Bloghop Blobberous Sergeant Itchy Memoirism

I WENT OUT BLOGHOPPING FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS LAST NIGHT and got such lovely comments back today. To "blog-hop" can mean different things to different people so let me say what I do. You CAN just press "next blog" and see what comes up but it's so very random and most of the 70,000,000 blogs have only one post or are in South American languages or nobody reads them at all so that's usually a dead loss for finding something interesting. There used to be a thing called Random Blog Button you could "press" and a blog would come up out of the ether to entertain you - and it usually WAS entertaining. No more, however. They've improved the life out of the Random Blog website so thoroughly the random feature has gone! (How typical is THAT of the modern world?? Hmmm.) The best way of bloghopping is easy: you go to someone's blog you know and click on a commentator you don't know. And you take it from there, clicking on comments upon comments friends of friends of friends and every time I see something interesting I leave my electronic calling card at least to say "hello - I coasted through, wahey!!" and on you go. (If you don't leave the callingcard you get no comments back - duh!)

I used to do that a lot. A lady called Annelisa who wears a glittery wig laughed because she'd seen me like a rash one night over every blog she knew. I DO miss the Random Blog Button... were it not for that I'd never have discovered the joys of Daniel Thompson, Microtonal Composer among many blogs of microminority interest ... nor Amazing Gracie, who seemed to pop up every seventh click!!

In answer to the queries I got last night, yes I AM a writer - as one who daily writes can call oneself but I'm not getting paid until I submit an entire manuscript to a literary agent and get my $1,000,000 advance, so until that time I remain poor and undiscovered and living (literally, yeah!) in a garett - haha! What was the other question? Oh yeah how do I find the time? Well, blogging takes an average half hour per day including replying to comments and spreading myself around a bit like herpes (you know, over the internet) not to mention posting. I always post EVERY day even though I usually have nothing to say (inherent factor of this blog, I'm afraid.) The book DOES take time... because in 4 hours I might write 2 pages. And by that I mean 2 pages in handwritten scribble on A4 33 lines per page "ruled, feint". Hmmm.

I found Clarissa Dickson Wright's memoirs (she is a former TV cook in this country, famous for the BBC show Two Fat Ladies) - in the bookshop today. Appropriately enough they are entitled, Spilling the Beans. She doesn't novelize her memories: just raconteurs them on paper the way a letter writer (or a blogger, for that matter) might do so. But Clarissa Dickson Wright is a known personality (who used to drink like a fish incidentally) who I got the strong impression really did write every word herself. She probably produced a manuscript so strong the publishers took it on as it was. I'm not known, but I still feel a bit spurious about bowing to convention and adorning my memories with novelistic dialogue that I don't REMEMBER strictly being spoken like that ...

My neighbours think I am mad. What else would YOU think if you stood at the door to hear 4am cooing, "Come out you old gremlin! Come out you swine!" (Me talking to Bashful.) Boy is she looking blobberous today, she's like a furry globe with a face racing about... Then Sergeant Itchy emerges to investigate. I'm sure Itchy really is a dwarf dwarf hamster, she hasn't grown at all since I got her - how long ago was it? Surely 2 months ago by now... Because she is smallest she still gets most washed - looks like a baby cow with wet back all prickled up. Hence title "Itchy" I thought at first she had the prickles literally...

On that note I must go. I've written no memoirs at all today and Valium Marilyn's threatening to come bellowing down my street if I don't come and shut her up first...

Wahey! Till tomorrow...

Video of the day:
REM - Losing My Religion

PS Remember I said Clarissa Dickson Wright gave great interview? Click here for her this year's Desert Island Disks transcript. Fascinating.

Quick Scrawl...

SEEING AS I HAD bugger all to tell yesterday I'm scrawling today's "piece" on paper. Hey - at least my blog's still going. I know someone who used to have a "250 comments" per post blog who has (temporarily, so he says) given up, saying the blog was draining him too much and besides he's writing a book.

Well that's not something you'll ever hear from me. I'm writing a book and (despite feeling uninspired) tapping out a couple of paragraphs a day only takes ten minutes so count yourselves lucky here. (I suppose.)

A man on the radio last week proclaimed that mastery of a musical instrument (and by extension he said: anything else in life) requries 10,000 hours' practice. Or to put it another way - doing something as a fulltime occupation for 40 hours a week for a full FIVE YEARS. Personall I use the silkworm analogy re my writing. A silkworm must spin out an entire mile of CRAP before any quality thread is consistently produced. So to extend this to my writing: I hope that my years of scrawling utter rubbish in notebooks can equate to this mile and now we're on to the "quality" stuff!

I cannot manage 2000 words a day as advised (yet). I'm still somewhere nearer 500. But at least the writing's moving along. I want a good first draft finished by Christmas. Which I can tidy up enough to have the finished product ready to dazzle my literary agents by my 36th birthday in March.

My Indian palm readers all said I would be a "successful businessman" in my thirties. I'm just hoping such success can come in the business of writing. Then I will be made up.

Jim Dandy says the full moon kept him awake all last night. Well it did the opposite to me. I crashed out late afternoon - surely no later than 5pm - and stayed in bed all night and through the morning until circa 10pm. That's 15 hours even if you do allow two hours' pottering about during the night (which I did nowhere near...)

I need to get another wheel for my robbies as Spherical's gone into hibernation - I fear boredom might be the cause - Bashful's less bashful by the day. And I've renamed my smallest Sergeant Itchy as she comes out to stomp about self-importantly at every smallest sign of disturbance. Just like the trainee robo-police sergeant that she is.

And on this scrawly note I must leave. I've a drugs clinic appointment late this afternoon and if I miss it I'm dead meat so ...

Laters my friends ...

***

Video of the day
Sound Factory (New York) Last Dance... I lifted it from M-filer's blog... the first tune I like but the 2nd... isn't that depressing... especially when you see the clear midday daylight shinin' through the "underground" haha!

The club I liked best was called Return to the Source

Ghkky Day

WHAT A DRY DRAB BORING DULL execrable excretionary not excellent swinely swooshing swoon of a day. Ukk everything is interminable blocklike brickdust dull disordinary disordered yukky pukky ukk. Gh! Too tired too long too grey too slow too everything too nothing at once and everywhere to go yet too tired. Ukk!

***

Video of the day:
Whitney Goes Crackwhoreing

So Britney Spears is Going Mental. So is Laundretta...

SO BRITNEY SPEARS IS GOING MENTAL; Laundretta is throwing pitiful weepy tantrums in the hallway; Burmese monks are protesting the country to the brink of collapse... What is the world coming to..?

Poor Laundretta: she is howling such desolation; ranting out lists of Matran's crimes and inattentions. And it struck me suddenly her problem. How she is so exceedingly immature. Because most people realize by age ten or twelve that the World and most of the people in it will not listen, do not care and never will give a damn about how you feel, what you think or your behaviour. Simple fact of life. But Laundretta somehow never learned this so she thinks her 25 year old self can cry drunkenly on the stairs, burbling the injustices piled against her and that somehow someone listening will effect some kind of change in her favour.

Which of course is not going to happen in a million years. How very sad ...

Did you all click my yesterday's post for your free cyber-copies of the News of the World? Britney's bodyguard reveals all in her post-matrimonial breakdown.

As for Myanmar; the BBC refuse to use that word (even though they slavishly follow nearly every other politically correct language convention from around the world... argument being in brief that they do not recognize the sovereignty of the ruling military "junta" (what on earth IS a junta? sounds like something you might wrap in chapatti following a nice chicken tikka dopiaza!) On what authority the BBC make such decisions I would be absolutely fascinated to find out, but hey ...

I've even had hits from Myanmar (not recently though). It's one country in the world, along with Tibet, I've had a permanent fascination to visit...

On this note I must indeed go as fresh pasta and cheeses (not pustules and diseases) bray my name from Sainsbury's...

My roborovskis had a great squabble this morning. Oh! The squeaking was so entertaining. Imagine two dozen rubber ducks being murdered ...

Righty-ho!

***

Video:
Britney Spears "Acting stoned"...

***

BLOG POKE OF THE DAY:

"STRANGE DAYS" http://sianikatt.blogspot.com... Victorian London Vampirism etc ... ooooh!

***

Video II

Eurythmics' Miracle of Love - Japanese Manga Anime video "Saint Seiya"...

Earthynibbled Sunday

SUNDAY AFTERNOON AND I HAVE TO COOK MY OWN LUNCH!! Mother Hubbard's house is being unearthed which means they get a whole new room to use (it was full of clutter before; also the landlord has taken it into his head to knock out every chimneypiece from the building which will provide - wow! eight whole square feet extra per floor - there is no accounting for a savage man with a mallet.

My robos are stashed in a multistorey cardboard construction of my own making. Basically I cut holes in lots of empty teaboxes, foodboxes etc (several in each side) and alligned tubes etc so the result is a multistorey wonderland. This will last a day until they get bored of it then I will have to think up something else. They are like Children with Christmas presents... y'all know what I'm talking about.

Yangyang has taken to nibbling his entire world to bits. Nothing that's there has not been chewed. He is not hungry as there's a pile of wild bird in the corner...

Well this has to be a quick post as I'm running out of (netcaff) time.

