Bushbabies

FURRY FRIDAY-SATURDAY

Bushbabies, aka galagos come from Africa...


They're called bushbabies, because they love clinging to trees.


Sometimes they hug the trees, like this.


They also hug human hands.


A hollow log makes a good bedroom.


These babies are nocturnal. What amazing eyes!


Baby bushbabies are tiny (of course)...

Video:

IS ALL THIS BANGING ON ABOUT CHINESE annoying y'all?

I was desperate for a hobby, desperate for a heroin-replacement (granted: Chinese wouldn't make a good heroin-substitute for most people, but it does for me).
I was also desperate to educate myself. I wish to speak Chinese and Japanese fluently. There is nothing new about this goal, which has been with me since my teens. So I have decided (or fixated) on training myself up as a translator. To be a qualified translator, you need a postgraduate degree on top of a language BA. Most translators can offer at least two languages on top of their own, so there is no conflict between improving my German and French and studying Chinese. Especially as I could do that post-grad in Germany, which would effectively qualify me to translate Chinese into German as well as English. German is the number one business language of Europe (after English, of course) and Chinese, as we all know, is the most-spoken language anywhere on earth. So I doubt I'd be out of work...
I've been looking into BA courses in Chinese actually in China. Annual tuition fees start from about £1600 ($2500US) pa for four years.
One of the websites I consulted complained that many of these courses concentrate on reading and writing at the expense of listening and speaking. But who cares, when you can pop outside to an authentic Chinese noodle-stall and listen and speak to your heart's content?
One major major hurdle is that every course I have looked at imposes a meximum age limit of between 30 and 40 years ~ I am 39 next spring.
But where there's a will there's a way. I have a cunning plan up my sleeve that might hopefully put some oomph behind my appeal against this ridiculous regulation.
Oxford, Cambridge and London universities offer Chinese and Japanese studies, but the prospectuses state rather bafflingly that a prior knowledge of the language won't help your application that much. Plus they specify that their courses aren't suitable for native speakers. Looking closer I see why: these courses promise only to take you to about a year past A-level ~ which is where my German is now! Which all in all suggests that if I cannot do Chinese in China I may as well get on to a "Sinologie" course in Germany, killing two linguistic birds with one stone.
I desperately need a copy of Hammer's German Grammar (the standard advanced reference work). My written German is still pretty dire ~ despite my daily blogging attempts. I'm having less and less trouble reading zentraleuropäische books and websites as time goes by, which shows I'm at least making some progress. (And I do know the German for a corpse (eine Leiche), which means I can describe my face in the mirror at six in the morning...)
I do apologize once more if my whittering is boring. I have a slightly obsessive temperament, you might see... Which also might explain why I've found heroin so very hard to kick.
Right from the word go I had a sense that my drug addiction had turned my strengths against me ~ so now my strengths were weaknesses. When I love something I give it everything. I have loved "B" like nothing else. So I gave my entire life to heroin.
And that, my friends, has been the crux of my problem...

Illustrated: Chengdu (top), home of the University of Sichuan... famous for its Szechuan chicken (bottom)!

Chinese for today:
Zhe4 这=this shi4 是=to be ren4shi 认识=recognize
zhen1 真=really gao1xing4 高兴=happy bei1 杯=cup
jiu3 酒=alcohol ba 把=suggestion particle
ne 呢=question particle hui4 会=know how/can/will
ju2zi 桔子=orange 橘子 also = ju2zi, orange
ju2zi-zhi1 橘子汁 / 桔子汁 = orange juice
ma 吗 = question particle

The numbers refer to tones: 1 high level; 2 high rising; 3 mid-low-mid dipping 4 falling. No number=neutral tone (the de facto 5th tone).

Chinese names

我学会说中文

FOR £35 I obtained the best budget book+CDs language course I have encountered in all my years of linguistic dabbling. And best of all, she teaches characters along with the pinyin Europeanized text, so I'm writing Chinese right from the word go (去).

The author, Liz Scurfield, has 40 years' experieince teaching Chinese and is full of the kind of tips a westerner, who's slogged away at the language would be full of, but a native speaker who learned Chinese from the cradle would have a hard time explaining. E.g. to get the high rising tone, just raise your eyebrows as you speak. Works every time.

