Me: Online: Tonight: Talkin' 2U...

I DID NOT STEAL chocolate. I yammed it down this morning... Ritter milk and biscuit which was a compromise for 2 cravings (thick, thick chocolate and biccies)... though I wished I'd gone for neat dark choc as afterwards I felt vaguely sick, yet craving more... Something dark chocolate never does. Ho-hummm.

The picture is supposed to be Whoopi Goldberg from the 80s film Jumpin' Jack Flash, which as you probably know, features lots of onscreen dialogue of the style now possible on my blog via my personal Gabbly Gledwood chatroom!

It's not just for yarning to me you know, you can speak to each others...

You know whether you've got company, and how much, by how many "gabbers" are listed online at any given time... The doorbell sound announces a new arrival at my page; the schmonng sound means someone's just said something.

To reply:

Just tap something out in the dialogue window, press return, and you'll see it join the rolling script.

The screen will tell you you're "gabber 609", say. Change this number into your name by clicking on that and replacing it with your internet "handle".

I shall be online tonight answering notes, queries and making general conversation with anybody around from 8pm local time which would be around 6am Australian and for you Americans is around 3pm Eastern, or midday to y'all on the West Coast...

Please give me a minute or so to reply if you initiate the conversation: I might be on another window, waiting to hear that schmonng that says someone's talking to me. (How do you bring up another window? I scroll down my own sidebar to that Google searchbox and take it from there. It means I can be in my blog twice without losing my place on Gabbly if I happen to skip off-page for a sec...

OK so looking forward to speaking to anyone who can be there 8pm "Universal" Standard Time!!

Here's a tune I hear time and time again:
Guru Josh: Infinity 2008

Candy Craving

I HAVE THE MOST MASSIVE CRAVING FOR SWEETS AND CHOCOLATE TODAY... more to the point chocolate... dark chocolate. Ritter dark chocolate which is German and used to be called Halbbitter because it was 50% cocoa solids. Now it's 71% and even funkier. Nothing around (apart from the very posh stuff) gives a lovely bitter chocolate kick like this. So bad did this fixation become this afternoon I very nearly found myself shoplifting a block, which is so much not me. My own shoplifting career was short with a bitter ending (not nice-bitter like high-cocoa chocolate)... Even though most of my friends think I'm stupid not to lift easy basic things like pens, envelopes, etc, it's my particular scruple not to. Hard to explain why, but I'd rather pay my way. Anyway back to chocolate: first thing tomorrow morning and Ritter and I shall be as one (how sad). But hey at least I'm not writing about heroin! Probably this is what psychologists call a displacement activity. But hey ~ surely it's better to be "displaced", get chocolate-dirty and tubby yet remain heroin-clean (if that is possible...)

Baby Itchy's Human Mountaineering

I TOOK OUT "BABY" ITCHY ROBOROVSKI, the smallest and tamest Tiny Trotter for a ramble today and she spent half an hour mountaineering along my arms, up my knees, then disappearing down an inch-wide long plastic tube I rescued from a skip and shoving around my sleeves. I say shoving because she does this nudge nudge digging thing with her nose which is really ticklish what with her 2ft long whiskers (in robo-feet). She can also climb it when it's literally vertical, then appears at the top, all furry and surprised, as if saying to me "where do I go NOW?"

I got one drugs telesales call when I was fast asleep at 10 o'clock this morning. The screen said TWONK (ie it's someone I wanted nothing to do with anyhow...) he quickly gave up within around 6 rings...

I've had such an obsession with gnocchi I used the entire 500g packet, together with half a jar of Ragu Oregano and Basil ~ half price (66p). You have to be careful which of those pasta sauces you buy as Ragu is proper ie 150g tomatoes go into every 100g (they are boiled down during production). Supermarket's own brand (£1.15 for about a litre) was only 40% tomatoes, I noticed, and contained added water, as such sauces should never do. If you want added water, add it yourself during cooking (it makes 'em go twice as far). Another top tip is to add Ragu to chopped tomatoes. The Ragu taste you simply cannot get, even from concentrated tomato puree. Your tomatoes must have gone through the specialized 3-hr lidless oven-baking sessions to get the mega-mellow taste right. Adding just a bit of Ragu to chopped tomatoes and puree makes it just right. But without that little bit of Ragu... you're nowhere near there! I've also used half a tub of grated Parmesan in about 2 days: yummm!

La Toya Jackson (yes! Michael's sister: looks how he probably wished he looked) is on Celebrity Big Brother, together with a tiny Hollywood actor guy called Verne Troyer (played Mini-Me in all them Austen Powers films), together with "Gangsta's Paradise" rapper Coolio. (Do click those links ~ they're hilarious!) For those of you without access to Limey TV, here's a clip of the first two discussing the third:



PS MY "WHERE IN THE COCA-COLONIZED WORLD" COMPETITION from yesterday's still open. Will somebody please gimme an answer on the mysteriously-lettered bottle. I know you don't know so just GUESS!

No Heroin But Italian Food

TWO NIGHTS AGO I WROTE out a lovely little post, all tiny and succinct about how I was quitting gear "just for today" ~ and the £20 in my pocket's going to my bank account not the dealer...

Only for all this to be scuppered by my waking up feeling slightly chilly which caused me to run screaming (metaphorically!!) up the road to "the flats" where £20 was exchanged for a lump of what looked like mud but was powerful enough to knock me out. Then, not having slept properly for days I slept on and on and on and woke up feeling so mightily depressed I decided to post more about my rising Italian food obsession than on how bad I felt. I am fed up of my own voice, whining...

Last night I wrote out no posts, but have reminded myself WHY I want NOT to use the heroin. And so, despite having £35 left ~ £30 still in the bank, the change from £5 on me. I only withdrew the minimum over the counter today. I am NOT spending on drugs. But there's a supermarket trolley round the corner with my name on it and I need a list of cheap things: thin bleach, sugar, Dolmio, gnocchi. I hope I can get all those for £4.40...? Well let's see. Anyway I must go: those gnocchi are calling my name!

