanted to know her secret. Three pages later I gave up. I still cannot fathom it....

* is there any other type~??!?

A New Project...

... or an old one revisited.

IT CAME TO THE POINT WHERE I JUST WANTED TO CURL UP AND DIE before I reached inside and grabbed a handful of the inner strength. I knew I had it somewhere but it hurt too much to use. (And why bother?)

I know I have been shillyshallying back and forth. I would do this. I would like to do that. I should do something else. And I could do yet another thing. I was looking for a project and finally fixed upon writing the second draft of the book that has been lying in the bottom of a cupboard for months on end. The first draft, let me explain, is so howlingly terrible no self-respecting publisher would light their stove with it, let alone print it.

This is my novel, not the drug-memoirs I also threatened to inflict on the world. The memoirs ground to a halt some time ago when I came up against twin dead weights. 1: I didn't like or enjoy remembering my own life; 2: there's the second quandary of whether/what/how much I say about real people who came into my life. At least fiction gives the freedom of talking in as much detail about anyone you please because the characters are all made up. Anyway the problem with the first version of this book was a major plot flaw. Basically I made something happen to my main character without researching thoroughly enough what this would entail. This time I'm sticking to that maxim "write what you know". I'm not feeling up to doing the job of researcher on top. Writing 100,000 pristine words shall be enough. So wish me luck, I've started already.

Also I cleaned my oven today. I have never used oven cleaner in my life. The chemicals always looked too scary. And why bother cleaning something you barely glimpse inside at the best of times. It's only because it's got so dirty it let off the main fire alarm that I got spurred into £2.50 Mr Muscle action.

Cheery-bye all. It's a miserable, crisp autumn day. What's it like your end?

Heroin in Brunei Darussalam in Asian English

Top: what famous novel do you think this manuscript belongs to?

NEW LINK: Erowid "how to purify street heroin" (I can't vouch for this!)

Sleeping... Eating...

THE WEATHER'S extremely chilly. Fallen leaves everywhere in a brown mush. A "nip" in the air, if I can say that without being racist about the Japanese (according to the Official Politically Correct Handbook, not ...)

All I want to do is eat and sleep. Eat stodge, that is and go to bed in the day. And sleep all night into the bargain. And then when I'm awake all I think about most of the time is doom and gloom. This is depression (again).

I saw a documentary on Japan last night. Japan and Japanese things barely ever come on British telly. Well, nowhere near as frequently as I'd like. Of course there are people from all over the world in London and the UK, but no great community of Japanese expats, so Japan and Japanese things are pretty exotic here.

But there was this British man, who motorcycled (and ferryboated) from Sydney Australia to Tokyo Japan. He was on telly last night. Id' seen some of it before, but this was was the last episode, the Japanese instalment. I sat glued to the screen and nearly fell over when a couple of street signs appeared and I could read them!

京都駅: 京 kyō means "capital city" ... this is the same character used in Tōkyō 東京 ("East Capital"). The second character 都 can be read to or miyako, meaning "the seat of Imperial palace" or "capital".) (Kyōto, by the way, was capital of Japan before Tōkyō took on the title in the modern era.) Railway station eki = a horse 馬 (lefthandside) coming to a halt on the right, 駅 where they say the R should be used as a mnemonic for Railwaystation ...


THIS IS IT: Charlie Boorman ~ Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means ...

The Kingfisher

FEATHERY FRIDAY (ON SATURDAY)

It looks something like a giant hummingbird. It is probably the most beautiful bird in the UK.



Surprise, surprise ~ it fishes expertly. Without bashing its nose on the rocks:





Sometimes they're generous:



Sometimes they can't decide who the fish belongs to:



I don't think this one enjoys being handled. Look at its indignant little face!



This mini cartoon version is called an African Pygmy Kingfisher ... (why do pygmy everythings seem to come from Africa~??)

Some Day I'm Gonna Change... I just don't know when...

WHEN INDEED! I am awake in the middle of the night worrying because my life feels wrong-wrong-WRONG and yet I never seem able to do anything about it. Not for any meaningful length of time.

There are gerzillions of things I'm meant to be sorting out, yet inertia stops me doing so. E.g. I really need to see a decent careers advisor from a good university to get my priorities straight and find out where I stand vis-à-vis returning as a student.

And what subject(s) would I study? Looking into Japanese at Birkbeck, the University of London college that specializes in degrees taught as evening classes, if you come to Japanese ab initio you can expect in the four years of a BA Hons degree to raise it to the status of "one year post A level" (higher school leaving certificate). But dreadful grammar aside, that's roughly where my German is now and I'd want a higher level of competence than that.