So I'm now very happy. Fun without drugs. Well... with fewer drugs, if the truth be told.

But hey, I'm au fait with Chinese computer imput already.

The following is my efforts at replicating lesson one's dialogue into simplified characters. I tapped it all in myself, from scratch, without highlighting and lifting texts from elsewhere, as I was limited to doing in Japanese. (I've not the faintest idea how the Japanese manage to input their language...)

This is a dialogue between Mr Li 李先生 and Mr Wang, 王先生. Wang means King, and it's the same motif inside the box which means "kingdom" 囯。Isn't that funky. There's plenty of rhyme and reason behind Chinese (especially rhyme).

李：王先生你好？ How are you Mr Wang?
王：李先生你好？ How are you Mr Li?
李：请坐。 Do sit down.
王：谢谢。 Many thanks.
李：请喝咖啡。 Do have some coffee.
王：谢谢，我不喝咖啡。 Thank you. I don't drink coffee.
李：那么中国茶行不行？ Well would Chinese tea be OK with you?
王：行谢谢你。我很喜欢喝中国茶。Yes thank you. I'm exceedingly fond of China tea.

If I can't get into that course in Germany I wanted to do, and provided I sell over ten million books (you need an eight-figure bank account to pay UK tuition fees, thanks to our kindly Tory government). I could opt instead to get a double first in Chinese and Japanese from Cambridge or Oxford. This could well cost me £30,000 in tuition fees alone (as opposed to about £3000 in Germany.) Cambridge only allow study of two Oriental tongues if you can demonstrate a high level of competency in at least one when you apply. I am nothing if not ambitious, so if I want to do this, I shall. The great thing about Oxbridge uni courses is you get to read loads and loads of lovely literary and historical texts. Unlike the more modern degree where you spend all day in a language lab pretending to give a presentation on Honda cars...

...If me and ambitious seem as congruous as Pope and Buddhist, by the way, then you certainly don't know me! You only know my depressed self. And all too many people ~ even some fairly close friends, unfortunately fall into that category ...

I must run. The local Greek shop has mysterious melted cheese-stuffed loaves and I must grab one before the local babushkas get 'em all...

Wasted Monday...

... NOT THAT THAT WASN'T UTTERLY FORSEEABLE.

My Friend in Need (and a "friend in need is a friend indeed") came round yet again and scuppered my plans for the entire day.

I made my displeasure very clear by ranting for about an hour and a half. I told him I had no interest in heroin whatsoever and was only into disappearing into town on my own with no drugs.

He wanted heroin (and crack). I told him all the heroin was rubbish. Crack is always rubbish because it's cocaine and cocaine is inherently crap. Like many drug addicts I used coke as pharmaceutical sugar to sweeten up my heroin. On its own ~ to me at least ~ it is and was an almighty waste of time. But he wanted to smoke crack in my house as well.

I said I wasn't doing this unless he bought me two £20 deals. In the end I backed down and settled for one £20 of crack and bought half a gram of heroin. The gram cost £40, which is over the odds, was at least 20% short (but I sold my old scales to a dealer ~ I so enjoyed weighing things on them. Not just drugs (which, surprisingly weren't underweight as often as I had previously supposed) but anything tiny and cute I could get my hands on ~ dead ladybirds, paperclips... drug wrappers... (when my late friend Lucky bought an ounce of "B" some years ago, the wrapping alone (cut-off black binbag plastic) weighed 0.3g) etc etc. These were the ordinary digital scales used for silver and gold, which weigh down to a tenth of a gram (one "point") ~ not diamond scales, which would go down at least to 2mg (a hundredth of a carat, which is also called a point).

Anyway anyway I didn't go into town. Didn't get my whizzy Mandarin (but I did purchase a tangerine from the corner shop instead ~ ho-ho!).

Also just to annoy me, I checked and re-checked the prospectus I was looking at in Deutschland and Chinese isn't in all editions. I cannot tell which edition it's in, as I'm limited to online versions with no copyright dates. So I was forced to email their office lamenting how "verwirrt" (confused) I was, though I'm not sure I selected quite the appropriate word under the circumstances... and would they please clarify the matter. I've yet to receive any reply, which shocked me as I believed the Germans had an unrivalled reputation for efficiency.