PS: Wherever I go, I always crave Coca-Cola!

PPS: Can anyone guess where they all originate from? Especially the really mysterious writing on the bottle? Clickonit to make the image larger...

Black Pepper & Tomato Pasta Sauce

I'M SO TIRED I SPENT most of the day sleeping... It took some something-or-other to get out of bed and come here; today I am too blackpeppery and I didn't feel like it. Not into gurging out selfpitying whingeings yet... I wanted not to use anything and did. The lump of powdery dried mud knocked me out... "helped me catch up on lost sleep"... I have not slept properly for days. Sleeping somehow sometimes feels too much like giving up...

The BBC have put on a new version of the Diary of Anne Frank. Never having read the original I can't say how much it compares. What they have done is remake it in the image of the present time focusing on arguments and her burgeoning romance with the Jewish neighbours' son. They're all in hiding together. Perched in rooms off a back staircase, which is hidden behind a bookcase, upstairs from a shop. Final episode is tomorrow and I don't know how much I can handle watching The End, when all these characters in such sharp focus... well: knowing what happens to them.

When EastEnders came on afterwards it seemed so trivial I went out of the room and did cooking. I'm trying to learn to make Italian bolognaise sauce, y'know the type manufactured industrially by Dolmio-Buitoni-Ragu, from scratch. I heard you're supposed to take tinned tomatoes, chop them if they're not already chopped, and boil them over a low heat frequently stirring for a couple of hours or so... Am I right? You just cannot replicate the taste of these industrial sauces with tomatoes or puree just as they come. I believe they're massively boiled down and thus concentrated up. I only had one tin and the patience of half an hour, but I have to say in that time I did appear to be getting somewhere... IF ANYONE KNOWS THE RECIPE PLEASE HELP ME OUT!

PS DELIA SMITH says oven-cook for 3 hours in an open casserole dish... Bacon-schmacon: I'm not adding swineflesh to mine though!

PPS DELIA'S first "media" gig (though she was already food writer at the Daily Mail) was creating that fabulously fancy chinzy iced cake for the Rolling Stones' 1969Let It Bleed LP...

More Robo-Food & A Crackheads' Conference

THREE GEAR-&-CRACKHEADS were chatting in the street as I ambled along. One was a former dealer of mine, who is now clean and has a goofy smile all over his face. You should do it too!" he enthuses. But enthusiasm alone just won't cut it... as I've discovered. One of the three I didn't know. The other is notorious. He calls himself Mellow and I have little respect for him. He once pulled a knife on an Irish guy who was a friend of mine... next thing anyone knew Mellow was pelting up the road, knife in hand with Irish Guy raging up behind him. And that tells you all you ever wanted to know about Mellow. Except that I first properly met him in what the press call a shooting gallery and we called "the Burnt-Out House". I was sat round a table with two lesbians. We had all just had a pipe and were now onto the gear. Mellow, was at this time still smoking all his drugs, started pulling a pathetic rant about "don't go squirting that crap in my direction". It was me who pointed out that at £10 a pop we were hardly likely to be playing waterpistols with it, were we? Then again some people are stupid and he doesn't look like he's added any IQ points as he's gone... Anyway they didn't spot me today as I quickly pinged by...

OK that's druggie story of the day done with. Now onto "cleaner" issues. No of course I have NOT touched any crack. At ALL. It really was as I said a once a week £10 thing in the end... and the end went on for months. Now the end is over. And done with. I'm fantasizing about breaking all my bottles. But I still haven't done it. (Not having a bottle has never stopped me piping in the past, so maybe that's it. Throwing needles away I found even more dodgy as when I was minded to "use" I would "use" no matter WHERE the needle came from. I'm just glad I tested HIV-Hep B-Hep C negative because I honestly didn't think I would. (Especially the last one...)

And now to hamsters. OK now mine have to be the best-fed in Christendom as I've gone out and got them a kilo of Wagg hamster Gerbil Mouse Munch. The packaging makes it sound so vitamin-packed they'll go supersonic... so let's see...

For anyone new to these pages who might be bemused by my constant references to "robos", I mean roborovski hamsters and here's the writeup at roborovskihamsters.webs.com

Roborovski Hamsters (Phodopus roborovskii) are the smallest and fastest of all the hamster family and are kept as domestic pets. Of the hamster species, they live the longest (2 to 3 and a half years).

They are very curious, easily startled, and generally timid little hamsters. Their suitability as pets to be handled is further diminished by their size and speed. Roborovski's are, however, extremely social and affectionate with each other, and when housed together from an early age, sleep in one place and indeed eat, play, etc. together. They have a very good temperament and rarely bite either each other or people, which makes them ideal for family pets.

They grow to about 4 - 5cm long [2"](not 7cm like you sometimes hear) and have bullet shaped bodies and have very long back legs for running extremely quickly.

See why I find them so entertaining?

Kicking Coke in Public

ALL OF A SUDDEN I FEEL STRANGELY EXPOSED, making progress in my drugs-fight and reporting online.

Cocaine, or more to the point, crack, has long been a feature of my life, holding hands with heroin and tangoing together as daily speedballs in certain years gone by. More recently I was reduced to Snowball Mondays. I'd buy just enough crack for one nice little pipe, then crush the rest into heroin, to make into snowballs.

Cocaine intensifies the effect of heroin and just like butter on bread or sugar in coffee, the combinations's hard to give up once you've picked up a taste.

An old drugs worker put it best: "Crack just separates you from your money as quickly as possible. And it makes you use even more gear."

Although I've usually had the control to keep my spend at £10 or £20 and then leave the crack alone (people who insist on buying the smallest amount then saying "let's get some more!" and "let's get some more!" really annoyed me. I always saw the high of crack as temporary and false and thus far easier to see "through" than my beloved heroin, who's done everything to make my life the garden of delights it is today. Ooo! Is Gledwood being sarky here?!

