OR THE "LAUNDROMAT" as I believe you Americans call it... 
BASHFUL still hasn't been buried. If my calculations are correct she lived to either 2 or 3 (time marches on!) I just don't remember... Roborovski hamsters are said to live slightly longer on average than ordinary hamsters, who will do 2 years standard, 3 if they're very lucky 3.5 extraordinarily. In exceptional cases Spherical and her ilk could (so I'm told) live past 4.
OR... I COULD HAVE PHRASED THAT: my methadone is going up and I'm giving up gear but things with Maple Syrup, my drugs worker, tend to be confrontational so I'll keep them as they are.
I TOOK MY FRENCH HOLIDAY IDEA and looked a little closer at what I actually wanted out of it. That is, to escape. And where I really want to go isn't France at all but Germany. And you can't go to Germany and not go to Berlin. So that is where I have decided I wanna live. As I said, I did years and years of German so I shouldn't have TOO much trouble filling in forms, reading things, etc. I will just need to get a really good dictionary.
I would love to say, "I'm going there forever. Never again shall I set foot on British soil." (I am very much tired of Britain. This country is sinking into a morass of doublestandards. Modern Britain deals with nothing until crisis is reached (who does that remind me of?) Problems are swept under the carpet: out of sight = out of mind. Civil liberties are being eroded here perhaps quicker than anywhere else in the "civilized world" and that really gets me. The "mother of all parliaments" is utterly corrupt; the home of free speech and all that is losing free speech. Spy cameras are everywhere. The populace are rude and violent. Immigrant communities rule over us and are full of attitude. Foreigners always seem to be first on the housing queue.
Having said all that, Neonaziism is what puts me off Berlin (and Germany in general) the most. But you can't have everything. And I never said I thought the grass over there was any greener. I'm just so sick of Britain. I want to live with a different set of problems.
I was already aware there are NA meetings in English in Berlin and that little link made going there seem a little less forlorn. I'm not "emigrating", just "migrating" for a while with 2 objects in mind. These being: 1: to get references/experience so I can actually go out and get a JOB ~ wow!! and 2: improve command of German enough to have usable skill rather than semi-useless semi-fluency.
I have never been to Berlin in my life. Neither have I set foot on the soil of any German-speaking country. My mind was oriented towards the region by years of language study at school, so it seems utterly ridiculous not to have gone. Also I long had a fascination with life behind the iron curtain ~ East Berlin of course was the gateway to all this. So when the wall came down without my having ventured behind it 
I was secretly rather miffed. There is something oddly romantic about former Soviet bloc chic. Giant alienating concrete architecture. Cold wind from the East ...
MY MUM said she was buying me a birthday present. I am now 38 years old. This is far too old to be a junkie. But anyway we went through Tesco's electrical department and picked out a cheapie CD player plus (what I really wanted) a digital radio.
BASHFUL TROTTERDONKEY ROBOROVSKI IS DEAD! The virus finally got her. She died on Friday but I wasn't around to post it. Spherical alerted me to the strangeness by determinedly moving nest from under the cod-in-parsley-sauce box under their wheel to under the chewed out chocolate fingers box. It is quite odd to see such a tiny creature behaving so purposefully. Grabbing mouthfuls of self-chewed bedding material and scampering to a new nest that's getting more and more luxuriously padded by the minute. Something suspiciously two-toned harvesty-coloured and white caught my eye and then I realized it was Bashful looking very dead and very bashed up. Imagine a dead cat that's been through a washing machine spin cycle and you're on the right track. I was wondering what on earth had prompted her into that corner when Spherical very officiously grabbed her dead housemate by the scruff and dragged her bodily halfway across the tank and into the her new bedding, where she took to preening her fur (not too successfully it has to be said as poor dead Bashful still looks like she's been dragged through several hedges backwards).
Last night, Spherical was moving nest yet again. Sure enough poor Bashful had vanished from under the chocolate fingers box, round several very inconvenient (by roborovski standards) cage obstacles and into the cod in parsley sauce box. I took Bashful out yet again and hid her in the furthest corner. This just so happened to be at the far entrance to a very long and narrow tube that originally held a roll of clingwrap. Imagine my shock to witness Spherical grabbing poor Bashful by the back leg and hauling her right through this long, thin tube right back to the new nest again!
IN MY USUAL DEPRESSION LAST NIGHT I was casting around for ideas when suddenly one struck me that has struck me again and again: why don't I go en vacances? Usually I assume that a methadone script is stopping me ~ until I remember how very many folks I know who have indeed gone abroad with the methadone in tablet form (no way would I even consider exporting litre on litre of swilling green 1mg/1ml liquid...) What some of these people don't want to recognize is that the Home Office Letter they take for customs purposes permits only the export of methadone from the UK. Of course it is up to individual foreign countries to decide whether they will allow it in. Bue la belle france is our nearest neighbour in the ever-"freundlich" Europäische Union (not that I'm suggesting Germany's in charge). So that shouldn't be un problème ...
I suppose this could have been a long entry on the glories of la république. My time in France has been limited to about three weeks or so I spent with a charity called Jeunesse et Reconstruction in the last summer of my teens when I joined a pan-European gang of youngsters on a river-pruning expedition between Clermont-Ferrand and Bourges. If you stuck a pin in the middle of the French hexagone; that's just about where we were... You only had to hack at the banks for about three hours a day then you got the rest of the time off to explore la campagne. To this day I know the names of basic farming and tree-surgical implements better in French than English. I also learned important phrases like bourdon (bumblebee) and nid des guêpes (wasps' nest!) Those are imprinted on my mind. I also learned that a lot of soft French cheese is like white horse manure but the local plonk is exceptionally cheap. The local mayor gave us lots of that as we were the cheapest labour around... Plus I learned to swear fluently and say a collection of obscene phrases in Polish. And I met some dodgy Lithuanian gypsies. The youngest one "looked like Madonna" (bear in mind this was 1990 or 91 when "Vogue" had just come out) and kept fluttering her eyes at me. Her brothers caught the most gigantic fish with their bare hands in a local stream. The local hôpital psychiatrique was just round the corner and we were haunted by a transvestit drest as a Red Indian sqwaw girl. And somebody caught diarrhoea in the communal toilets leaving an Everestine pile of steaming ordures like a molten Mr Whippy caramel king-cone on the famous French squat-down loos ...