Tune of the day is Like a Prayer by Madonna as that's what popped into my head just now...

OK I hope yous all had a pleasant weekend.

PS I looked through my hits list and ... such a bizarre collection of place names! Who lives in Tangerine, Florida?!? That's what I wanna know the most... OK...

PPS Wanna read Britney Spears' bodyguard's world exclusive? Click here for News of the World online! (Why sell the paper for £1 if you're putting it on the net for free? Isn't that called commercially shooting yourself in the foot?) Well I had a good read just now (that's why time's so low) she sounds like a proper maniac...

Pinging Pouch-packing Pompoms

MY HAMSTERS CONSUMED AN ENTIRE WILD BIRD IN TWENTY MINUTES YESTERDAY.

Yes! Seeing as no food was to be found in the roborovski enclosure, save stray dry chiken bones and hunks of bread and the odd scone buried in the sawdust 'neath their wheel (they have an incorigable habit of stashing their din-dins, the swines!) I fed them a handful of "wild bird" seed; believing that, between the three of them, they might polish the last of it off that spot within perhaps three days. How wrong I was! Five minutes flat and the entire handful of seeds was GONE! My baby gremlins sat right on it stuffing their faces, filling their pouches more and more and more until literally they were three round fur-balls on the brink of explosion. Baby Itchy, being the tiniest, managed to return safely to the hamster-house to "disgorge". Then Bashful tried to follow suit and by this time I was watching closely. She was so enormously fat and rounded she could not fit through the entrance (that Yangyang had originally excavated as their house is just a small box of cardboard)... Looking embarrassed and distinctly inconvenienced, Bashful took to nibbling angrily at the doorway, sticking her head through and pushing... still too fat. The entire house shifted and threatened to fly up in the air to various rattlings of the seeds Itchy had already stashed inside... so she nibbled again and again and still wouldn't fit. Spherical, meantime, had totally given up on the hammyhouse seedery idea and disgorged hers in the Maltesers tube. So I snatched the hamster house up in my hands, much to Bashful's left and right and peering up into the sky in wonderment confusion and tore a bigger opening myself. On its return she viewed this human-smelling orifice with scepticism. Turned on her tail and was last seen emptying her seeds beneath the far righthand corner toilet tube...

It's hard to believe that these three critters, each the size of my thumb, can between them stash a handful of birdseed in one or two mouthfuls each and then literally the whole lot was so roundly polished off that nowt but woodshavings remained where the seeds had been. I put out another handful and they ran to hoard this lot as well. And I think by today they've eaten most of it, too. They eat a lot of food for their size. A lot of food compared to Yangyang, the Chinese hamster. And I'm not surprised either. They must burn it all up with all that racing around they do in their every waking minute...

Spherical (or "Merickal" - the new name I coined as Mother Hubbs says the original's too much of a (wild-bird-like(?)) mouthful) has made the hamster house her new bedroom, stuffed as it is with special hamster cotton wool (which I suspect is merely Johnson and Johnson's cotton wool pulled apart, died in a mild solution of food colouring and marked up about 1000%) whereas the other two remain in the limited Christmas edition Maltesers cardboard tube, woodshavings piled up each end. As I mentioned probably yesterday, Merickal's actually the most bashful, racing around in blind panicks each time I threaten to poke her with my fingertips; Bashful's quite tame and will actually wander up to me. She tries to eat my fingers unless I poke the back of her neck. In which case she endures this as a fellow robo-groom thing (they always wash each other's shoulders; I've no idea why). And Baby Itchy is just... the babiest gremlin. Surely a dwarf hamster dwarf, so tiny, you can feel her bones as you pick her up, poor cow. I don't think she's ill though as she runs the wheel with just as much enthusiasm as my other two. Only problem is, being so light if she decides on one direction when another wants the other, poor Baby Itchy ends up revolving round and round and round in constant loop-the-loops until she scrabbles off! (It's a wire wheel and so they can hang on while they spin upside down...)

Right on that note I'd better be off. The local shop are selling butterscotch flavour McVities chocolate digestives and I'm after something charming to dip into my tea.

Cheerio!

G

Videos:
1. Eminem ft Dido - Stan
2. WhitneyBobby Diane Sawyer Xmas Cheer
3. WhitneyMariah When You Disbelieve. Oops, I mean "Believe"

Long Drug Clinic Appointment

THAT'S WHY I DIDN'T POST YESTERDAY: because I was too mentally frazzled after this interminable (is that a real word?) drugs clinic interview. I missed my appointment last week and yet my prescription went on so I didn't HAVE to come back until yesterday and when I did it felt like a year's worth of catching-up was to be done... Filling out forms about self-care, happiness ratings, what food I eat even. She also remarked on how I'd given up my teadrinking non(alcohol)drinking ruse. Though I have taken to diluting lemonade into the cyder which makes it taste less scummy as much as anything. (Stuff I drink comes in 59p cans 500ml 7.5%ABV which is basically the cheapest alcohol you can get in this country on a pennies per mls alcohol basis so...)

I still might get my place in pensioners' sheltered accommodation. I hope I'm allowed hamsters in there, else I will only smuggle them in.

It's quite extraordinary but they are slowly becoming tame. From the early days when they fled for cover if they so much as heard the door opening. Or I dared speak to them. Or go anywhere near them. They now allow me to put my hands in there and might sniff them. Bashful, who is now ill-named keeps trying to bite my fingers if I put them in front. But I can stroke her back which has her trying to turn round in spiral-fashion... I think she considers this to be some sort of hamster grooming by an almighty pink foreign object with probably 10,000 aromas emanating from under the nails. Spherical goes nuts if I try to touch her but is more interested in dashing about in blind panick than actually escaping my touch as sometimes in this fury she actually runs up to and past my evil alien hands. Poor cow.

They were awfully funny the other day when I accidentally dropped a chicken bone on their heads. Instantly they fled to 3 different toilet tubes. Precisely 3 seconds elapsed and the three pink noses emerged in unison from their discreet hiding places. Another three seconds and, none seeing the others' actions so far as I could discern all three decided it was safe to leave said tubes and went about their daily pinging as if nothing untoward had happened....

Then they took to nibbling gristle off the bones - cannabalistic swines that they are! Hamsters DO eat meat. It's just stupid people who cause them problems like the man who took a hamster into Rolf's Animal Hospital (tv programme) with inch long scarily overgrown teeth... poor mite couldn't close its mouth anymore. "What do you feed it on?" asked the vet. And the fat redfaced alcoholic-looking man smirked and said "'E eats full English breakfast just like I do. 'E loves 'is fried eggs and sausages of a morning." How vulgar. Rodents will eat anything (as anyone who's had housemice eat their candles can vouch) but I'm surprised that man's survived at all... Chinese hamsters aparently like LIVE INSECTS and allexperts.com recommended me to buy live locusts for him. (Oh the fun I could have letting them free in the bathroom!!)

I found an hilarious video. It's only a 3-year old boy talking, but he's so funny. I purloined it from Raymi the Minx's blog she said it's her voice talking to him. Have a look it's so funny (click here) if you're reading this after today.

My other video today is Dido - White Flag

And yesterday Gospel Medley

and Diane Sawyer interviewing Whitney, Bobby and their kid. Which is old news really as it came out in 2002...

***

Blog of the day

South American Journey: http://elisega.blogspot.com

Text is in Spanish but the Amazonian tribespeople photos are intriguing...

Laundretta Chaos II

CHAOS IN MY HOUSE. Not only is the front door smashed in yet again (Laundretta got locked out drunk), but for the past couple of days she has been staggering up and down the hallways at night in the dark (a little like a drunken human prostitute minotaur) wailing and hollering and yelling accusations at her boyf, Matran.

It all came to a head yesterday when she smashed the back stairs window with a sink plunger... leaving the kind of plunger-shaped hole that you couldn't do if you tried a million times...

Yes chaos rules again.

Evilstein went slightly mad about that and Mat and L's television being left outside their room for two months and claimed we all have to clear up because the council are coming round today. Frankly I don't believe that but hid my robbies and made everything look a bit smart.

I actually went out and purchased some memoirs to use as an inspirational template for mine... and reading through came to the unsurprising conclusion that yes I will have to novelize the entire thing. Ukk.

This means telling your life story as if it was a novel ie with dialogue and descriptions laid out in the traditional format... which is kind of hard to do when it's your own truth... and such dialogue, though it pulls in the focus crystal sharp and close... is inherently untruthful because as we all know it is NOT the exact dialogue from the time.... ho-hum. But you gotta live to convention. Otherwise you end up in prison.

I'm going to mess about on the internet and then will have another go at memoiring later on tonight so wish me luck again... I shall aim to complete two whole pages today! Woo!

***

I think I picked out two TOP tunes today!
1. Sinitta - Cross My Broken Heart... you poor Americans on the far side of the pond... you don't know what you're missing not having charts full of Europop... (And Sinitta IS American by the way!!)

2. Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood. I've no idea whatsoever WHAT Clint Eastwood has to do with this song. But that's the title. Hmmmmmmm......