Now back to crack. I managed to beat it back to a single day a week and when it wasn't that day even if I had the dollars I didn't feel tempted. Compartmentalizing life is one thing I'm good at, so I found myself sticking to this rule without much trouble.

Also I was so unused to exercising any moral gumption it made a spiriting change actually to make a decision and prove I could stick by it.

But of course my Crack Mondays have been sabotaging all attempts to steer heroin clean. Because come the weekend's end ~ and Sundays have always been miserable for me ~ and I'm always broke ~ I'm suddenly chucked into the glory of a monday morning with money and a double temptation and so I always gave in, and so the only pattern I made in life was circular: a vicious circle too!

So you see that little bit of coke was far more of an issue than it might seem at a casual glance. I didn't dare post this much yesterday because my inner demons love so much making me a hypocrite. I can just imagine posting "I did it!" then running straight to the dealer. As soon as addiction flourished in me so too did an inner gremlin who seemed to spiritedly enjoy chucking my resolutions to the wall. After all I'd lost so very many dignities there was no way now I could do without the consolation of drugs cushioning my fall. And so I didn't. And so I lost the power to resist.

Please don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying "I've done it. I've kicked the crack"; I never can. (You can only ever do it day by day...) But I managed it yesterday and that felt like some achievement...

hey! Now I can throw out my crack bottle collection (they were brandy miniature like the three to the top left pictured). I need the drawer space and I don't need the reminder.

I STILL FEEL SHAKY WHEN I SAY ALL THIS. Something in me just wants to sabotage and cheat. I'm a drug addict! How can I ever trust myself again?

OK: before this post turns viciously circular as well I'm going to ping off like a roborovski.

Excitement at the Trottery!

EYES ARE GLEAMING, ears pricking up (why do hamsters poke up their ears when a good dinner's to hand ~ what's to listen to? ~??!?) Yes Bill Oddie's own brand, the poshest birdseed £££ can buy with about 10 different mixed grains in it... the Rolls Royce of all robo-banquets is proceeding as we speak.



That's why I didn't want Trill, which is just millet for budgies, or cheapest, sour-looking grade C rubbish from the petshop up the road. The "I'm so busy and I don't suffer fools (I also never listen to people)" Countess Arrogant who works there insists on selling a minimum 1-kilo bag, which would last my hamsters months.

Weight for tubby weight Bashful, Itchy and Spherical are by far the most voracious nibblers of all the furry animals I've ever had. They weight not much more than an ounce apiece and yet they devour their own weight in cereals in less than a fortnight... if not a week. So-called "experts" say you should not overfeed seeds as the high fat content will make the hammies too tubby! I think hamsters are smart enough to pick out whatever they need from a balanced diet of birdseeds, hammy mix, biscuits, breakfast cereals, bread crusts, chocolate drops and pumblechooks...

... besides I've noticed a high-birdseed diet gives 'em gorgeously glossy fur. OK I know this is totally irrelevant to anything but I found this whilst searching out a clip of an escaped horse trotting through a picture-house ... supposedly while a film was running. The entire lot was captured on CCTV... according to the Sun newspaper. Instead I found this: not that I can preach about high speed rail being far better than cars coming as I do from Britain which is low-speed central. Our ONLY fasttrack being the one directly OUT of the country to Belgium and France; how embarrassing is THAT..???!?

No drugs today. I've been meaning for quite some time to post an "I think my child's using heroin! What do I do?!" parental guide. My blog was originally intended to be an information crossroads for drugs issues of all kinds but addiction and recovery in particular. Well I'm still working on that one and this afternoon I scrawled out a Facts and Stats about Heroin post that just shouts drugs Drugs DRUGS! Too much for me today. Specially as I'm quitting crack today (remember I said I'd taken to using just once a week? That once a week would have been today and it's not happening any more. Just writing it makes me want to cheat and use again... But I really don't want to use. I gave up crack for over a month last time, my willpower only sabotaged when a dealer gave me a free bit... I can live perfectly well without crack... it's just thinking about it winds me up and makes me want it. I knew that dealer was playing games who held out his hand saying "pay me for it later"... and then having a dealer so near I could score within 1 minute flat really did my head in, not to mention reducing resolutions to ashes. Now I want control back. Kicking in crack is a major way of achieving this even if I DO leave myself a raving heroin junkie who's fighting THAT addiction a little less satisfactorily. One thing at a time, as they say.

And with that thought I'll love yaz and leave yaz. L8RS!
Gleds ;->...

PS See how quick the robos run around in the top one? THAT is why Itchy was so impossible when she turned escapee....

PPS And last but not least: LOOK AT THIS! I've always wanted a basket full of furries ~ just imagine keeping this pinging pile of pets..!!

Tuppence a Bag!

FOR DAYS AND DAYS since Xmas that dreadful Mary Poppins song has been going round my head. It's about birdseed: "Tuppence! Tuppence! Tuppence a bag!" (I bet you could have fed a human being for 2d in those days ~ forget the birds). I desperately need birdseed for my hammies yet nowhere seems to sell it. I think my rodents are fed up of living off the food I live on (pasta smothered in tomato sauce). Also they have become Tutku addicts. Tutku are Turkish biscuits I dunk in my tea. Brown and white in what I'd call a "harlequin" pattern, these are full of chocolate fondant. Not sandwiched like ordinary creme biscuits but totally closed in. My pets have gone longer than a month on this kind of diet ~ replete with breakfast cereals and pumblechooks and bread. I think it's about time they went back to "proper" rodent food of the type wild mice eat in your house ~ e.g. candlewax and soap (joke!)

Does anyone remember the time Itchy escaped ~ this was 2 houses ago ~ no sign of her for days. I was tearing my hair out. Also the place was scuttling alive ~ especially at night ~ with wild housemice and I was terrified they'd mug her and beat her up. Robos are not very violent animals, far more likely to take flight (or, unlike other hamsters, freeze and play dead) than to actually fight.