Anyway I SHALL speak fluent Chinese whether higher education comes into the question or not. Plus Russian, because I am now determined to read Dead Souls (not as gruesome as it sounds, the dead souls refer to a kind of 19th century identity theft) and Anna Karenina in their original русский.

In readiness for all this I've already set my computer to type in Cyrillic (which will involve learning to type from scratch as the Russian letters don't sit on keys corresponding to their Latin equivalents (unlike, eg, the Greek keyboard). Instead of QWERTY my whizzy Russian keypad goes ЙЦУКЕН (Y, TS, U, K, E N) ~ highly confusing. A "Russian phonetic" layout does exist, which corresponds to qwerty (so Д (D) is on the D-key). But Windows 7 doesn't support it.

The Pinyin Chinese is lots of fun. E.g. if I tap in feng I get 风 (the character I wanted, it's the (simplified) feng of fēng shuǐ 风水, which says "wind-water"...) ... other fengs are: 封 逢 缝 蜂 丰 冯 枫 or 疯! It's actually dead easy to use so I'm looking forward to lots of fun with Chinese.

With heroin I am more seethingly furious than ever before. I am not particularly happy with my "friend in need" either...

I must ping into London today to get these books as a tube strike kicks in at 7pm tonight, after which the entire town shall plunge into chaos...

Eating eating eating me alive!

STUPIDLY I went and downloaded the most up-to-date PDF Broschüre for the course I have set my heart on.
I hate setting my heart on anything, because I might not get it. But I've set my heart on this. The desire to do it is eating me up inside. In fact I feel like I'm festooned with army ants and being eaten alive. I feel like a hydrogen bomb inside me is about to detonate at any moment.

This is what they say about the languages on offer, re the application process:

3.2 Zulassungsvoraussetzungen
Für das Bachelorstudium besteht in den Sprachen Englisch, Französisch, Spanisch eine Zulassungsbeschränkung (Numerus clausus). Der NC-Wert ergibt sich für jedes Semester neu aufgrund der freien Studienplätze, der Abiturnoten, der Wartezeiten und der Anzahl der BewerberInnen. Eine Vorhersage über die für das jeweilige Zulassungsverfahren geltenden Grenzwerte kann daher nicht getroffen werden.
Als Zugangsvoraussetzungen für das Studium am FTSK sind neben der allgemeinen Hochschulreife oder einem äquivalenten ausländischen Abschluss fundierte Kenntnisse in Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Englisch, Französisch und Spanisch und Grundkenntnisse in Chinesisch erforderlich, falls diese Sprachen als Fächer gewählt werden.
Genaue Informationen zu den Eingangsvoraussetzungen für alle Sprachen entnehmen Sie bitte den Merkblättern der einzelnen Sprachen, die Sie auf der Seite http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/261.php finden.

Well I have to read it in German ~ so can you!!

To summarize, English, French and Spanish ~being so highly popular, are subject to entry restrictions in numbers. Being as English is my mother tongue and the only language over which I feel I have some genuine mastery, I don't have much choice in the matter. But I can avoid French by not applying for it, and doing Russian instead, as I've already decided. Some basic knowledge of Chinese is required. So I'm determined to trounce the other students by achieving A Level standard (or higher) before I even start.
As you cannot fail to have noticed, I have a genuine fascination for Chinese characters. I already know about 2-300. If I could multiply this by a factor of ten, I'd have a pretty good basic reading knowledge in Chinese.

I couldn't find any entry restrictions or requirements for Russian, but would feel compelled to reach at least GCSE (lower school certificate) level, simply to underline my interest (and distinguish myself from the vulgar hoardes I'll be up against in the application process). The greatest novelists of all time wrote in Russian ~ Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenyev, Pasternak... imagine how amazing it would be to read those in the original?!

My biggest worry of all doesn't concern waiting lists because I'm English or beating others at Chinese: it's the German language test to which I'll be subjected. I tried on before on the Goethe Institut website (admittedly when my German was clagged up with 18-years of unpractised rust) and got a dreadful score.