I also became familiar enough with the grande métropole that when I came to London I spent a while wondering where to find that island in the middle with a huge cathedral opposite the courts of justice. Not realizing, of course, that that would be la cathédrale de Notre-Dame opposite le Palais de Justice ...
In general I would say that Paris is more beautiful than London (though in a preplanned and perhaps stuffily regimented way; and the statlier parts of London somehow outdo Paris in élégance ...), in my day London definitely had the edge over Paris in nightlife and clubbing though Paris would probably appeal more to slightly older people who were more into eating out and drinking. London and Paris seemed to be pretty much equal when it came to shopping. Being so near of course I had to see Galleries Lafayette, the French Harrods with its giant atrium above the perfume hall. Unlike Harrods this is one store in two buildings connected by a high-up open-air walkway. And I swear that as I crossed the bridge I passed the image of French chic: yes a woman with black Chanel bob, in furs, reeking of French perfume clutching a small dog ...
BASHFUL ROBOROVSKI is still alive and looking like a Porkshire Terrier. She's actually a bit better-seeming than she appeared 2 days ago, when she looked to be going the same way as Itchy... Just like Itchy used to do, she's looking a bit bashed up, like a Porky Terrier illustrated. Imagine having one of those tiny enough to trot around the palm of your hand??!? That's why I find hammies so cute. They're like kittens or puppydogs, only they never grow big and horrible and growly. Having said that, when she was on form, Bashful (named after her behaviour when I very first got her) used to lean on a little cardboard box with one hand, like a gossipping fishwife at a garden wall. Then, like a humungous aggressive dog leering over a garden gate she would snap at my fingers when I dared "introduce" them anywhere nearby. For this reason she garnered the additional Monika "Sergeant Bashful".
I THINK BASHFUL ROBOROVSKI IS DYING. She is certainly ill. Seems to have lost her sense of balance and spins round and round. This is a genetic fault and nothing can be done about it. There she was, huddled inside a cardboard box last night all sicksome. I fed her sweetcorn and Bill Oddie's Breakfast Birdseed. Her backbone is sticking out of her fur like a metal arch. Her eyes have been getting progressively blearier for days and days. Spherical on the other hand looks bright as anything.
I AM FED UP of being emotionally blackmailed and pushed into drugs group meetings I do not want to go to but attend mostly so it looks good on my record. The reasoning is the same as drug-dealers use: well what else would you be doing? A real disrespect for my own time. Today, my worker rang up pretending to be someone else. I know it was her as she ended with "don't let me down" ~ typical of the coercive language my worker uses when it was I who was supposed to be going for a shiatsu/massage thing, I who'd reap the supposed benefits, I who would only let myself down by nonattending. The appointment (already a missed appointment, which is why I had barely an hour's notice) will go free to a staff member if no "client" is there to pick it up. So it wasn't being wasted if I also failed to show. 
ALL I WAS THINKING about this morning was what a strong, fixating hold this heroin drug has over me. I can't think of anything else that comes close.
OK NOW I'm still not entirely finished moving out of my old place. Scraps of this and that lie all over the kitchen floor. The painter's probably coming in there today. Then I get a call from my Worker at the druggie place "the council say you've not been paying the weekly service charge where you live". That's because the council still think I live 2 houses away and have yet to give me any paperwork so I CAN pay even the last one (but I can't). On their computer I do not exist (except, oddly, for council tax purposes.) So I vented my fury at the poor druggie worker who said she'll ring back in the afternoon.
HOW VULGAR! But that's what I did. It took me TWO HOURS to get from suburbia to this certain dealer's "urbia". TWO HOURS of faffing around for a post office open enough to get MY OWN MONEY OUT. Faffing for the right bus and a route where someone had not been murdered leading to yards and yards of it cordoned off (like yesterday). Then finally about twenty minutes into my pacing about in an "obviously not waiting for the bus" way at this innercity stop da man turns up. He didn't seem to notice I palmed him off with short money. Then I was so agitated at missing the first bus home and then useless ones to places like John O'Groats and other areas I do not live I thought "oh bugger it", went into the public urinal-cum-phone box (without Big Ben views), poured out a bit of my cyder-and-Lucozade drink and made that into a yummy hit of gear that I jammed into my leg whilst having an imaginary conversation. I don't think anybody noticed and I don't know whether it was unfamiliar surroundings or what, but the drugs were rather good ...
SCROLL DOWN TO THE BOWL OF STEW FOR PIRI PIRIS. 
IT'S MONDAY AFTERNOON and by now I'm feeling better. I didn't even put down yesterdays morosity to Unsacred Sundays ...
FINALLY I FOUND THE KEY to turn my own blazing radiators off. My home is fairly clean, though scattered with stray dumpling flour. The schizophrenic next door claims the landlord was seeking me on Friday. Why can't these people leave notes like ordinary human beings. The register I signed days ago is still on the wall full of my initials.
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| You Are: 50% Dog, 50% Cat |
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| You Are a Chocolate Cake |
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