Anyway I was just giving up hope of ever seeing poor Itchy alive again ~ this must've been at least 48 hours after 1st disappearance ~ when a suspiciously persistent scrabbling set off in the corner, where I'd lined up my books, 3 deep on the floor. Imagine my surprise when I came face to furry face with a shocked-looking housemouse, which rapidly pinged out of the way. I couldn't believe my eyes when the scrabbling continued and there appeared a cleaner, fatter and smaller rodent (yes ~ Itchy really is tiny. Fully grown yet smaller than a mouse. Plus she can run faster.)

I could not believe this ~ the little swine had been out under my wardrobe with a frenzy of wild mice, partying away (no wonder all that squealing ~ and it wasn't from her ~ robo-voices are more like the honks you get from kiddy-toys) ~ they'd obviously shared their dinner. Or she had stolen it off them (cheek-pouches being such an advantage). They'd taken her on a jaunt across the adventure playground of my books. Unable to ping back under the wardrobe because I blocked off the way, and never having learned to spring the way rodents have to in the wild, she was effectively marooned within a Berlin Wall of paperbacks. I took advantage of her instinct to seek cover by dropping a toilet tube down there. She scuttled straight inside and appeared most astonished suddenly to get snatched up and plonked back down with Bashful and Spherical. Roborovskis are the most social of all hamsters. "Regular (Syrian) hammies will fight to the death anything that dares invade their burrow. My robbies on the other hand sleep 3 to a massive bed, which is always under their wheel. They don't seem to mind getting repeatedly kicked in the head as they carry on dozing when one of their number decides to get up for a midday spin...

... And back to drugs. I am depressed because my addiction is more powerful than me. (Is this the meaning of that 12-step phrase "we admitted that we were powerless over our addiction"?)...

... Every now and then I have a reality check. Similar to the time when, in the bourgeois house I used to live in (many years ago) my one ally said of the other housemates "they all think you're a heroin addict" ~ and I suddenly saw "heroin addict" ~ the drug-ravaged spectre one steers clear of on the street ~ converge with me. My innocent self. It felt most disconcerting actually to be this labelled character. I feel the same jolt here sometimes. Especially when I vision my blog popping up in suburban kitchens, casserole in the oven, dogs running around, grandchildren yelling in the garden. And I think What am I doing here? My blog was never meant to be a cry for help. It wasn't meant to be a game, either. "Confessional" rides a rocky road once outside the confines of Secret Diary covers.

"Never apologize; never explain" goes the Immanuel Kant quote on one blog I only recently took up perusing. The first bit I go with ~ but the second? ~ Each to his own. My style of soul-searching would sit about as well with Melody Lee as black pepper on strawberry icecream. My drug addiction needs explaining.

Even if you don't need explanations, I do. Maybe, if I dig around the dustbin of my life, I might find a diamond. My mind was once furnished with marvellous things and I must have chucked them out somewhere... maybe they're still around...

And here endeth today's babble.

PS just a thought: I bet yous lot all thought "tuppence a bag" meant bags of "gear"... but hey ~ if only heroin was tuppence a bag.

(I'd probably be using 2000 bags a day...)

PPS LA TOYA JACKSON is on Celebrity Big Brother... hahahaaahaaah!!

AND FINALLY: I don't usually deliberately post up crap (I just have execrable taste) but here for y'all is Julie Andrews chiming away our titular melody...

Thrown

REGULAR READERS may have noticed a sudden change of tone in this blog.

This is down partially to my having discovered ~ through my blog's followers who somehow found me ~ a new set of bloggers either using or going clean, writing about their experience the way I used to ~ when I wasn't drowning in trivia! You can access this new world (new to me) via my "users' blogs" link up top. In a way you could say I'm replying to what many of these people have said. I also feel I need to leave a witness statement of how life is ~ scungy as it may be ~ while I am still using. Or swaying between temporarily on-methadone-clean and back-on-heroin dirty.

I must leave details of where I am, especially as I intend to move away from this place.

I hate being like this. The pain of living stuck between two intentions, totally at the mercy of the whims of my illness hurts too much.

What also depresses me is the realization I've come to ~ via some of your comments @ that Clean is something I might want. And sincerely desire it. But I just don't want it enough. And that hurts me.

When people really turn the corner, they say they would go to any lengths to get where they have to be. I've shown myself unwilling to do this.

Yet I want it. I do want it.

I'm also depressed that methadone doesn't hold me enough. The dosage I'm on should replace all the feelings I can get from heroin enough that some people say that, at this level, they can barely feel heroin at all. Yet this is not the case with me. Some years ago I used to be able to take 70mg a day and feel a bulletproof hold around me. Now the hold feels all too frail and ragged... Perhaps addiction has marched on with sister time...

Nowadays on the methadone I wake feeling like an ice block every single morning. I'm not withdrawing, I'm not "sick"... but I do feel blank and empty and under the weather. Heroin of course takes all this away...

... So I don't know what to do.

I'll leave you with a hamsters song I sing to "Baby" Itchy ~ my One Tame Robbie ~ when I'm feeling dur:

Itchy's covered in fur
Itchy's covered in fur
Eee-aye-a-dairy-mouse
Itchy's covered in fur

Hmmm: hardly liable to win me poet-laureate-hood, is it?

Here's a classic from Youtube... from a Japanese TV show (hence "hamu-STAAA!" CAT AND HAMSTER... this lil' kitty seems to think the winter-white Russian hammy is her OFFSPRING..(!)
And I take it the cat IS a "she"... (somehow looks that way...)



And last but not least, here's something more inspirational I'm sending to my Gran, who's slowly dying of cancer in a nursing home. She's so morphinated she's barely conscious these days. I know William Wordsworth is her favourite poet, so maybe it'll bring back some sparkle from days of yore...