As I shall point out, not having a teacher here, I have focused my energies on acquiring a passive reading vocabulary. And it's working amazingly. The novel I'm reading, Seegrund, which means Lake-Bed is a thriller about a dead body found... you guessed it. In a pool of blood in the snow on the banks of a frozen lake. I was astonished to comprehend the words for river-bank (das Ufer) and corpse (die Leiche) ~ both of which I've picked up and remembered in the past couple of months. So you see reading books and keeping my amateurish German blog has got me somewhere after all. There are many expressions for which I know two or three words in German, just as I do in English. I get a real sense of achievement from this. Especially as I DROPPED OUT of a languages degree in the early 90s in disgrace and despair, convinced I would never achieve any degree of mastery over German, let alone any other tongue. Somehow, amazingly, the magic has happened.

I think my turning point came one night as I listened to BBC World Service radio. I realized that across the world there are millions of people who have never set foot on Anglophone soil, who have learned to speak our language fluently by following radio broadcasts and slogging their way through English literature, dictionary in hand, referring and re-referring constantly to every word they're not entirely sure about. So I did this and look! I'm seriously considering applying to uni in Deutschland. How amazing is that. Six months ago I wouldn't even have been able to read the prospectus...
Well enough of my babbles.

It's 5:34. The clocks went back last night, meaning darkness now falls not long after 4pm. It's dead romantic ~ like a Siberian goods train yard full of onion-picking babushkas, with immigrant workers hiding in the cattle trucks smoking Cyrillic cigarettes and babbling away in Chinese. (I must fit the two new languages into this silly fantasy.) German, Russian and Chinese are also, of course languages of the former Communist Block. Life behind the Iron
Curtain has long held an enduring fascination for me. That was a big reason why I so loved German doing at school. When I started the A-level course Germany was separated by 200 yards of watch-towers, searchlights and tripwired minefields. By the time I actually sat the exams the wall had come tumbling down and a new world order was upon us.

What the future world order shall bring, I shudder to think. It's capitalism capitalism capitalism everywhere. I'm a capitalist, but I see excesses everywhere. And greed is not always good, despite what Gordon Gecko would have us believe.
Anyway I must ping. I wonder if anyone actually read this post to the end? If so, I commend you with a 金奖章 jīn jiǎngzhāng ~ a gold medal!



PS Here's an entertainment for you: the oldest recording JRR Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, et al... he appears in this early English Linguaphone course in units 13 "the wireless" and 20 "at the tobacconist's"! What a blast from the past. (He was well into his "pipe-weed" as anyone who's seen the films will know...)

Link: Sprache, Kultur und Translation - Chinesisch

中文明天 Chinese Tomorrow

WHY OH WHY OH WHY is the desire to speak Chinese eating me alive?
I can tell you why: because I'm obsessive-compulsive anyhow + I'm an addict + I'm desperately fixating on this because I can tell you from experience that immersing myself in foreign language is the only brain-switching off technique I've found so far that in any way compares to heroin. I get a high off writing fiction, too, but that's more like crack. A switching on, rather than switching off. And I don't want heroin. Or crack. I wanna educate myself. I've followed BBC Chinese classes on late night television and had no problem with the language. It is far, far easier than German ~ which might sound counter-intuitive. But you have to bear in mind German is an inflexional language, which means lots of information that can only be presented in tabular form. Asian languages require no such grammar tables, because words never change. (E.g. you never have to conjugate a verb.) Once you know the right words, and know the word-order, you just slam them together and hey-presto, you're communicating.
I've looked all over the internet for free Mandarin lessons, but what's there is very scrappy. I'm after an in-depth immersive course. I am willing to spend £60 or more on books and CDs. That £60 would only get blown on heroin if I didn't buy books, so I'm not being quite as extravagant as I might sound.
Mr "I want some heroin" DID indeed show up today and the stuff was such rubbish I injected half a gram in one go and was still walking. Half a gram of decent heroin would have most people blue in the face and not breathing if you injected it direct in a vein in 10 seconds. I am utterly fed up of this drug. Even when it's "strong" I can't really feel it. I have overdosed several times and even an overdose I would rate as 4/10 on a scale of how strong drugs can feel. On this scale crack would score an 8 or 9, ketamine a 9 and LSD (in brain-frying doses) a 10. Ketamine and acid are literally so strong that on a full-on trip you don't know who you are, where you are, cannot understand what anybody is saying, cannot perform the simplest of tasks (e.g. getting a key in a door). I once visited a 24 hour garage on acid to buy food and beverages for other assorted tripheads. The shop was fully open and for some reason the guy working there had decided to tip all the biscuits off the shelves and on the floor. Literally all I could see was custard creams and chocolate digestives in psychedelic peaks and valleys kaleidescoping on for ever and ever. I returned home with something pink, something yellow and something green. I had no idea what they were (drinks, biscuits, something...), but the colours looked amazing.
I can't believe I'm actually sharing this information with the world. I can't believe I ever got into drugs of any type. I can't believe I've had conversations with my own family about needle exchanges and hepatitis testing.
Sometimes I still can't believe I'm a heroin addict at all. How on earth did I end up in this ridiculous situation? Drugs are ridiculous. I am ridiculous. I am also very fed up. On Monday morning first thing I'm fleeing to the bookshops of central London where I shall indulge this alternative new fixation of mine. I don't care how sad anyone thinks it is. Nothing is as sad as being hooked on heroin.