And my 2 other vids:

3. Paris Hilton and Madonna munching sandwiches in the park...

4. Britney Bitch Revisited...***

Blog recommendation of the day:

The Captain's Blog. From HMS Somerset Royal Navy warship. Or frigate. Or whatever they call it. But it's a big grey metallic ship full of weapons. Designed for going out in times of conflict and kicking "arse"...
(http://www.hms-somerset-co.blogspot.com)

Why Can't I Write As Quick As Spherical Runs?

THIS IS GONNA BE A very short post as I've not much to tell.
My roborovskis are in hamster heaven after I discovered a stash of kitchen-roll and toilet tubes in a back bin yesterday. They now have tunnels galore to ping along...

Also I am beginning to theorize that "Baby" Itchy might not actually be a Baby at all, as he/she shows no sign whatsoever of growing... but might rather be a dwarf dwarf hamster... he/she is very tiny - small enough to fit inside a hen's egg shell...

Well there's no specific news of them really. Except yesterday I accidentally dropped a chicken bone on their heads. Wow! The palaver as they all scuttled and hid. For all of five seconds. Only to emerge in exact unison from three separate places... poking pink noses up in the air as if to say "What was THAT?!?"

Memoirs: I have been slogging away every day. (Slogging might not actually be the right word. "Trying" is perhaps better.) I've put pen to paper at least on a daily basis... and yet have yet to complete even four pages (as printed)! I don't know WHY it should seem so incredibly hard. But hard it seems....

Right I better had go and sort various "things" out....

***

TUNE OF THE DAY
(Something very different. I lifted this from Calista's blog...)
Dino Merlin i Zeljko Joksimovic - Supermen

Bumblebee hammies ill Mother Hubbard landlord bang-bang Whitney rage...

ON MONDAY... for Sunday night...


SORRY I was so tired last night I fell asleep on the floor with my my robbies next to me in their fishtank. According to the books, small rodents of the hamsters, mice ilk cannot see by red fireglow bulbs so that's what I installed in my bedside light... When that light is on they feel safe enough to come out and PING for England...

And I had all sorts of strange hamster dreams... one dream or fantasty involved my robos being fitted with mini rabbit-style harnesses replete with remote-controlled bumblebee wings... and me with the controller having my furry baby gremlins bzzzzzzz all over the place in 3D...


Not much else to tell since yesterday except I came by Mother Hubbs' place this morning only to see her lying in bed with 20 years put on her... severe diarrhoea and vomiting... it's been everywhere of late. I've had it twice. I'm OK now though I had to avoid eating any big meals for quite sometime. Must be some virus/germs/"bug" going around...

I bought her oral rehydration salts - only flavour available was yukky blackcurrant (how much more nauseating can you GET?!?) but she said that was fine and she felt better "what are friends for?"

But her eejut landlord was banging away in the floorboardless next room. NOT very helpful for the sick.

Well that's what I've been doing. How about you?

Music of the day is:

BRITNEY SPEARS' FAMOUS VMA "CATASTROPHE" (I must say I've seen far worse...)
And WHITNEY'S FURIOUS "you cheated on me, boy" XYLOPHONIC "IT'S NOT RIGHT"

Cats Drinking Butterwheel Whitney Stop

I WENT BLOGHOPPING EARLIER... through so many cats blogs you wouldn't believe that number of cybermews exist even..!

Anyway...

I HAVE BEEN DRINKING TOO MUCH. I know I have. Every day I drink drink drink (usually I only buy one can at a time so imagine how tired the local shop gets of my face)... It's only when I come to empty the bin that I realize just how many of these empty half litre cans have piled up over maybe three days... enough to fill the entire bin up (along with newspapers etc. I've given up recycling I used to do it SO conscienciously yet I noticed people were just chucking the entire recycle box INTO the giant wheely-bins ... #1: WHY? What harm are my newspapers doing them.... Without being "racist" that attitude IS typical of all the foreign landlord types I've had over the years. They're the type of people who would pour mercury into a river if it saved them $50 safe disposal fee. I think that attitude stinks but as I say I've just given up on trying to save paper for now also I don't tend to tidy up until things near crisis-point and so sorting the trash is just an unwanted obstacle to getting "clean" (so to speak).

Hey does no-one like Whitney? I used to LOATHE the woman's music when it first came out in the 80s. Especially the fact that... weren't her first TWO albums both called "Whitney Houston" - what genuis came up with that idea? Makes it near-impossible to put one on order. Duh. Anyway as I said earlier I found her remixes they are pretty good and the stuff she put out AFTER the Greatest Love/I Will Always Love You phase is GOOD.

My hamsters did get very excited by the buttery wheel... one big reason being they took to EATING the butter haha! Yesterday I saw two of them drinking the water at the same time they looked so funny like baby cows drinking mothers milk... or something...

Hang on what was I actually going to SAY? Well that has gone to the four winds... Better go and do something more "constructive" with my posh gel ink carbon black pens collection. (You want to see the state of the notebook it's literally falling apart at the seams (thanks to my repeated cyder-spills) ... looks more like a 12th century parish register that's been buried since 1777... Oh well beggars can't be chosers maybe one day a university will want to put it in a controlled atmosphere under dim lights so phd students can read the original MS to the top-selling memoirs of all time (won't be my MS then; hahar!!)

Swines Sleeping Peacefully

IT'S A HOT AFTERNOON. Isn't this what they call (post-Partition) a Pakistani summer? I don't remember Septembers ever being this sultry when I was at school! The wasps are buzzing everywhere round melted ice-syruppy bins, sunshine's all a-sparkle from every wingmirror of every car and every fake diamond earring of every fake resident of this area.

Inside the house it is cooler. My furry pet swines are sleeping peacefully. They got really excited last night when I put butter on their wheel (because it was squeaking). Now it spins faster than ever before. During her lifetime it wouldn't surprise me if Spherical actually ran far enough on that wheel to roll it all the way from London in person (and with a little floaty help from the cross-Channel ferries) and all the way back to Mongolia from whence she originated.

The dealer kept me waiting for so long that I took to marking up my legs for helpful-looking vein remnants. Then he did show and with different gear that I was suspicious of because it looks to me like a dark powder mixed with a light one. Anyway I took it and got the hit in my arm for the first time in ... I cannot remember. Woo; it was just like the olden days!

The charity shop has some funky-soulful choices in second hand music these days. My latest find was Whitney Houston remixes. They're quite good. Far far FAR better than anything by Mariah Carey, who of course likes us to think she is the best best best. How many Mariah Carey tunes can you actually remember? Take that figure as X and that's X more than I do!

These two tunes of the day are from the POST I Will Always Love You Whitney, when she got all back to basics or whatever you call it. Actually, I call it better.

1. It's Not Right But It's OK (watch the video; how ANGRILY she acts the words!)
2. My Love is Your Love

oh and I never posted this one up here but if you want a dreadful hardhouse remix of It's Not Right - click here!!

Too Much Sleep

I DRANK TOO MUCH EARLIER and have spent hours sleeping it off. Duh! The deadly drink. When it's not one thing it's another.

I was ranting earlier about the "horrors" of penning memoirs because basically I felt utterly lost with a notebook containing about five pages thick with crossing-outs, bubbles, loops, arrows. It looks like the blueprint for the metro system of a Tokyo-sized city.

Really I shouldn't complain. I know one day all will just "click" and smooth running shall take the place of all this trudge trudge trudge through honey.

Right I had better go. Do have a nice weekend everyone!

Gleds

***

Have a go on this.

http://play.blogger.com

You get to see just-uploaded photos to blogs round the world. You can track those blogs down and leave messages. (You know what I'm like talking to strangers, never heeded my Mum's advice NOW look at me...)

Anyway give it a click it's fun.

Oh and this is a great travel blog:


http://libby2007.blogspot.com

Autobiographical Challenge

YESTERDAY I WENT OUT AND BOUGHT three new black pens for my memoir-scribbling. When I wrote that novel I mentioned - it was only about 200 pages (or would be if printed in volume form - ie about 80,000 words) and yet I used something like twenty Mitsubishi rollerballs just to write the first draft. In other words I spent £40 (EIGHTY DOLLARS U.S.) just in INK!!

I don't know what took me so long to get round to buying proper pens. I had been trying to write the thing out in free ones meant for betting slips. Even though I purloined five or ten at a time, these can only write out one page tops... so they're useless for writing a book unless you were absolutely desperate!

Someone left me a comment saying words to the effect of "if you're going to write a book, start with decent paper. I love lovely paper." I get your point: only I'd already invested in an A4 bound notebook. Bound is essential for me. Means NO sheet of manuscript can ever go missing! Many years ago when I was in the midnight blues of depression I insisted on writing anything "creative" in permanent certified lightfast/waterfast carbon ink on 100% acid free cartridge paper... so determined was I to leave the most permanent mark on the world that I possibly could. Now, though I still like the permanent black ink (waterfast is essential to me as I drink so much!) I just use any old paper. I'm writing for ME not the museums and it frightens me even the remote thought that I could ever become famous and my every shopping list/etc preserved. To me this is intellectual parasitism. My old university was full of it. In fact that's what lecturers/professors/whatever they call themselves of anything connected with languages and literature tend to be... they are basically "novelists manque" who, because they cannot or will not create their own works, obsess instead on every obscurest aspect of the life and works of novelists long dead. I found this faintly sickening.