The following lines from Wordsworth

Ode
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

PS WHEN I WAS LOOKING for pictures of a "secret diary" I stumbled across this reference to the Secret Diary of William Byrd... has anyone out there heard of this guy?

Oh and BTW here's the Mamas and Papas: I got Creeque Alley back again (as some of y'all may have noticed, the one on my sidebar hasn't run for about 35,000 years...) so THAT has been replaced by THIS herebelow... which DOES indeed run very well indeed. The clip is from the Ed Sullivan show, which I know OF well but have never seen in my life...

Grotesque

THE DEALER TOOK SO LONG this morning and I was resentfully waiting wound up into ever such a state that, despite over 80mg methadone (which I've been on every day so it's well entrenched in my system) that I found myself vomiting yellow bile. Yet telling myself that I wasn't really "sick", just winding myself up. Bile-retching is a big part of the withdrawal syndrome. But I'm telling myself it also had a lot to do with barely having eaten yesterday, partially because I was sulking due to "no gear".

My head has been shillyshallying both ways between dead-set on not using and "if it was here I'd be doing it right NOW". On the one hand I can put a sustainedly "clean head" on for several days at a time ~ which used to be near-impossible for me. But on the other I'm recognizing more and more the chinks in my armour and the feebleness of my desires to stop. I don't know how I'm ever going to make it happen now; it feels forlorn.

My new year's resolution was one I thought worth working on and that's to say bye-bye to crack. I say little about it here because there's little to say. You go up like a skyrocket. You come down. Most people want more and more and more. I've succeeded in reducing consumption to one £10 rock, once a week. And even if I DO find I have money "spare" that could go on it days later, it does not. Most of this coke gets mixed into heroin, which candifies it up massively. But that means that when I DO have crack I can easily get through a gram of the other in a day, which is way more than I want to be using. And just to explain to non-users: it might be easy to assume that "a gram" means a dosage unit but with heroin this is not the case. In fact a gram of the local street heroin is potent enough to kill a (non-tolerant) family of four. Most junkies would get between three and ten hits from a gram depending on how much they're used to using. I hate the fact I've turned into an opiate sponge. Almost anything I take seems to get soaked right up and barely touches the sides. My aim with heroin, if I can't stop completely, is to use as little as possible. All things are relative, anyhow. The more you take, the more you need. So you may as well take as little as possible ~ then you'll need less.

I got fluorescent vomit all over my notebook, which means I'll have to copy my shorthand lists of "brief forms" and other contractions into the volume I set aside as my "secret diary" (except half what's gone in there has been posted up here!) My searches online have revealed to me that after Mr Gregg's death around 1949, rights to his shorthand were bought by another company, who, through successive editions of the manual, progressively dumbed it down till it was nearly useless. My "simplified" textbook from 1950 is the least dumbed down version but I'm working on converting to the 1929 "Anniversary" version, which is the last edition Mr Gregg worked on and used himself. Writing shorthand is one thing: you've gotta be able to read it back! Hence the practice. I've wanted to learn this art since I was very little indeed and I'm not giving up now. Who knows... Someday I might even get a job out of it..?

Back to my addiction "issues"... thanks for all the comments everyone. I'm just getting tired of all my own words. Fed up of hearing them. But still, I've readlized, I don't have strength enough of desire to turn away. I just hope that meanwhile y'all don't get bored to death!!

Last but not least, purloined from my friend Welshcakes Limoncello's blog (what a funky screen-name!) is this polyglot HAPPY NEW YEAR message!!

Hello 2009!

WELL I HOPE YOU'RE HAVING A HAPPY ONE Y'ALL... did yous all go to great TV-news-captured celebrations? Or just stayed in and got staggering drunk? Or just stayed in and drank half a grape juice? Which is worse? Depends where you're coming from...

Well I "used" yesterday and some urgency told me to get all three hits done and dusted before the fateful chimes (any excuse to use quickly). Which meant I spent most of yesterday evening comatose kind of half hanging off the bed (which is how I always sleep on drugs: if not bolt upright head lolling backwards or in some other odd position...)

I had half a mind to go out and hit the local populace for spare change, the theory being that drunk + red letter day = generous (well it always used to). I've not gone begging in quite some time so that would have felt like a step backwards. Instead I stayed in bed agonizing about this and watched Elton John see in 2009 with celebrity friends blablah...

Can I just say: what on earth was that I spewed out yesterday? Not so much WHAT I wrote but the words... I just looked them over; they went duhduhduhDUDUDUHHH on me. Which is writing in serious need of hacking around. In mitigation, may I say that I DID write the entire post in shorthand. Which involves staring at a page full of what looks like barbed wire HOPING that some words might eventually emerge. It can be a forlorn hope.

Anyway that's about all. I have not used in 2009 (except methadone), and I don't feel that spectacular as a result. My willpowe is wavering and, while we're on "clean" I have realized I'm going to put a hell of a lot more welly into this process than before... and STOP MAKING EXCUSES! Which I am World Expert at...

I was reading a book by an Aussie chick who experimented with heroin after student days... wound up as a street hooker, jumped into the legalized 6-room brothel system they run in Melbourne and became one of their most prized "ladies"... anyway SHE was saying she went right through detox-'n'-rehab after 2 years of daily using and sailed through the withdrawal part. Only when she became hooker extraordinaire did her habit really amp up. My point being that by 2 years I had the most reeking habit on "gear" was so badly addicted it was unreal. Most of this was psychological and that's my point but I couldn't even watch morning television without the most overpowering association to scoring. As I'd turn up 10am at the same person's house each morning Mon-Fri and there we would await "da man" as BBC's daily tripe spewed on. Not to mention eating, sleeping everything else in life being by this time totally tied up with using. It was impossible.

Anyway today I've been drinking weak cyder (someone dropped a full bottle on my road and waste not want not) and as I say not using and where there's life there is hope! Sorry I've got to go my brains are hobbled...