I can't read aloud any of those characters 中文明天 I put up top, but am already familiar with all four from Japanese. The last one means the sky 天国 says "tengoku", which means "the Kingdom of Heaven" or "paradise" in Japanese. For some reason that was my favourite word ...





PS 中文明天 says "Chinese (language) tomorrow" (zhōngwén míngtiān) in Chinese; the same phrase in Japanese is 中国語明日 (chūgokugo ashita) though you'd actually say something more like 明日の中国語 (ashita-no chūgokugo) "the Chinese language of tomorrow) or 明日に中国語 (ashita-ni chūgokugo) "tomorrow-in Chinese language" (Japanese love putting things the wrong way round) ~ all of which throws to the four winds the notion that the Chinese and Japanese express like ideas in the same characters ~ because they obviously don't!

PPS if you want to read an article that chimes in with most of my own views on the German language, expressing them better than I ever could, click here

I will go on taking heroin till I die...

... SO YESTERDAY I SPENT MY DRUG MONEY ON BOOKS (and food). £10 got me a 972-page German tome called Der Turm (The Tower") by Uwe Tellkamp. £3.50, beautiful hardback with acid-free cream paper. Set in the former DDR... well I can't tell much about it as I'm only on page 7. But it's set behind the Iron Curtain and I have a thing about life in former communist states. The other books were give up smoking for 50p, Byron Childe Harold/etc 30p special offer (minuscule hardback) and Peyton Place (80p) by Grace Metalious, who died of alcoholic cirrhosis at 39 and sold well over 20,000,000 copies of this book about moral degeneracy in a drab New England Town. This reprint comes with intellectual introduction by some academic and I have to say Metalious's literary style isn't bad (nowhere near as bad as Jacqueline Susann's, if you're into trash fiction of the 1950s and 60s).

The rest of my tenner went on food.

I was actually hoping for Teach Yourself Mandarin Chinese book and CD set for £5 (well I can hope, can't I?) but Mandarin will have to wait till next week.

The urge to educate myself is eating me up inside. An all-consuming craving, far worse than any drug-craving I've experienced for a very long time.

Today will be a test day. I KNOW a friend who will come to me in need (he always does) and how on earth I will get out of that situation without scoring heroin I have no idea.

By the way there is a terrible drought on at the moment. The drug purity has fallen ~ even in the best stuff I've found ~ to less than a third of what it normally was. I can tell this by the way methadone holds me so much better than any street heroin I've bought in weeks.

My favourite hobby is complaining about the lousy gear. So people assume I'm being ripped off, introduce me to their dealer and I'm even MORE BITTERLY DISAPPOINTED with minuscule bags of even poxier gear!

In my opinion anything that's not China white is rubbish anyhow. Heroin is properly white, not brown.

The worst stuff that was around can't have been more than 1% pure ~ if that. And it was full of some sort of resin that re-congealed on cooling, making the stuff uninjectable unless you filtered it three times.