I have bought a fresh notebook, whose blank pages shan't glare at me ~ white with rage! ~ because I've already defaced a load. On one double page I've begun listing my goals and have decided to get Japanese up to A level before I even apply anywhere, even if I do apply to do that. I also want to learn Chinese. And I have an A level in French I'm not going to let rot. In any case, if I do win the lottery I'm shipping out to Monaco. I ain't paying taxes to Gordon Brown any day of the week!

Also if I really do win the lottery no-one need worry about what I'd do. I've already decided the first thing I'd do if I had any amount of money (apart from paying my debts off) will be to get straight into private treatment where they can prescribe sustained release morphine pills which are far better than methadone for someone who really wants to stay away from "gear" ...

Speaking of drugs: here's something "funny" I found online:

"Heroin Clearance Sale in Southeast Asia (New York Times)"!

The Union of Myanmar, better known as Burma, which not much longer than a decade ago used to make the majority of the world's heroin, still manufactures about 5% ~ which amounts to about 40 tonnes of neat diamorphine annually!

A Burmese tribe called the Wa, supposed "masters at heroin production" are arming for a full-on fight with the "ruling military junta" ... hence a cut-price "drugs garage sale" threatened to "flood" international markets ....

Euromillions' jackpot is actually more than double the £35,000,000 mentioned on that ticket and no those aren't my numbers so please nobody congratulate me if they come up!! Pills: morphine sulphate 100mg ...

Two Moons Under A Mountain

Japanese character of the day: kuzu ~ two moons (see left) under a mountain (see right). 崩れる kuzureru ~ to collapse, fall to pieces; 崩す kuzusu ~ 1. to demolish 2. to break a large ¥ note or bill 3. to write simplified Chinese characters (!) This is the poetry of writing.

What do two moons under a mountain really signify?


If you literally see two moons under a mountain (as reflected in a pool) you're either seeing double or the water is agitated ~ either way is a way to unrest or even destruction. But a moon 月 (tsuki) usually signifies a month 月 (gatsu). If you take a mountain 山 (yama) to mean a city or civilization the two months under the mountain would be a siege leading to collapse of society.

And there we have it: two moons under a mountain 崩.

Utter demolition and ruin!

Hamburger Fixation

I AM NEWLY ADDICTED TO BEEFBURGERS. I eat them in brown pitta bread with relish and cheese and tomatoes and radishes. I've cooked so many (and convinced the alarms the entire building was burning down) that the whole place reeks of said fry-ups as you walk in.

Not having the use of an oven any more because the old one's so dirty and grease-filled it smokes like a towering inferno whenever it's on (but no flames). So I carbonize mine in a pan. I'm not averse to blackened meat. I really like the whole indoor-BBQ aspect. But the last but one was a bit too Hiroshima-crunchy. In fact the only thing non-nuclear about it was it didn't glow in the dark and didn't make your fillings tingle.

Anyway: right next to me in a carrier bag as I speak are four of Morrisons own prime beef quarter pounders. 99% beef. I have this inner excited glow of looking forward to cooking them, which is quite sad. And it's about the only excitement I have left. The dreary depths of autumn are mounded rotting-leaf high... police constables have been issued with advice leaflets on how to avoid slipping up and injuring themselves in these terrorous times. I found an embossing stamp this morning and have been embossing everything I own. I am still reading (the end of) Bahnhof Zoo and lots of things re Japanese. But apart from that I feel like jumping before an oncoming train. I just hope I win Euromillions' £90,000,000 jackpot on Friday. Unlike some of those American lotteries I hear about, this one pays you the entire sum tax free in one lump. How cool is that. You could even buy a house in Kensington and Chelsea with that money...

I mean, if £90,000,000 can't solve my problems: what will???

Talking of money, who else was a fan of 80s soap operas? My personal favourite was the Australian Return to Eden. Unlike Dynasty it wasn't so boring you could only admire the set-design. Most of the caste of this Australian "miniseries" (not based on a novel) had been in Prisoner Cell Block H so me and my brother called them by their prisoner names as the rich-bitch drama unfolded. All I remember was Travers from Prisoner (the Joan Collins figure) had a psychopathic hatred of her pudding-basin-coiffured rival, the motherly Stephanie Harper. O ~ I recall the name to this day. How full my life must have been in the 1980s.... just about every cliffhanger seemed to feature a twisted-faced Jilly/Travers's Aussie-vowelled threat: "I'm gonna get you, Stiffany Hairper!" Here's a few clips:








Peta Toppano (Travers/Jilly) official site.