I'M STILL STANDING
OK this one came on last night's Elton-a-thon. I 1st heard this at school (of all places) where this 13 yr old girl stood up and belted it out expressing all that it meant... which is kind of remarkable. But WHO chose this deadbeat-a-delic video? They should be terminated!

Self-Deception and Excuses, Excuses...

OF ALL THE AILMENTS which with I've been "afflicted" ~ mental, physical, whatever, including OCD, depression and paranoid "episodes", the one whose "diagnostic criteria" I've "fulfilled" most fully and directly without question is OPIATE ADDICTION....

Click here for DSM (American doctors') diagnostic criteria for opiate addiction.

"unable to control intake despite numerous attempts to stop"... etc etc. There is no question, no matter from what angle you choose to view it, or what slant you put on it or what spin you put on my past that a heroin addict is what I am and a full-blown one at that. I don't go along with many I've heard in groups who declare they've been a lifelong addict even before they found drugs. That is not me. It took heroin, which is arguably the most potently addictive substance of all, to make me an addict. But I am an addict now ~ no question.

I have not troubled to research my condition too thoroughly because I know all about it from the inside. What reading I have done, however has left me with a few choice nuggets that stuck with me. One such pearl (mixed metaphors ahoy!) is that opiate addicts have an exaggerated concept and experience of suffering". This wording is typical of one viewing the condition from the outside, who is forgetting one basic fact ~ that all suffering is relative. It has as much to do with background and expectations as experience. Plus it is apt to bear in mind that opiate addiction, far from being a chase for some long-lost "ultimate high", has more to do with escaping pain and suffering than anything else. In this respect the heroin junkie has perhaps more in common with the outright alcoholic than addicts to other drugs which tend to be uppers like crystal meth, other sorts of speed, cocaine or crack that do provide some experience of "excitement"... empty as that might turn out to be in the end.

This is an aspect of life (I was going to say "addiction", but once you get far-gone addiction and life become interchangeable because addiction is your life... but I was discussing the following with my old friend Lee, who gave up heroin after a 30+ year habit and stayed stopped despite liver cancer (had a chunk of that chopped out), nasty interferon combination treatment for hepatitis C and the death of one of our closest friends who I called Lucky (she and he went back a long long way)... through all this he may of wavered, but he did not use. But when he WAS still using I described the experience of going out penniless it felt like I would never make the money. But I sat down and stayed resolutely there no matter how inclement the conditions and made my money. Then I hit the phone box (never had a mobile in those days), got the best dealer I could (there was always a shopping list of descending preference...) waiting there, often in the dark, the cold, the rain, feeling like he was never going to come. When he did I was still not happy. I'd wait what seemed an age for the bus back, stewing: "it had better not be small, or crap..." and the bus seemed to take a lifetime, stopping every hundred yards, to drive me the two miles or so home. All this time I was telling myself the experience was intolerable. Even the couple of hundred yards between bus stop and front door seemed too much and I'd half walk half run to get there. Keys already sorted for when I hit the door. In twist bang. I wasn't meant to slam the door but never had patience to do anything gracefully by this time. I'd barge into my friend's flat: this was a friend who I'd literally met, who'd picked me up off the street... I'd barge in already stripping off clothes to get body and needle together ss rapidly as possible. Shoving into the bathroom I'd answer queries about how I was how the day had gone in a yeah-yeah way, rapidly breaking fresh works from the packet, cursing the water for not filling it up quick enough, pouring on citric acid. The lighter flame was never fierce enough (but I hated cooking up with those alcohol swabs). I'd watch the dried-mud-looking gear alchemizing under water into mahogany-coloured solution, not happy, not relaxed but telling myself again how intolerable it was to have to wait. As far as I was concerned, it even took too long to draw up into the spike. And then damp, sweating and desperate I'd plug the needle in (at least that in those days didn't usually take very long)... blood rushes back: BINGO. Push in. Half a minute later I felt it: like life itself running into my veins. It was never a strong feeling, even when I took enough to overdose. Heroin just does not feel strong. But it did feel beautiful. And though I told myself the drug didn't work for me any more it reduced every evening to a haze of food, lost hours of television and falling asleep on the couch. I had long forgotten how to sleep like a normal person. And no matter how much heroin I had bought ~ unless it was several grams it was all too often gone by morning.

What was that rant about?... "Intolerable!" Even life's pettiest annoyances took on that description. Intolerable! The fairytale of The Princess and the Pea could have been written about a junkie.

It was only today that I realized, mental excrement passing through my brain and a plethora of reasons (focusing around the fact that it was cold) WHY it was a totally unreasonable idea that I should go without heroin today.

I'm afraid I did ring the dealer around 10am. By the time I'd walked the length of my road he was calling back to say he was there. So I did use and today should be totally tolerable. Except I've all this to say...

People have applauded my blog (sometimes) for being so "frank" and "honest". I do try to be these things. Yet I'm a full-blown junkie who's still using... I do try to be straightforward and truthful.

Yet it follows that if I fulfill every other diagnostic criterion of junkiehood then I must be deceiving myself in some way ~ if not in every way.

This much stands to reason: those who are deceived cannot know it.

... So what is my blind spot? I've no idea...

And there I had better leave it before I do start muddying the waters...

Flexing My Muscles

I THINK I MAY HAVE COME UP WITH a more positive way of viewing former abortive attempts at staying off heroin (not going cold turkey (though I did try that once) but by sticking to prescribed methadone). Rather than seeing these as failure (no matter how politely worded, that is how I saw it), perhaps what I have been doing is flexing muscles I have got used to not using. So each of these tries, you could say, is practice or even a dress-rehearsal for when I do it for real...

That's about all I can come up with positive-thinking wise.

Other than that I've been trying to distract myself by scrawling in a "reporter's notebook" and writing in a posher hardback notebook with "secret diary" squiggled in shorthand inside the cover... my one worry being that, with the battles I have to decypher my "outlines"... whatever I write in there may stay secret even from me!