I don't know why but I've found this memoir-writing so painfully slow! I use the word "memoirs" advisedly because this is NOT an autobiography. It IS just a memoir of how I became a drug addict. I've read a couple of other drugs memoirs but no-one has explained even to my satisfaction what it is that can draw an otherwise intelligent and promising young person into the grip of drug addiction. I believe this is a question the general public WANT answering and I believe I can answer it for them. At least I can explain how it happened to me.

And I don't really need to fear anyone else coming up with the same book faster - because junkies, so I've found, are famously bad at explaining their thoughts, feelings, conditions of life even to people in the same boat as them, let alone to the "straight" majority.

I remember asking around "what is rehab like". The answers I got were SO EXTREMELY unhelpful.

Instead of saying: A rehab is usually a large detached house with seven or eight bedrooms. Male accommodation is in a separate house usually from female or at least confined to separate floors. You spend about three weeks detoxing. They achieve this by daily reducing a dose of methadone for about ten days though there are detoxification programs that can take you off higher doeses over a month or so.

After three weeks the rehab proper begins. This is a bit like being at school with a timetable. The "subjects" have names like "life story", "consequences" ....

And blah blah blah.

I thought you were thrown into a hospital-like enclosure and forced to sweat it out cold turkey! Nobody gave me even the faintest picture of what, for example, a day at rehab was like. Junkies are useless at storytelling. They're only good at LYING.

Well I'd better go, stop babbling and write a bit more. It's difficult because I don't know what to include. Streamlining one's own life from a wealth of memories (and blurs where memories used to be (in my case!!)) is not easy. Not at ALL easy.

I'm trying to tell my early childhood but only as it relates to setting me up to take drugs later. Really I wish I had a publisher/editor/etc but there's no point indulging in such excuses not to get to work. I just have GOT to get this finished by Christmas otherwise it's slishy throat for me!!

Inertia! I feel as inert as an inertia reel seatbelt.... right I'm off!

***

Did no-one like my Mika vid yesterday? I thought it was rather funky. Or did it get lost under so much of Somewhere!?!

Here's today's:~
Mika: Grace Kelly
Dawn Penn: You Don't Love Me (No No NO!!) This was covered by a singer called Rhianna. Who I've heard of, but she's not really known this side of the "Pond"...
Mika: Relax Take it Easy

I USED TO HAVE A FRIEND CALLED CHARLOTTE who was a real woman (far as I know or else she just bought tampons for show) and wore bright red hotpants nearly all the time. Filling out a graduate job application which required one to specify:

Sex: male, female or "other"

she appeared tipsy and cackling her head off the following evening, telling us all she had ticked the "other" box! (Good on her. Serves them right for putting it there!)

Strangely, however, she was never called in for interview...

Now I'm having my doubts about poor Baby Itchy. After more hapless rambling atop a CD case (Sarah Vaughan sqeaked so shrilly on opening that Itchy went into a kind of fight-flight-playdead shock and appeared utterly paralysed for a minute before making a jump for freedom on the carpet.)

Well I am now totally confused, I don't know about Itchy. Whether it is a he/she only time and babies will tell I'm afraid ... very confusing indeed....

OH WHAT A DRAB LIFE IT IS BEING A CAT!

There's an incredibly bushy tabby on the next road from me. Who not only rather unhelpfully (for their owners) sits on the front step telling burglars of the world "my house is empty!" (aparently where I live has the highest break-in rate for miles around... we've only got "done" once though my room was such a pigsty at the time I wouldn't know wether anyone had rifled it. I certainly had nothing worth nicking and so nothing went...)

Anyway this poor cat sits there all day long waiting forlornly for its owners to return. And if it thinks you may be someone who will come out with a saucer of milk, or if you smell of rodents (not that I do, ahem) it pirouettes round miaowing. And I started miaowing back and we took up a duet and several black girls with fancy nails looked at me as if I was a lunatic...

I WAS SWEATING SO SEVERELY THIS AFTERNOON I was more than damp... practically soggy from head to foot. I felt like a human amphibian. Took off clothes. Entire body was running like a melting glacier. Took some heroin. That stopped it. I don't know why, but opiate withdrawal causes sweating but also taking methadone makes it happen too. This is frightfully inconvenient as Ruth would believe I talk. (She was most shocked to discover I have actually 50% Worzel Gummidge turnip blood! Said she still believes to this day that I hail from an ancient aristocratic lineage. But my housemaster at Eaton told me never to admit this to any common people as they would come and break my windows. And our ancestral home has a lot of windows!

I WANTED to buy an icecream from this cybercaff but was too shy. You know when you gaze into the freezer. And when you're as fussy as me. And they have just plain flavour Cornettos and something else you don't want and no tropical fruit flavour Soleros... I've never been the type to compromise out of the politeness of being stared at in a capitalist "buy my wares or stop examining them!" fashion. I don't know why I'm telling you this.... aoh! Except I had a real scandalous experience with the local halal frankfurters. Those labelled "beef" varied so much in actual beef content... some being as low as 9% of that meat and mostly chicken. (One variety were 25% beef, 25% chicken (but labelled "beef"... what the rest of the bulk constituted I shudder to imagine. Probably dead farm animal's eyelashes and toenails picked out of the plughole after they swoosh down the corpses... Well that's what "mechanically reconstituted" meat's supposed to be made of... Ukk!

Eventually I found some 79% beef, the rest soya protein. I know frankfurters are traditionally pork but it says in the Bible you should not eat pork. And pigs are disgusting. When I was in India they had a thing called the "pig toilet"... and these pigs ate my amoebic diarrhoea. (I'm tempted to exaggerage and say they also licked you clean because Indians don't use toilet paper but you had to use a carefully aimed jug of water to perform that function.) Well whatever, nothing is going to have me eating a dead whiskery, grunting swine. Ugh!

Can I ask you a question because there are never cooking instructions on these things. Do you need to cook frankfurters? Or are they "ready to eat hot or cold" type of things? I honestly have no idea I've just been boiling them up as much as I can then dropping into baked beans and hoping for the best...

Well I've totally lost my thread so I'd better go. Got to get back: I'm spring cleaning. I mean Autumn cleaning.

The abscess is going down btw... I'd had it for days and days when I finally realized what it was (I mean, I noticed it hurt but thought it was just a "lump" (that happened to be bright red. Yes I know I can be quite thick. No wonder I have been feeling ill and sleeping over 12 hours a day!

Right better go!!

***

Today's Songs:

Mika: Relax, Take it Easy

Then 4 versions of "Somewhere"!
1. Il Divo ft Leona for Simon Cowell's "This is Your Life" episode.
2. Pet Shop Boys
3. Barbra Streisand
4. original clip from movie: West Side Story

Itchy Blood Leg Pouring

A GYNORMOUS BABY ITCHY came trotting past in the street earlier. He was so furry and sweet I wanted to pick him up and squeeze him... no! I just remembered "he" is a "she". Yes! Baby Itchy is an all-scrabbling pink petalled-eared Big Baby GIRL! She will never father baby robbies for me. Whatever "bits" I presumed to have seen previously can only have been leftover umbilical cord.. or visions of my mind's own invention (what's new?). Itchy looks just like a sand-coloured pompom from a wooly hat crossed with a furry baby gremlin with miniaturized pink rose petals as ears. You can see the light through them. They are awfully cute.

Seeing as people said they DON'T mind my lurid drug tales, let me tell you about my lumpy blotch-ridden legs. I've an abscess on the left hand side. When the pus-bag's filled up the whole gruesome apparition's relatively numb. It even goes slightly itchy, probably from dead skin, rubbing against dead pus. I can push the pus from side to side like leg egg yolk. And I've resisted all temptations to slice open and squeeeeze as I don't want the staph (or whatever it's called) grossing all over the place.

And these veins that are going down so badly I'm reduced to pushing half of 1ml insulin syringes into these remaining broken threads and hoping that they'll bare up to the onslaught. The blood in the legs is famously slow. For example, standing still for long periods results in a pooling of blood in the lower legs. That's why the statuesque bearskinned soldier e.g. at Windsor Castle is apt to faint if he doesn't flex his toes frequently enough on guard duty. That's why when the WWII PoWs in the Burmese jungle got tropical ulcers they afflicted more often than not the legs. The blood simply does not flow quickly enough to rid them of all toxins. That's why the drug service advise against IV injecting in the legs, labelling it a "high risk" occupation. Of course, I'd already made a frequent habit of this activity by the time I received this advice. And I had precious few alternative "sites" to prong with my trusty needles by then anyhow...

One dusty morning as I woke up in the squat I used to reside in thankfully alone (what a luxury to be away from all other druggies!) and being as my arms, after years of hammering, appeared not to be playing ball that morning, I found a welcoming raised vein in my foot. So literally a minute after waking and without so much as stretching my legs I pushed the entire acidified brown "hit" into it and thought no better of it until a couple of minutes later rather than experiencing a pleasant dizzying sensation a nasty burning pain took to stabbing me in the ankle which on inspection had gone bright red with a gross archepelago of raised white bumps emanating all around. i tried running about to get things moving but it was too late. The entire hit had burned its way into the tissues of my ankle, effectively turning an IV "hit" into a "skin pop".