The root of the shortage is blight on Afghanistan's poppy crop, reducing this year's opium yield from around 8000 tonnes (enough to make 800 tonnes of heroin) to something like 2500 tonnes opium (250 tonnes heroin). The UK alone uses an estimated 35 tonnes annually (at import strength), so if there's blight next year it's curtains for heroin (hurrah!)

Hurrah, because I can be free. I feel like a pan of boiling water, seething with pent-up energy and furious steam. One day I will go out and smack the world right between the eyes, because the world deserves it.

Meanwhile I have to 1. give up heroin 2. learn fluent German 3. write several bestselling books 4. learn fluent Chinese 5. learn fluent Russian 6. get on course I've been wittering on about 7. graduate with summa cum laude or whatever the phrase is.

Then at long last I will be qualified to do something.

When I was little and heard foreigners going blubble-blubble-blubble, I thought they all spoke one language called Foreign. I was determined to learn this mystery tongue, so nobody could prattle over my head again.

Also I was affronted by the way almost all foreigners appeared to be fluent in English, giving my family, friends and I no linguistic privacy whatsoever almost anywhere in the world.

My goal is to speak at least 10 languages fluently, including Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Thai ... blah blah. If I'd only not been so incredibly lazy all my life I could be a long way to achieving this goal. As it is, I barely speak fluent English!

My goblin-bitten computer cable replacement is here! Whoopeee! Now I must run in the shower. I'm so minging I'm infectious...

Where there's a will there's a way...

I AM STILL DEAD SET on doing this uni course. The prospectus says you can choose an A-language (your mother tongue, in my case English); the B-language would automatically be German. These two languages you learn to translate into and out of (written translation; interpreting the spoken word is another skill entirely and you can't do it at home in pajamas, so I'm not into that...). Translating INTO a foreign language is a tall order, so I need to get as far beyond my A-level German as possible. They say they have 800 students with mother tongue English on these courses (Bachelor and Masters), so to get in I will need to distinguish myself as much as I possibly can. The C-language can be any one of: Chinese, French, Italian, Modern Greek, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish. This language you translate out of, into your mother tongue ie Chinese to English. I would luuurve to speak Chinese, it's one of my life goals (as well as Japanese, which isn't on the syllabus). The D-language, which is entirely optional you don't learn to translate, you just learn it. The choices are: French, Italian, Modern Greek, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish (note Chinese isn't there). Originally I would have gone for French, which I already have A-level (higher school certificate) in.

Having banged on ~ quite truthfully, of course ~ about WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY in my previous post, I realized I was limiting myself by present circumstance and convenience. If I could have a magic wand waved over my head and speak fluent French, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish or Russian ~ I'd actually choose Russian.

So Chinese and Russian it is. And I don't see why I should compromise.

So I'm on a hunt for Linguaphone courses in Russian and Chinese. I need to get as fluent as I possibly can before applying. If learning those two from scratch simultaneously sounds a tall order, just bear in mind it's what I'd be doing at uni anyhow ~ if I can prove I've done it myself, at home with no teacher, just CDs and books, and if I can get my German as fluent as I possibly can, this will stand hugely in my favour when I apply.

I'm not too worried about having to account for my lost years. Nobody is owed an explanation for my life and I can justifiably claim ill-health.

You see I'm working to convince myself here, not you, but if you have any comments I'd be glad to hear them.

I wouldn't expect even to apply until this time next year at the absolutely earliest. Interviews for college places are generally held the following spring (2011). And I wouldn't be able to start until October 2011. This feels very fast. I cannot really envisage myself commencing until the year 2012. And as I say, for a course like this, which is obviously going to attract the crème de la crème (nobody leaving the British educational system at 18 would have German good enough to go straight to a course like this, unless they had German family or some other advantage ~ the standard of language tuition in this country is abysmally low...

... so these are my thoughts for today. Hope I haven't bored y'all too much ...!


PS My apologies for having visited NONE of you for AGES. Until my goblin-nibbled cable replacement comes I'm limited to half-hour dashes at the local internet café...

I want to get qualified

DO ANY OF YOU REMEMBER the language course I found in Germany that I was banging on about some months ago? It's the only course on the face of the earth that I actually want to do, because unlike a straight language degree it's actually a course in TRANSLATION, so it would qualify me to do something I know I'd be good at.