PS Please God don't let me turn into a cleaned-up junkie equivalent of the man illustrated... you meet people enough like him at NA...

Reality Check

YOU CAN ALL HATE ME NOW because I've used. I used heroin. I used it last night after I had posted. I was not feeling any good anyhow and now I'm weary of life.

I say that in response to a comment does it feel good or just plain bad?... Honestly..? It felt terrible. Early on yesterday afternoon my mind turned to schemes for robbilng the supermarket of smoked salmon, alcohol, Mach 3 razors and the other shoplifters' staples so frequently removed from my local "emporium" security have taken to sitting at a "workstation" as you enter, consisting of a bank of CCTV-screens across which they supposedly track "dodgy customers"... Oh I cannot be bothered. I was in the frame of mind where you just go kamikaze/suicidal/lose all self respect/however you wish to phrase it... And I really don't know what else to say because I'm so tired. And I wish to go in said shop to get all the stuff I'd run out of by yesterday evening. And to be able to shop respectably... And not be banned from my own local one... Man what a miserable day it was. Yurks yurks YUUUUUURKS!!!

Being Have...*

*~Rhymes with "brave"...
THE PHRASE WAS A FAMILY JOKE after one of our parents' friends said to their toddling child: "behave!" ~ and the reply came back, "but I am being have!"

OK so it was a brown Christmas. The day went past in a syrupy haze... but since then I did stick to my plan. Not that it's feeling any good.

I count myself lucky to have the NA big blue book, I think they call it their "basic text"... which is full of junkie advice and wisdom. One such pearl is, "we tried to stop because we were in such pain"... [but that was not reason enough]. My question: so what IS reason enough..?

O man this does not feel good. It doesn't feel right. Feels very wobbly. Can it last...?

Robo-Jamboree (et cetera...)

I CAUGHT MY ROBOS in chaos this morning. Not only have they chewed an entire issue of the Sun newspaper to squiggles in the past couple of days, creating bedding so deep it has combed their fur into frosted white colour matching the weather. But when I disturbed them today they quickly dropped all they were doing: the loud gnawing from the toilet tube ceased; the scratching and scrabbling from the outer corners stopped ~ and three tiny faces staring at me as if to say, "what do YOU want..?"

They ran out of hamster food over a month ago ~ by that I mean "hamster food in a glossy labelled packet"... meanwhile they've been living on breakfast cereals, granary bread and kitchen scraps, so they've hardly starved. Anyway they got really excited when I presented them with a courgette ("zucchini") top and what I call a "pumblechook" ~ that being the inner seed head of a red pepper with all the lovely crunchy bits pinging out... a pumblechook is only a red pepper's, however. You get a bumblechook from a green one; yellow's is a tumblechook and green with yellow flecks is a ker-mumblechook. And if you believe that you'll believe anything.

I did sleep last night and woke up very early indeed (well: 8am). Drank 4 cups of tea and methadone (I'm being so good). I'd like to say I'll be doing no heroin next week when a bit more money comes, but that really remains to be seen. Getting DSS money is linked so intimately with scoring (not spending the entire lot on drugs but a bit of it) that it's tended to confound past resolutions to take a break... but hey, as NA say: you can only do it one day at a time...

And on that note I'd better go. Tapping that out took ages because I'd squiggled it out in shorthand first and my net-time account's running low so I'm running against the clock which is highly stressful. I need to make sure this gets safely posted. OK have a cheery weekend y'all!

And I hope Xmas was nice to you...

Bitter Cold

IT IS THE MOST ABOMINABLY COLD WEATHER you can get without at least frost everywhere, if not snow... In fact by the ice-stick feel of my fingers Jack Frost may well be out and about tonight...

All I have done today is sleep till past 4pm (maybe a midmorning dose of methadone helped... not that it has any proper "sleeping pill" effect on me. But if I'm already a-drowse, or on the verge of sleep it does knock me off. All the effect it really has is to make me feel stone-cold normal. (Stone cold being an operative phrase as I feel chills far more on that than stoked up on gear...)

Anyway on waking I found myself glued (for want of anything better to watch) to Mary Poppins (the chimney & rooftop scenes) and The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe Or Narnia or whatever it's called (latest Hollywoodized version...) It's all a highly symbolic struggle between good and evil; that's what I got out of it. Anyway look I gotta go it is so very cold.... Laters...

PS RE Illustrations: top one is best I could get under Jack Frost (though it looks like the sort of storybook illustration I might have treasured had I had a childhood in rural Spain)... bottom is the beautiful, gorgeous, wondrous, etc Tara PT as mentioned in yesterday's dream

Terrible Nightmares and Attempted Robbery ... but a tolerable day!

IT'S BEEN A TOLERABLE DAY SO FAR... possibly because I have done nothing at all except doze doze doze in bed, then switch on Channel 4 where Friends was on followed by a Girls Aloud concert (I think Girl Bands are OK; it's boybands I can't stand, with all that Christ-style arm-throwy-outing and "I'm o-so sincere because I want to get in your knickers" heart-grabbing. It makes me sick... Anyway what was I saying... yeah done nothing except that and had a drink. And another drink. And a shower. And forced myself out to the shop because I'm desperate for sugar (or else no tea! I tried sugarless tea and really tried to stick with it but nothing doing. Ever since I woke up on a trolley under a hospital striplight (heroin overdose) and spent TWO DAYS in there (which is well unusual for overdose; usually they just chuck you out... but that was my second ever IV hit, as I'm sure they noticed by the state of my arms, so I probably got special treatment. I remember trying to wash and realizing I was covered in coloured sensors from those whirlybleep machines we all know from ER and Casualty... Ever since that I've been resolutely addicted to sugary tea (when I do drink it: in my heavy-boozing phase I glugged nothing but intoxicating liquor and maybe the odd sip of water... Right anyway what was I spouting on about... O yeah I found myself out here. I'm posting this in my old internet caff. I think they were not at all pleased to see me as they remember me shambling in daily and nightly in the most dreadful conditions. This is also the place I lost 0.4g of heroin which was highly annoying as that costs £15!