I nowadays have learnt to point my feet at the ceiling after such procedures, thereby "pouring" the drugs quite literally down my legs and closer to my heart. Once they do reach there, they are pumped quite vigorously to the brain through the far more effective arterial system. (Arteries have a pulse (and should never be injected into for they take blood away from the heart to the body's extremities) veins have no pulse and their blood is darker, deoxygenated.)

And there goes the anatomy lecture of the day. What relevance that really has to anything or anyone I've no idea but there you go.

I found a Sarah Vaughan CD in the Post Office bargain rack this afternoon and hence her two starring videos:
#2 Send in the Clowns
#3 Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Plus #1 by Amy Winehouse, who's always credited Sarah Vaughan a major influence on her vocal style.
#1 Love is a Losing Game (Mercury Awards 2007 live performance).

TV Licensing are after us as per usual. More of their presumptuously threatening epistles come pouring daily through our front door:

"Extra Enforcement Visits are underway... shceduled to... your address... any day now... you can still cancel your visit," - woo! - and, "if you do not need a TV Licence, please call blah;... a TV Licence currently costs £135.50 for colour and £45.50 for black and white.

Even if I do write and tell them (truthfully) that I don't need a Licence they STILL insist on visiting - so what's the point in writing?

Itchy Meets Yangyang!

BIG DADA YANGYANG cricetulus griseus Chinese hamster (click to see a picture of Yangyang's balls) and Baby Itchy phodopus roborovskii roborovski hamster finally had their formal introduction today. From separate hands. Except Baby Itchy kept leaning over to "kiss" Yangyang and eventually ended up clambering over, crawling right over Yangyang's face and poppy eyes and his back as he pulled a patient expression "Oh! The indignities of being a domesticated pet!" as Itchy took to openly sniffing his private parts... poor thing.

I was a bit reserved in my enthusiasm for all this as Yangyang is the same size and weight in proportion to Itchy as petrol tanker to human being. If he did turn to attack and Itchy didn't get away fast enough, Itchy wouldn't stand a chance. Thankfully, Yangyang is the most laid-back (for that, read: inactive) pet rodent I've ever owned though!

Oh and I am somewhat dissapointed to have to declare I shall never have hamster babies in this house. Not at the rate things are currently going. Because now Itchy's tame enough actually to stand still on an empty CD case I can depressingly confirm that SHE is a GIRL. The two "vents" as one book euphamistically put it are FAR too close together for her to be anything other than a GIRL. So she can't have been "mating" when she tried to get on Spherical's back all those times. It must just be one of those tunnel-dwelling animals' rites of introduction or passage. Or something like that ...

***

Here, by the way are my videos of the day...
Was no-one particularly impressed by Leona Lewis? I thought she was rather excellent, considering she was performing as a complete amateur in the first two of yesterday's clips and as fresh competition-winner in the third... Come on! Certainly she is a superior British version of Mariah Carey if nothing else!

- Luciano Pavarotti - Una furtiva lagrima
- Leona Lewis - Summertime
- Paul Potts - Nessun dorma

Do you think Paul Potts's version of the aria is in the same league as Pavarotti's? (I don't!)

***

Would you like to peruse a Wonderblog, full of magick of the morning dew?
Come to http://talesofinglewood.blogspot.com
It's a little like my friend Mousie's blog http://plumpiemousie.blogspot.com

Also, if you want to read Madeleine McCann's Dad's blog, click on http://www.findmadeleine.com

Childhood Blizzard Persistence; Boil int Bag Fish

PEN HAS BEEN PUT TO PAPER! I HAVE PENNED ANOTHER 12 PARAGRAPHS of my book! Which is really something as all those other times I said "right I'm off to do my memoirs wish me luck" (because I certainly needed it) I did not write a single word, rather fell asleep into the dead of night and woke up usually with Sly and the Family Stone or Barbra Streisand warbling away in the roborovski-active redlit gloom. (Red lights equal darkness to small rodents so you can see them pinging about at optimum force if you install fireglow lighting by their enclosure.)

All I seem to have put to paper so far involves anecdotes about getting stuck in blizzards on the Brecon Beacons/North York Moors... on the second occasion (which actually happened first) my brother and I came down with scarlet fever. I fell asleep in a snowdrift. I vaguely remember being carried back to the van through horizontal snowfall. I spent the journey back delirious and being sick.

When we got a little better we took out metallic poster paints and midnight blue sugar paper and painted rather wonderful pictures of the November 5th (Guy Fawkes Night (do they celebrate this in Australia/New Zealand btw?) fireworks). These we popped in the post to Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace... forgot all about it only to be astonished a couple of weeks later to receive a very grand embossed envelope in the post containing the poshest typewritten letter I have ever seen (it was typed in a Times-like font, which was unknown at the time)... from Her Majesty's Lady in Waiting Lady Lavinia Whassername or whatever reading "I am commanded by the Queen to thank you ..." haha!

Oh. And here the story endeth so far...

When I was little my parents' main hobby (I mean, who actually has the requisite paragraph full of hobbies we're all meant to list in our employment resumes and CVs?) was hillwalking and hiking... on a couple of occasions I got stuck in the most severely inclement weather you get in this country... which pretty much adds up to horzontal snow flying in the face at 50 miles per hour which is not very pleasant aged 5, 6, 7... my point being I did not ever think of giving up in such a situation. Or crying. Or even complaining. All I ever did was march on. After one such occasion my Dad seemed really impressed (though I think this was through rain not snow as I vaguely recall being utterly sodden through). ... All of which resulted in an adult persistence, I suppose. Which persistence has been partially destroyed by this addiction of mine... partially has actually gone against me because (as I know I've said before) Willpower is the Power of Will. And if your Will is to Use. You will go on Using. And that is what I've done.

I feel this addiction of mine has turned on their head all my former strengths and driven them against me... Now I only want to harness them back and recapture their old power!

Right I gotta go I got boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce hubberbubbling violently on the stove and I gotta get back before the bags melt into the bottom of the pan!

Diarrhoeary Moments Monday

WHAT AN INCONVENIENT TIME! I'VE HAD DIARRHOEA splurging into the lavvy like chocolate flavoured porridge (not the same smell though (oddly)). And the grips half the time. And the inconvenience, as I said. I missed Sunday lunch yesterday, not because I couldn't make it but because I couldn't face the thought of a piled up plate of steaming roast chicken, gravy, Porkshire pudding (baby Itchy style) and garden veggies (esp lovely stringbeans)... all I could see was myself swushing out a diarrhoea Everest next morning if not sooner. I know it has been dreadfully inconvenient all the way and Mother Hubbard said she got it plus someone else we know called Porker Mc Podger plus other people. It is going round like a dose of the clap or whatever the expression's s'posed to be...


WELL MY ROBBIES now have landscaped grounds through which to scurry... an 18in long L-shaped tubular bedroom that breaks in half for them to do weeweeze on the woodchips and banks of graceful Capability Brown-style rolling hills carefully sculpted into their aquarium so they emerge, like Stig of the Dump, from the troll-like depths of the underground... Wooooowh!

And when I break open their bedroom in the daytime and lean over cooing three pink noses appear... Bashful and Itchy always as a two-storey hamster with Itchy as the ground floor... and Spherical is first to panic and go bolting into the blue yonder (well red actually because it's Red Label) of the tea house...

IVY REPREHENDED ME yesterday for jumping from one topic to the next like a stuck Chinese hamster chocolate sauce better than Whitney Houston. What?

Well you get the point there. Do yous all agree? That I hopscotch so rapidly between topics (albeit in discreet paragraphs) that my chains of thought become as disjointed as Ratner's 9ct belchers? Please add a comment to the great debate.

My memoirs have made a false start in their composition... People keep saying my writing's OK and (especially when it's quoted back to me) selected bits seem fine... it would be rather pretentious to say I NEVER read any of my blog posts back because of course I look everything over rather briefly and some bits I spend some time on... generally speaking though, I do just tend to tap out and press return and hope for the best! My argument to self about this is that while blogging's democratic (in fact most readers of blogs are also bloggers... and the general standard of writing, photography and overall graphix and design I would say is surprisingly high across the popular blogosphere... Readers of a book are not generally book-writers, however. And a consistently high standard of prose is expected ... surely? Or should I just knock 'em out like they're for my blog and hope for the best? (Or to put it another way: see how the results turn out and take it from there~??)

Hey I've a musical treat for you in today's vids: if you don't already know it, please be informed. Leona Lewis is the Next Big Thing. Voice of a generation. She's launching in America in the very near future...

Winner of 2006's X-factor (ie British "American Idol") she has a voice that in my view appears only once in a generation. She's up there with Whitney Houston. And far better than Mariah Carey.

Here are the songs:
Leona Lewis:
I Will Always Love You (watch this right through to when she starts belting it out. The crowd go bananas)
All By Myself (best version I've heard. Compare to Celine Dion's version)
A Moment Like This (first British single)

News on Sunday

I WAS GOING to do a big review of the papers but frankly there's so little news except for the Portuguese keystone cops having bungled the investigation over missing (now presumed dead) British 4-year old Madeleine McCann so totally they've taken the line of last resistance and actually accused the parents of allegedly having drugged the kid with sedatives (because the child had troubles sleeping) and somehow accidentally overdosed her. (How very implausible: who gives a 4 year old sleeping pills?) And somehow this drug overdose left blood specks in the McCanns' hire car 25 days later....