Plus I could study German and two other languages.

If you're reading this on American soil, you need to bear in mind that European university courses are always specialist honours degrees. There's no "major" as such. You do a degree in English or law or physiology or whatever with little scope to "read" much else. Which was part of my problem before. I had too many interests...

Last year's prospectus annoyed me because there's an undergraduate version (for me: I don't have a bachelor degree) plus a postgraduate version for those already in posession of a BA. The only difference so far as I could discern was that the postgraduate offered Chinese in the list of available "C" languages, whereas the undergraduate version didn't. Which really annoyed me, as I'd love to do Chinese. It's not that difficult, I never had trouble with tones when I learned holiday Thai some years ago, plus I have a good memory for characters. You might have noticed over time that I have a thing about foreign scripts. I think most of them look really funky.

Anyway I just checked and they've CHANGED THE PROSPECTUS so I could now do exactly what I wanted to: English-German/German-English Chinese-English (translation) + French (not to translate, just to speak it). I already have A levels in German and French.

Also I just found out that those German ICE trains, due to depart London-Frankfurt within a couple of years would take me to within an hour of Mainz, which is where that course is... is this a sign?

I have already started and dropped out of TWO uni courses... perhaps as the saying goes "third time lucky". I don't know how on earth I would fund this, though we ARE in the EU for the time being, so I ought to be eligable for local as well as European funding, especially as I would be studying two European languages. German tuition fees are a fraction of those in Britain (which are about to skyrocket). The only way I can think of paying my way through without ending up in huge debt would be to write a bestseller.

If this course is so unsuitable, I don't understand why I keep coming back to it in my mind. I've not found one like it anywhere else.

As the saying goes WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY. And you're supposed to keep your eyes on the goal, not the obstacles.

My legs are almost healed now. Valium Marilyn whose eyes are up the wall has STILL not seen a doctor. I told her to go to her own, who knows her, knows she hasn't got a "lazy eye" and will see straight away what's wrong, and probably know what it's likely to be.

Sprache, Kultur und Translation Brochure (sorry only in German) http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/fbpubl/brosch/FTSK-Broschuere.pdf

Healing leg

I KNOW THESE aren't exactly my legs pictured, but mine are as clean as this woman's jeans are white and tight fitting.

The abscess on the right leg is going down nicely. No longer does the calf look like a red bowling pin with an erupting volcano upon it. It looks mildly pink with a post-eruption Mount Saint Helens (minus flattened pine trees for miles around...)

I'm feeling much better in some ways. But of course I'm still depressed, so I'm really enjoying that. Drinking lots of hot cups of tea in front of morning television, dreading going outside and pigging out on Mr Kiplings mixed fruit selection cakes and vanilla ice cream...

I really miss not having internet at home (thank you, cable-nibbling goblin) and I miss y'all. Sorry to make everyone worry. (What's new.) I really am better...

... BUT I have a medical question. This is serious and real:

Does anybody know what it means if you have splitting migraine-style headaches for weeks on end, accompanied by severe double vision and one of your eyes becomes mis-aligned, so instead of looking directly at me, it's looking down and to the right. While the other eye functions as normal.

This isn't my problem, but a 65 year old friend of mine has it and I keep telling her to go to the doctor, not to waste her time at Opticians (the optician she did see deserves to be shot). As far as I know she STILL hasn't been to her doctor or to Moorfields Eye Hospital, which is quite easy to get too from here (remember I had to go a few months ago when I had a smut in my eye all night and all the next morning and it just would not wash out...)

I have tried not to mention things like "brain tumour", but I'm dead worried about her. And she's one of these people who the more she worries the LESS she's likely actually to go in and get it looked at (who does that remind you of?)

Answers please! I'm dead worried...

Off to the Doctor's...

I'M OFF to the doctor's in a moment (and dreading it). But I have to go...

The abscess on my other leg (did I mention that one?) exploded with the help of a pair of sterilized nail scissors. Strawberry milkshake pus blobbering out. In the middle was a snotty green "eye". Now it's just running with a bit of fluid and closed over. It doesn't hurt nearly as bad as it did when it was full to bursting...