I had a dreadful nightmare 2 nights ago. We were supposed to be in a holiday home. An extensive palace of a home this was... my brother, my Dad and me. But I had crackheads and junkies surrounding me... My brother went off to do things of his own... my Dad was not at all pleased that these undesirables had followed me in the house (I had "let them in" only in the most passive way. The dream ended with me trying to escape by bus (a huge red double-decker London bus pulled up in the lobby of this 5-star hotel-sized and styled house only I could not run to it fast enough to get on... All this time some hassle was going on that I was supposed to meet my dealer where I grew up (and where summers seemed to last a million years). It all ended with the house catching fire. My Dad was REALLY upset by then. And I couldn't get out because so many of these crackhead-junkies were pressing round me in my way... wonder what THAT symbolizes..?

I next had a dream that I was in the company of the socialite Tara Palmer Tomkinson and she was being my new best friend. I don't usually like "socialites" and those dreaded tv-ified "it girls"... Tamara Beckwith who could play Cruella De Ville with no makeover always spouting "I I I: me me me..."... as for Paris Hilton and her punani-flashing.. who can say anything?!? But Tara PT has a ditzy charm. I admire her for kicking a blazing coke habit and she pushes herself: e.g. singing on celebrity bootcamp reality tv... Yeah I like Tara PT I think she's OK... I think this one symbolizes the fact that a better life and better friends are possible... (Can't see myself ever mixing with real socialites though...)

Yesterday was a crap day. Compounded by the fact that I returned home to see a black man I didn't know knocking at our front door. Instinctively I walked on past, in case he was a bailiff as much as anything ... then I thought "how long am I going to have to hang around pretending not to live here?" and irritatedly approached my own door. The man put on a cheesy smile and did that knuckle-knock thing they call "touch". Usually I would only indulge in that tripe to say goodbye to a dealer... "Who are you looking for?" I enquire. "John the rastaman..." I've been there approaching a month yet I'm still yet to eyeball all my fellow tenants... I tried to get out of dodgy guy what room rastaman supposedly lived in; he vaguely told me downstairs at the back. I unlocked the door, feeling thankful to have set it on security lock (that is: not just banging it shut, but turning the handle upwards so about five bolts insert themselves the length of the frame. This way nobody can get in even if they do smash the laminated glass... I noticed he moved to follow me but I swiftly slammed the door behind me. At first there was no answer, then an annoyed-looking Spanish guy opened up, yelling "no I don't know him" (black guy was by now waving in the most pathetically OTT cheery way) "DO NOT LET HIM IN!" So I went upstairs and paced about thinking "I need to go out again. Why should I feel prisoner in my own home because some would-be thief has come to pick on the poorest and most vulnerable at Christmas. And that is how I'd clocked him. Possibly looking for a crackhouse but most probably out to rob someone. But of course when I returned downstairs four minutes later he'd vanished. I made sure the door was fully locked again.

Well it's Xmas day and I've no definite plans. Valium Marilyn invited me to her's this afternoon, so if she phones I will come and watch Discovery Channel on her cable TV. She tells me her son is going away...

Valium Marilyn was in tears yesterday saying no Christmas Spirit was left and blah blah. The staff of McDonalds were staring at her like she was a space alien just because she was a bit benzo'd (though to them she would most likely have seem half drunk...) Then I cheered her up and got her to do an impression of a shrieking gypsy pensioner we both know at the top of her voice. We got funny looks from everyone but hey it's Christmas...

The Queen's Christmas Message is on in 40 minutes ... after that there should hopefully be a half decent movie and I have to make Chinese stir fry. If Valium Mal does call she won't have bothered to make Christmas lunch: it will be Quality Street and Doritos with dips and temazepam ~ I know her.

Righty-ho: gotta go. If your day has not gone merrily then I hope it's at least gone tolerably and may 2009 bring what you've wanted most of all...

PS my top picture, by the Spanish artist Goya, illustrates the origin of the English word "nightmare"... yes it really does have something to do with wild horses riding out of the inky black!

HM THE QUEEN CHRISTMAS MESSAGE 2008
Here's the Queen's Speech for any expats out there who'd like to view... or foreigners or Americans who've never heard HM's squeaky voice droning in the vaguest, most diplomatic "allude to everything; say nothing and don't rock the boat" message that comes out at 3pm sharp Xmas day by which time most are too sozzled or patriotic to switch channels...

Have a Good One and a Superior 2009!

TO THOSE OF YOU WHO CELEBRATE, here's wishing you a very merry Yuletide, Joyeux Noël, Fröhliche Weihnachten and Nadolig Llawen. (That last one's Welsh, which I did to GCSE at school...!!) I don't believe the actual festival of Christmas as celebrated now truly does commemorate the birth of our Lord and Saviour in a Christian way, but I respect that it does mean a lot to many people, hence the greetings.

I do believe in the testimony of Jesus Christ and that he is indeed our coming Saviour.

I just wish I had the wherewithal to put those beliefs into action!

Here's a festive quotation from the Bible (Revelation 19:11-16) If this catches you in the right frame of mind it might bring you out in shivers like it did me:

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no-one knows but he himself knows. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. "He will rule them with an iron sceptre." He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has the name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.

He who testifies to theses things says. "Yes, I am coming soon."
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God's people. Amen.
(Revelation 22:20, 21 ~ closing words of the Bible.)


THE POGUES FT KIRSTY MCCOLL: FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK
In countdowns of "favourite Christmas song... Ever!" this one's constantly in the top three precisely because it is NOT slushy... If you don't happen to know this one then clickonit it's absolute classic. Don't get dismayed by the term "fairytale" ... it's used ironically!



HAVE A BRILLIANT TIME EVERYONE AND DON'T OVERINDULGE!!
(And don't take advice from a roaring hypocrite like me!!)