In other words they hid the body, alerted the world's media, returned to Portugual over three weeks later in the full glare of all this to collect the child's body from whatever hiding place and transfer it somewhere else... I mean what planet are these guys living on?

The second story, from the News of the World is so misogynistic I honestly couldn't believe I was reading it in 2007. Click here for a gander.

Thirdly - wasp flavoured crisps are a big hit in Japan these days. Each packet contains a guaranteed minimum of four of the fried insects. Yum-yum.

And how was YOUR day??

***

Videos:
Mika: You are Beautiful
Nick Cave/Kylie: Where the Wild Roses Grow

***

As you may have noticed my poll has been updated... if you voted before, please vote again. There are now four questions covering each conceivable eventuality... Many thanks...

***

Ivy asked me about the top news story: the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

Here is my answer:

you mean the little kid? her family were on holiday in portugual, they had 3 children, madeleine age 4 and twins aged 2. they went out to a tapas bar about 8.30 one night, this was 75 YARDS from their apartment... left the children sleeping... when they returned the twins were sleeping sound but Madeleine WAS NOT THERE... massive international publicity, even the Pope got involved... you may have seen little posters or pictures on people's blogs about it... her photo is everywhere... also she has a distinctive eye, one of the pupils appears to be teardrop shaped... anyway the portuguese police were crap and gave whoever DID do it DAYS to get away before the investigation kicked in... that part of portugual is really near the spanish border and it would have been dead easy to take the little girl from their either to Morocco by ferry (from Algeceiras) or to drive up into france and to who knows where... the evidence against the parents is basically NONEXISTENT but the police are embarrassed at being held up to the standards of the civilized world and they can't take the pressure. that's how I see it anyhow....

You can read today's News of the World on Madeleine by clicking here

Please Don't Hate Me

IS EVERYONE GOING TO HATE ME NOW BECAUSE I KICKED OFF MY LAST POST WITH TALK ABOUT DRUGS? I went bloghopping earlier and found myself at some pretty good sites by people with names like Teacher Bee and her friends... Now I bet they will hate me. Remember that guy called Path whose blog I enthusiastically commented on bc it was brimming with funky snapshots of Berlin? And who came by here leaving a snidey comment about my "boring dope stories" ... well I am an addict. And I have consciously cut down the drugtalk in recent weeks in preparation for my eventual leaving of all that nasty scene behind. But I gotta mention them sometime; specially times like today when I find them lying free on the pavement!

When I saw that psychiatrist last time I said to him I was thinking of nominating a day and just stopping from there (I do have methadone already, remember. I'm just useless at sticking it just that. Methadone should not leave you feeling at all sick. You should feel perfectly straightened out and normal on it. If you are sweating conkers or shivering or having constant hot flushes on methadone days then the dose is not high enough. This is borderline the case with me; but I don't want them upping it evermore. I'll end up drinking a fishtank full every day... Anyway this psychiatrist said quitting on a nominated day and just stopping forever from that date was a bad idea as you've been taking this stuff practically daily for donkeys' years on end... and also that is putting too much pressure on yourself over one single day. Select many single days and just do not use on all of them... That was his philosophy. He seemed to believe NA put undue pressure on addicts over the fact that using alcohol or any drug at all is considered "using" by that fellowship... I do get his point. I've known one person in particular who "relapsed" by taking sleeping pills... believed all the good work he'd put in over the predeeding two years to have been scrapped and was back on heroin and crack within a week... THAT is what I consider a dangerous state of mine. Addiction is a single condition and you're an addict no matter what drugs you take. That does NOT make all drugs the same! One thing I noticed in NA: a lot of people in there seemed to have lost sight of that particular fact. Having said that, NA is a brilliant place that does work for those who "keep coming back and work it". I've seen THAT fact with my own eyes. So don't think I'm doing them down because I'm not.

Tonight's the night I go back to my memoirs... I have a LOT more of this chapter one or two (depending whether I break the story up there)... the entire history of my childhood. All I've said so far is that basically I was born into a different age! With 3 channels on black and white television, no video recorders, no freezers in our house, no microwaves and that when I was very little I went hiking with my parents through a disused railway tunnel and saw for myself the meaning of "light at the end of the tunnel"... an experience that would come back to me with greater meaning in the light (or dark) of my subsequent addiction to this heroin ...

... And I'll tell you something else: I think I just told you in a paragraph a message that took eight hundred words and several hours of scribbling to word not as well! Maybe I'll scrap it all and just quote the above.

Maybe.

When I have something even half finished by way of introductory chapter(s) as I said, I shall post it here for yous. Only thing is I won't be able to post the entire book because, legally speaking, that would mean I had already self-published and might compromise the situation re agents/publishers. The fact that only about 60 people a day visit here would be neither here nor there if they decided I'd somehow "breached" my own copyright. You know what lawyers are like.

Before I go I will mention that - wow! - I actually saw Yangyang the Chinese hamster venturing out of his nest today. Now that is a turnup for the proverbial "books" ... He is the shyest, most retiring hamster I have ever come across. I think he has hamster depression, though I'm not sure why. His millet spray was barely touched though the Robos have demolished both of theirs... If I were American I'd take him to the vet's to get hammy-sized Prozac...

Must go and get scribbling. Wish me luck!

Free Drugs Day

WALKING DOWN THE STREET I SPOTTED A BLUE TWIST OF CARRIER BAG POLYTHENE (why is it always blue? Dunno; but it is.) At first it seemed to have white lumps in it (crack - wahey!) On closer inspection it contained three very tightly single-wrapped piggles of brown powder. I could tell by first glance that it was almost certainly genuine (because fake drugs would be far more heavily wrapped - gives the dealer escape time.) Also the deals weren't that big. So that made a start to the day ...

I haven't done any memoir-writing as I make Saturday my day off.

Pet gremlin news: Bashful will actually let me put a finger right down next to her... then she makes an attempt at nibbling it... Yeah, thanks a lot! When I come along and lean over cooing at them three pink noses appear in the gap between tubes... they are so frustrating as they're so round and furry you just want to pick them up and sqeeze them - but they hate that. Even Itchy doesn't like it. By the way I found out he is definitely not itchy in the literal sense. He gets washed all the time because he is youngest of the bunch. Bashful is older and Spherical at least a generation older... ooer the most amazing herbal ciggie smell has just drifted past... ghostly tendrils of canabinol fumes... mmm. I love the smell. Just hate to smoke it. Ukky stuff.

Come on people VOTE or the videos disappear to the sidebar.

Today's fabulous selection is:
REM - Everybody Hurts (I think this is their best tune. The video is based on a true story where the "inhabitants" of a traffic jam outside Los Angeles gave up and just got out of their cars and walked ...
Lily Allen - Alfie (not based on the shrill 60s Cilla Black version where she sounds like she's being poked with the sharp end of a feather in the privates)
Barbra Streisand - Hideaway (this tune was written for her by Barry Gibb or whatever his name is you know the BeeGee plus to other Gibbs I think they are his sons or grandsons... great songwriters. If you've ever heard Guilty I and been sick I can assure you Guilty II is better. Seriously. And Barbra Streisand (it turns out - remember my Celine Dion disaster?) is the only "adult contemporary" music I can tolerate ....

Great Video Debate, Baby Itchy's Long Bedroom, Laundretta Crack Binge, Memoirs Begun etc

THE GREAT VIDEO DEBATE: before I proceed any further let me ask you to answer the following query: should I continue posting videos up top in giant format as they have been? Or should they go in miniature on my sidebar? Or should I give up posting such timewasting trash?? You decide!!

O man what was I going to post today...?

O yeah! I finally started my funky memoirs... a full 800 words (2 pages. big deal) but I wrote it out... now I just gotta complete an entire first chapter. Perhaps Sly and the Family Stone helped me out with trumpeteer Cynthia Robertson's jazzery toodle-doo-ing. Or something.

I had the most horrible protracted drawn out nasty nightmare last night... the type of dream that once you wake up from you cannot explain what the problem was.. except I was being chased by accusers... and as usual had done nothing wrong... and seemed to spend vast amounts of time on rooves and guttering and flying between different building-tops... (as you do...)

My miniature Porkshire Terriers now live in a giant 18 in long bedroom... the original Xmas Maltesers tube is now extended with 2 slotted-in toilet rolls and a third sticking out at an L-shaped angle... They hide in this all day like baby gremlins. And sniff my fingers suspiciously if I dare to venture them in. And run away if I dare touch, poke, attempt to pick up anyone except Baby Itchy. Ho-humm.

Matran and Laundretta seem to be having a giant crack binge. I know this as all sorts of "guests" have been showing up at their door (a sure sign there's drugs in the offing)...

Even though I did post up about their 8am underwear bizarreness lockout when I dealt with them and handed out endless pairs of scissors, knives, plastic travelcards to bust the lock open I never once sneered or refused to was anything less than civil... possibly for this reason they keep giving me big lumps of the stuff (well they did twice which is so unlike them)... but WHY?!?