The funkiest writing in the world...

HERE ARE SIX OF THE MOST PICTURESQUE WRITING SYSTEMS on the planet ~ in my opinion ~ in ascending order of funkiness.

What do you think?

Mongolian traditional:


Korean:


Tamil:


Amharic:


Georgian:


Burmese:

Fire Chaos

NO FIRE ~ but a great deal of chaos.

I slammed in a pair of Morrison's own quarter pounder beefburgers in the middle shelf under high heat fan oven-grill combi with drip-tray to catch the slimy expectorations.

Within three minutes so much smoke was seeping from the sides of the door you'd think my own secret Bonfire Night was smouldering away in there. A minute later, predictably, the smoke alarm went off, but I was ready underneath with a broomhandle to poke it quiet.

This technique was successful for a while, but five minutes and a couple more pokes later so much smoke was pouring into the room that the alarm in the hall went off to earsplitting, lights flashing, bellringing psychotronic hullabaloo. Basically my "fire" had set the house's compulsory Health & Safety state-of-the-art alarm system into the biggest techno-tizz I've ever experienced.

I nearly fell down the stairs trying to get the control box to quell this unearthly commotion. Even then it took two minutes of random key-stabbing till I eventually hit on the right sequence of key-turning and button-pressing to restore peace and sanity.

Thankfully all my housemates seemed to be out ~ or hiding behind their doors.

I barely had time for ten seconds' leaning against the front door panting with exhaustion and to clamber up the stairs to try and air the intractable grey fumes via my tiny casement windows. The oven was off and extractor hood on full blast already. And a woman blaring in Japanese about her trip to London. I always try to combine cookery with education when possible.

But I'd barely a second to notice any of this when the main alarm was off again ~ like a sonic drill to both ears. I charged downstairs. Key-turn. Press press press. The red light signifying a blaze in "zone two" vanished. Peace again.

I had barely got upstairs when the alarm went off yet again. By this time I was panicking that the neighbours ~ or worse the alarm box itself ~ would send the emergency services piling round.

Back upstairs I wiped by glasses, convinced the fog I witnessed everywhere was down to burger-greasy lenses. But no amount of spectacle-buffing would clear it.

The terrible racket went off again and again and again. By the fifth time I knew the silencing procedure by heart. But the control box was mains-powered with battery backup. There was no way of just switching the whole thing off until the smoke cleared. And with my tiny windows (the big ones painted shut long ago ~ thanks landlord) this was going to take a long, long time. I was on the verge of despair.

The cause of all the trouble, so it transpired, was a red-glowing water-filter-shaped gizmo I hadn't even noticed before on the ceiling by my door ~ quite separate from and independent of the poke-outable smoke detector in the next room. No amount of determined broom action would silence this baby.

Eventually with a prayer to God our ridiculously over-zealous alarm system did chill out and shut up for good but not before my nerves were totally frazzled.

No smoke without fire?!?
Not on your nellie!

All that and my burgers were still only half cooked through ~ I had to finish them off in a frying pan!

AND HOW WAS YOUR WEEKEND..??!!?!

Guinea Swines!

FURRY FRIDAY (ON SATURDAY)...

PROPERLY KNOWN AS GUINEA PIGS OR CAVIES, these are native to South America ~ where for generations the Andean natives have considered them a source of food. They look like this in the wild:



Like all furries, they have to be quickwitted, because just about everything that's bigger than them considers them food ... including, as I say, some of the local human population ...



They do chill out when they get the chance ... here's a furry cavy-conference on the sands ...



Guinea pigs are of course best known as domestic pets. This is a typical mixed-coloured coat.



They resemble giant hamsters but actually probably make better pets for many children because they are easier to handle, active by day, better-natured and hardly ever bite. See how the kitten fell in love with this one:



They require far more extensive housing than hamsters of any type, but hamster-style high security isn't required as unlike hamsters, guinea-pigs aren't obsessed with running wheels and trying to escape!



Guinea pigs breed as prolifically as rabbits. A female guinea pig can (apparently) hold on to a male's sperm inside her and "use" it several weeks later to get mysteriously and inconveniently pregnant ~ the swine!

... and young guinea swines are of course extremely tiny ...



... look at these tiny trotters ...



and very, very cute!



Coo!



O, and one thing I forgot to add: they love to make squeaky noises!
Look at Emanuel's glossy coat. They must be feeding him lots of lovely linseeds:




HAVE A BRILLIANT WEEKEND, Y'ALL!