OK no doggies today I promise you.

I'm TIRED. SICK AND TIRED OF BEING SICK AND TIRED ... as the saying goes. But not, unfortunately sick and tired enough.

I don't post about my own drugs very much these days because I am bored of it. If I'm bored I'm only going to be boring... so I keep my trap shut and fantasize instead about a more perfect life with a scruffy ro-ro (OK: first and only canine reference over and done with)... I have barely any veins left. My right ankle is swollen like a bowling pin. Yet still the using goes on and on and I'm just bored of it.

I have a tiny bag of gear lurking on the sideboard. There's a crisp £20 lying temptingly on the telly... and yet I've fully decided on doing Sunday drug-free. (Well, on methadone, of course, but no illicit drugs.)

"Just for today" as they say... Not that I have any sort of track record of success. But as the saying goes: if at first you don't succeed ~ try, try TRY AGAIN!

I have been desperately seeking any online resources for learning Japanese that are FREE and of GOOD QUALITY... and haven't really found any. Surely someone, somewhere has put SOMETHING up that's decent...? Oh well.

Seeing as I'm very slowly learning to read and write the language of the rising sun, I thought I'd have a look at the Japanese Bible. I had a hunch that the first word might well be the verb hajimeru, as in "hajemimashite" ~ the basic phrase you say when you meet someone. It literally means something like "let us begin"... hajimeru means to begin and ~ ta-daa! It is indeed the first word of Japanese Genesis 1:1 ("In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"... (The Japanese say hajime-ni "beginning-in", because they're Japanese and mad!))

創世記 1

1 はじめに神は天と地とを創造された。2 地は形なく、むなしく、やみが淵のおもてにあり、神の霊が水のおもてをおおっていた。

3 神は「光あれ」と言われた。すると光があった。4 神はその光を見て、良しとされた。神はその光とやみとを分けられた。5 神は光を昼と名づけ、やみを夜と名づけられた。夕となり、また朝となった。第一日である。

No of course I cannot read every word. But apart from はじめに "in the beginning" (and how hard was THAT to guess!?) I did recognize 光 "light" (let there be 光) and 一日 "the first day". Who knows? At this rate by 2016 I might be able to read the rest of it..!

POOR GORDON BROWN!

The Prime Minister is in trouble... Or at least he was on Thursday. So before this is totally old news, here's the email I sent to Vanessa Feltz the other day ~ she read it on her BBC London radio show!!

For those blessed to be continents away from the British general election, I should explain that Gordon Brown had been out canvassing when his assistant set up a conversation with an old Northern lady who appeared to be a staunch Labour supporter, so with news cameras rolling they had a short chat, only for her to burst into a tirade about Eastern European immigrants and "where did they all come from?" ("well it wasn't China!" said the witty Vanessa)... Once dragged away from this the flustered Prime Minister retreated to his car and, not realizing he was still miked up to Sky News, branded the old woman a "bigot" ~ and all media hell broke loose!


Good Morning Lovely Vanessa (she always calls us "Lovely Listeners")

What a load of rot some of your callers have been spouting this morning!

My feelings towards Gordon Brown have long been exceedingly mixed ~ as much as anything because he appears to have been so loath in the past EVER to admit to being wrong ~ as he has been so many times ~ proclaiming an end to boom bust would be a sterling example. I would have loved to hear him admit he was wrong over that one and apologize profusely...

But what has he done wrong this time?

Let off steam in the privacy of his own car? The Conservatives claim this shows "the real Gordon Brown" ~ well I say, if it does then it's all to the good. All he has done is call a bigot a bigot. What's so wrong about that?

And of course he has to say sorry IF he has caused offence. Had he branded his own comments "offensive", imagine the lovely soundbite that would have made!

PS I just realized I understood an entire Japanese sentence (OK, not a sentence, a clause ~ but I understand it all!!!:
神はその光を見て
~ it means "God saw this light". I cannot transliterate I'm afraid because I only just leared 神 is "God" when I first read this entry this evening and 光 I have long known to mean light ~ look! 光 you can see rays beaming out of the top 光光光... but I cannot for the life of me remember any of its pronunciations (most kanji have at least two very different readings that mean the same thing ~ the original Chinese pronunciation and the native Japanese word ~ It would be like drawing wavy lines and saying they read "water"... but also "aqua" as per the Latin... PPS did you know the EU has recommended (but not made compulsory) LATIN-language ingredients on chemically formulated products (where chemical names are the same across languages) like shanppoos, so instead of reading the majority ingredient as "water" in perfume etc we see "aqua"..! How international...