Righto and here better endeth the present vulgarteering... I have cod in parsley sauce in my bag that is melting beside me... am I the only one sweating like a swine on conkers this afternoon? It has been ROASTING hot for the past two days...

Videos:
Kylie Minogue: Giving You Up
Lilly Allen: LDN

8am Underwear Chaos

I GOT FRANTIC KNOCKING ON MY DOOR AT 7:30 a.m. from Laundretta. Hid robos and opened up only to find her and Matran drest in nothing but underwear... I don't know what they had been doing but they had managed to get locked outside their high security room in this state (why can't my room have such a secure lock?) with seemingly no possibility of getting back in.

Having seen their near-naked bodies I have to say Laundretta is pretty stacked and I can see what her clients book her for. I will give her 8 out of 10. Matran is the same shape as a deflating hot air baloon as he took to tucking into chicken nuggets and other vulgar food when he last gave up crack. I will give him 2.5 out of 10.

Anyway I had a big bag full of clean washing but didn't want pubic lice, gonorrhoea, etc getting into it and so didn't make the offer... they didn't want me hanging outside but kept asking stupid questions like what was the time (I don't know as my mobile phone screen has gone and that was my only timepiece)... eventually Radio 4's thought for the day came on (meaning it was 10 to 8) so I told them this... then the weather, then the news... they needed to know the time so that I could go out find Evilstein and their spare key (o what a scene THAT would have made!)

Laundretta asked for something sharp/etc... I gave her my tomato knife. It was unfortunately covered in dry baked bean juice which she grimaced at as if it was crudsome diarrhoea. Then I found them a pair of scissors. This they used to chizel away the wood on the corner of their Yale-style lock.

Then more banging. Did I have a plastic card. No! I said pointedly as I never keep such valuables in here. (Glad I got that one in...) Eventually I did find an old Oyster card which is something you keep in a wallet or even a pocked and can touch through fabric onto a reader on buses or tube clappergates to get prepaid discount transport throughout London. This was luxuriously bendy and ten minutes later they got in and paid me a bit of crack for my troubles.

Technically I had given up crack but had already squared it with self that if I FOUND any (or someone gave it to me) that was different. I'm still not wasting my money on such rubbish.

Now they have both started speaking to me again. Well I suppose because they had to.

And I psychologically have promised not to laugh at what happened.

Ha-haargh!!

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ALL SAINTS VIDEOS OF THE DAY:
1. Black Coffee (their best song)
2. Pure Shores (music from The Beach)
3. Never Ever (="Amazing Grace"... but 9/10 people don't seem to realize that)

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ISN'T THE MUSIC BIZ A CRUEL MISTRESS?

Hear this from the Wikipedia's Shaznay Lewis (All Saints') article and bear in mind that with the eclipse of the Spice Girls in the late 90s they were the top-selling girlgroup (and always the coolest) of that decade...

On August 21, 2004 Shaznay married dancer Christian "Storm" Horsfall. Shaznay had her first child, a son named Tyler Xane, in February 2006.

On January 24, 2006 it was announced that All Saints have reformed with a new record contract and will release a new album, Studio 1 on November 13th 2006.[3] She performed with All Saints on live television for the first time since reforming on the UK light entertainment program, Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway on October 21st 2006. All Saints started their comeback off with a bang as their single Rock Steady went to ~3 in the UK. They quickly followed with their comeback album Studio 1 and things went downhill, the album flopped at a peak of ~40 in the UK and not charting in many other countries. Polydor then decided to take one last chance with All Saints and let them release their second single Chick Fit.The single failed to make the slightest impact not even hitting the top 200. All Saints were then dropped by record label Parlophone. The group say they will remain together and search for a new record company.

Gonna Getta Home...

MUSICAL OVERLOAD... TOO MANY TUNES... I'VE DELETED ONE ALREADY... Black Coffee (All Saints' best song) will have to wait till some future time...

AT THE DRUG CLINIC TODAY... after an hour+ wait finally I got to see my worker (YES I HAD MISSED AN APPOINTMENT YESTERDAY: how typical of me)... now we're going to weekly appointments again... We're constructing a recovery plan that involves me aquiring new socks, new towels, keeping my room like a temple. (Not an operating theatre. But a temple is cool. I might even get an incense burner...) She said my housing situation is ridiculous and I now have two people from the Drugs Agency working to get me somewhere... I might even get into some type of supported housing... I don't know if that is a nightmare or good bc I think it means you actually have a "staff member" on call or actually living there... Rather than turn away from the suggestion I'm thinking perhaps it is a good idea. I have shown myself singularly incapable of running an adult life of my own. (When I was down the depths of those pits a year or two ago I wouldn't even have been able to keep it together to score. If I hadn't been on methadone to take care of my daily drugs requirements I don't think I could have survived. Honestly. I had been a street beggar and made enough money to take a gram of heroin most days, so my life has never been "charmed"... I was living with Lona who people have also called "Nutnut"... she eroded what little self-esteem and self-reliance I had left... So when I got rehoused and hid from her I found myself wallowing in a pit that I just could not clamber out of... How can you explain why after the event? Drugs weaken you in ways you can't imagine possible... and yet leave you functioning in ways you never expected. It's a deal with the Devil and the Devil does nothing in a straightforward manner.

I had trouble sticking to the requisite three screens... Does everyone know Barker's Adagio? You might not think you do, but you do. If you know the film Platoon you definitely know it. The Cambridge Trinity Choral version is the most beautiful I've ever heard... and that Nasa-enhanced video is so amazing... I guarantee if you watch it in the right frame of mind you might get literal shivers up your back... Cut to DJ Tiesto playing same tune at an Alexandra Palace rave... Ally Pally used to be right local to me... I used to go walking on the spacious lawns outside on charming Sunday morns... wow! What a wonderful place. And what a moment they captured on camera! The crowd are going mental! The last clip is William Orbit's Ferry Corsten remix version ... which gave me amazing flashbacks to nights "on the pill"...

I returned home earlier to find a Roborovski party of my very own going on in the corner... all three gaggling in the corner, little furry gremlins kissing one another and pushing paws in each other's faces (I've no idea why they do this but it seems to be some social ritual)... I tapped my fingers on the glass assuming they would flee, they started gledebbing up to my fingers as if it was their long lost Roborovski friend...

... mad creatures. Quite seriously deranged...

I'm still at scruff notes stage to the memoirs... though I tell you who did just put an autobiography out (and this is one cracking tale if I know anything at all about the author) Clarissa Dixon Wright, the fitter one of the BBC's Two Fat Ladies TV Cooks series (butter and cream sales jumped 21% in the first week, so they claimed, when their shows were first aired!)... Born the daughter of an heiress and a man with a posh accent... privately educated... became the youngest ever barrister practising in England (barrister being an advocate ... the lawyer who represents you in murder trials etc) ... only she had a manic problem with drink... two and a half bottles of gin per day and that was on a quiet day... I've heard her interviewed before and she tells a cracking story so if you want something to peruse while you're waiting for mine to come out (it may be a bit of a weight I'm afraid) ... hers is my recommended Read of the Month!

THE VIDEOS:
~Sly and the Family Stone: Runnin' Away (starring the BBC's own Pan's People dance troupe)
~Mamas and Papas: Creeque Alley
~Choir of Trinity College Cambridge: Barber's Adagio
~DJ Tiesto Alexandra Palace rave Barber's Adagio
~William Orbit (Ferry Corsten) techno'd up Barber's Adagio

Guitar? Agony!

THIS I AM SCRAWLING ON SPACE ORIGINALLY PRESERVED FOR MEMOIRS - and man! - the other trash that's here; unposted; unscanned that has also found its way in this cheapest of bound volumes. Did you know they even produced "feint" ruled notebooks in Elizabethan times?! It does bemuse me though that WH Smiths actually charge MORE for a 200 or so utterly blank pages between marbled hard covers than for 500 horrible old ones that someone like Danielle Steel has diarrhoea'd all over! I must continually remind myself how great a loss to Literature it would be if I failed to produce this weighty tome of mine.

(I don't think Literature would actually Care, to be quite honest. I don't think Literature gives a toss about anything. Literature, having seen this world's digital tatters, lies fast asleep and is snoring obnoxiously.)

Big Momma Spherical's hiding heist in that tea-box when her most indignant a-wrigglings and a-bigglings and I've seen four of Baby Itchy's lookey-likeys on leashes or leads - yes! - little Porkshire Terriers! And he does look just the same! Due to his wet parting of fur down the middle of his back. I think that comes from being compulsorily groomed by the others...

I got my 1st ever pop CD last week! For 50p. It was Saints and Sinners by The All Saints who, as I once said on my Music blog are the only girl group I like. Their best tracks on this are Pure Shores and Black Coffee. A lot of it is produced by illiam Orbit who did Madonna's Ray of Light album. It is good.

Hey I decided to learn guitar. And I mean to pluck out tunes and play properly not just strum pathetic cords. There is a shop by me that sells 'em in all different colours for £35 brand new each. Is that a good price for an accoustic guitar? And I suppose I am gonna have to get a book to teach me how to actually do it. I shouldn't have trouble tuning the strings as I have that synthesizer and a fairly good ear. But I don't even know what the 6 strings ARE. Or is it 8? That is Spanish guitar. I want the one that sounds like a harp only warmer and pleasanter. And a gerzillion times funkier to look at! THEN I have to learn to SING and won't THAT inflict torment galore on my neighbours ... so far worse than Moonlight Sonata on glockenspiel ever could!

All of which is TOTAL DISTRACTION as I'm REALLY SUPPOSED TO BE WRITING THOSE DAMN MENOIRS OF MINE!

Sundry Musical Tuesday

LONG LONG SLEEPYTIME YESTERDAY.. what was WRONG with me I went to bed at two p.m. had to get up at 4.30, back to bed at 6pm didn't get up till PAST MIDDAY what is WRONG with me...

... surely not just a couple of drinks early yesterday morn..??

Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Going On was playing round and round and round all last night...

The story about that album is Sly Stone whiskey and cokeing (not the fizzy variety) in a Winebago mobile home that was set up as a recording studio... the musicologists will have you believe it drove through the desert in a cloud of dust, mastertapes clogged with priceless once-only jamming sessions trailing in its wake...

... the OTHER story goes that he had ONE mastertape for the entire album and rerecorded and erased so much that on CD especially you can hear the demagnetized wooliness... in fact it kind of gives some masterful quality so that the plucking of guitar strings and the sinking voices seem actually to have risen from the tape itself... you can hear this on Family Affair if you care to click. So I think the second story's true. Also bonus track 13, the single version of Runnin' Away (click to see the famously dreadful Pan's People perform in a central London shoe department) is suddenly crystal clear which implies a totally different tape from the rest of the sessions... musos don't half talk a lot of *******s.

My piano playing career is coming along in leaps and bounds. Not only have I made progress in Moonlight Sonata (glockenspiel setting: right hand only!) I even had a good stab (stab being the operative word) at Pachabel's Canon this morning in a brief waking "window" before sleep reclaimed me... Tomorrow I tackle Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Minor... sorry Major (what is the difference?). Wish me luck bc I don't even know the tune.

Do you like today's videos.
Elgar's Nimrod.
Nimrod is to me the most "English" of musical pieces. I imagine if they played that in a 2nd world war concentration camp it would have reduced grown men to tears... which just begs the question WHY did he name the piece after an ancient middle Eastern dictator - semimythical founder of Babylon - whose mother Semiramis (Sammu-Ramat), so the story goes, proclaimed herself Queen of Heaven?!? THAT's not very English IS it?

The second choice if You Had a Vineyard is from Sinead's Theology album... it took a long time to grow on me. What do you think?

Thirdly Bananarama's Venus. This was recently used on a TV ad for ladies' razors... it's also default tune, rather weirdly on my Yamaha synth... don't ask me why ask them...

Strangely as I watched the making of the video vid... a strong smell of bubblegum seemed to rise up and accost me from all around ...

Right I gotta go I might well be missing an appointment at the drugs clinic...


Byee

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Videos str84wRdly listed:
Elgar's Enigma Variations: Nimrod (Chicago Symphony Orchestra)
Sinead O'Connor: If You Had A Vineyard
Bananarama: Venus
Bananarama: Venus (Making Of)

7a.m. Booze

DRUNK AT 7AM! That was me today! A cleaning bug bit me (bedbug more like)... and I had to have alcohol to get moving... in the end it deteriorated into me plunking out random glockenspiel sounds on Yamaha synthesizer as Moonlight Sonata blared from free Mail on Sunday "Country Cottage" CD. The neighbours have spent enough time annoying me I felt it was my turn to make some noise. Strangely none of this woke up Laundretta or Matran... perhaps I was being quieter than I thought...

Later in the morning I took to feeling really quite ill. Eventually I had to return home and to bed and sleep it all off. How inconvenient.

Nobody got disturbed by my impromptu classical music concert, either.

I THOUGHT I WAS HALLUCINATING EARLIER ON WHEN I SAW BABY ITCHY RUNNING AFTER A BALL IN THE PARK! Yes! My escaped hamster had turned loose on the green I was frantic with concern... till I realized it was just some old age pensioner's Yorkshire terrier... hmmm.

AND BIG MOMMA SPHERICAL GOT STUCK trying to squeeze her fat backside out of the Tea House (a Sainsbury's Red Label 40 teabags box with "windows" cut in all sides by moi) ... she looked so indignant and I had to resist temptations to give her a poke with an old crow's feather or something that would really have got her moving. Neither was she put in a good mood by my sudden appearance, cackling at her and saying "Have you got a fat bum? You have!"

BASHFUL has done nothing of note of late except been bashful.

YANGYANG the Chinese hamster has aphagia. I once told a certain friend "aphagia" meant giving up smoking and they believed me!

Yesterday I revelaed to Ruth how I have 50% turnip blood coursing these battered veins of mine. In fact half my entire family have (or had when they were alive) Wurzel Gummidge accents.

Ruth was quite shocked and confessed she had believed me to be product of some ancient aristocratic lineage.

Not so, I'm afraid. Although I did used to speak in the same voice as Prince William when I was a student in Norfolk many moons ago... this had more to do with being surrounded by public schoolboys and Sloanes and being out of touch with the local people. Two of the people I know now claim to hail from elevated backgrounds. But most of my friends nowadays really are quite vulgar. Some even have Cockney accents.

Yeah, as I was saying to the Duke of Marlborough only the other day: I'm a real man of the people .....

And on that note I had better leave things be...

Tunes:
Sinead
Thank You For Hearing Me
Three Babies fan vid
Three Babies original vid

Baby Itchy Frantic Nonday Sunday Posting L8R...

WHAT ARE SUNDAYS FOR? Mine always seem to go past in a haze or lumpen plodding of useless disrespectability... somehow...

Baby Itchy, the Porkshire Terrier lookylikey was due to pay Mother Hubbard a visit... but he scrabbled so desperately against his carry container and ran so eagerly for the light each time I looked in on him that I eventually relented and left him at home with the other two. (If he IS a him... I'm now starting to question even THAT!)

So I went to Mother Hubbs alone. She was claiming not to have "used"... which I somehow found easy to doubt... why do people lie to me?

THERE IS A DRUGS DROUGHT ON! Heroin is scarce... but I'll tell you what's really hard to find and Mother Hubbard knows this from her grandsons and I know it from Valium Marilyn's son... that evil green herb, the Devil's own grass.. CANNABIS! Ukkie stuff - I'm glad.

Well this was just a short post to say I have actually got out of the house today... even though I did stay under covers till 3pm...

There is another post due later... so do pop back. I have scribbled it out already in my maroon booklet so it shall be here within 2 hours I promise... consciousness permitting.. no don't say that....

wahey!... ho-hum...

thanks for the bookwriting advice and comments, folks... THAT is what that other post's ABOUT...


Tunes of the Day:
~ Randy Crawford - One Day I'll Fly Away
~ Bob Marley - Sun Is Shining
~ Sinead O'Connor - Troy

Yangyang Robo Clawed Frog African

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheerio!!, till L8Rs!

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

Drugs Hell Literary Hell

I AM HAVING TROUBLES WITH THIS autobiog' of mine - my drugs hell memoirs are starting to create hell of their own.
1. I feel desperately uninspired
2. I would say "I don't know where to start" except I do. (Basically with a rewrite of my From Depressed Acorns Miserable Oak Trees Grow post.)

What I'm 3. worried about most is how to turn this tawdry story of mine into a full length book ie at least 150 pages (bare minimum) at 400 words to the page = 60,000 words... 200 pages 80,000 words would be better.

What separates writers from wannabe writers is one simple characteristic: the ability, having planned and envisioned your work actually to put it down on paper no matter what your personal feelings of the moment would rather you do. I do speak from experience. When I wrote before I forced the writing out of me... if you wait for "inspiration" to strike, chances are it'll never get done. Trust me.

Baby Itchy Roborovski seems to be proper perturbed by Satchmo's trumpeteering... he just done a massive ping off my arm and into a toilet roll tube I had thoughtfully provided (what would the domesticated hamster population of the world do without cardboard toilet tubes?? They'd be utterly confounded.)

Yeah so as I was saying about books it's all down to me which makes things doubly depressing... would you want me in charge of YOUR life??

Just as with any job you do you just gotta show up and do it however discoraged you feel. And tell yourself what a feast the book buyers of the world will be missing if this never gets scrawled down.

I suppose....

Clips:

Nina Simone: For All We Know
Sinead O'Connor: Rebel Song Live
Sinead: I'm No Man's Woman
If you click on the last two simultaneously, watch No Man's Woman to the Soundtrack of Rebel Song... perfection (try it; you'll see what I mean!)

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The Saturday Play
Our Man in Jamaica, by Marcy Kahan, set in Jamaica in 1962. Noel Coward's neighbour Ian Fleming is determined that Noel should resume his wartime activity as a spy.

Click for BBC Radio 4's Listen Again and select the above for a fantastic glamour romp through 1950s Carribbean with Noel Coward in the company of Marlene Dietrich, Ian Fleming and Jamaica's very own Doctor Evil!

While you're there, why not select Just a Minute: the legendary panel game where a topic must be discussed for a mere sixty seconds with strictly no hesitation, deviation or repetition!