... ukh. I know I might sometimes give the impression that I love pus and abscesses, but I don't. What I love about them is squeezing them dry and cleaning them out. I don't like pus at all. Especially blocked-drain-stenching dribbles ~ as were running out of my left leg.

My left leg has healed very well after I "accidentally" picked the old scab #2 off, which had repeatedly been stuck back down (by me). Then I'd have a good peer into the pustulating catacombs of near-death that lay beneath... I noticed it always had a drop of something that looked like snot on the reverse side, which I was assuming was necessary in order to get the thing to re-stick to my leg. The scab really reeked of rotten chicken fillets that have been a week too long in the fridge...

Then I realized the focus of the infection might actually BE on this scab, so I got rid of it and ... TADAAA! Thank you God. It has eventually sealed and dried over and no longer stinks bad and is getting smaller. So I'm on the road to recovery.

My back is also better. I can walk more than 10 paces without having to rest on a garden wall or street railings. When I found myself in places with nothing to lean upon I was utterly helpless and stuck. I wasn't so much in terrible pain as the utter exhaustion of my muscles pulled all out of shape...

I'm gonna have to run, else I get terminated again, but thanks for all your good wishes. I would have gone hospital if it had got really bad, but I started feeling better and am clearly over the worst.

(Found the picture online, my wounds are a bit like those ...)

I'm "back"

BUT I STILL HAVEN'T GOT THE POWER CABLE. I've not been well enough to go anywhere. I can barely walk the length of my own road. It hurts to do anything. I feel 105. I take rests on neighbours' garden walls with their moggie circling my legs and purring. I don't know what I've done but I've done my back in and I feel like an old pensioner. One of these days I'm going to drop and not be able to get up... that day is closer and closer. On a brighter note that wound on my leg is healing, having pussed up every pair of jeans I own. I cannot cover it as it's impossible to remove any kind of dressing without ripping it open. Blood and pus and the reek of dead flesh are everywhere. I am exhausted. The only good thing is I lost my appetite, which is saving money on food. I have a dr's appointment on Monday. Hopefully I will make it out alive again..(!) Akh! I've got to do, else I will get terminated yet again...

The Goblin is back!

THAT NAUGHTY GOBLIN has bitten my computer cable. So I've no power.

Actually no accident happened. The cable just wore itself out. Rather prematurely, in my opinion, but I know old age was the problem, as just before it went completely, you had to twiddle it so it was in one precise position to make power come through ~ like a mobile phone charger on its last legs...

So I'm waiting on a new goblin cure...

... meanwhile I've decided to pen a kiddybook. And I'm hacking through something in German by someone called H G Adler.

Must dash, as I'm on a public computer and I shall be terminated!

Laughing Babies

Cow & Gate laughing babies ~ famous TV ad



Is 9-month old Ethan drunk?! He keeps falling over!



Giggling quadruplets (hilarious!)

Canary Song

FEATHERY SATURDAY...

Five minutes from my house is a flowershop with a canary, who sits outside in a cage singing his feathery little head off. Today he was singing so loud I could hear him right across the main road!



PETER GABRIEL; KATE BUSH: DON'T GIVE UP

Don't give up
'cause you have friends
Don't give up
You're not the only one
Don't give up
No reason to be ashamed
Don't give up
You still have us
Don't give up now
We're proud of who you are
Don't give up
You know it's never been easy
Don't give up
'cause I believe there's a place
There's a place where we belong



WISHING Y'ALL AN AMAZING WEEKEND ...

Kate Bush

I dreamed about Kate Bush last night.

Signed to EMI Records at 16, she released her first album aged 19.

Her biggest hit (and the first self-penned single by a female to hit #1 in the UK) was Wuthering Heights...



... her next release was the haunting Man With The Child In His Eyes ...

The never-ending freight train ...

THIS IS ONE THING I find ridiculous about Britain. Not only are our skyscrapers embarrassingly squat at a mere 50-floors maximum (pah!) ~ but our goods trains are far too short. They should be like this American one, only longer.
And doesn't it sound amazing!)

The train to China!

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT is planning a transcontinental high speed rail link that could take passengers from London to Beijing in as little as 48 hours!

Now I know where I wanna go by train next after Berlin!

When I'm in Beijing I'd love to take the Himalayan express to Lhasa in Tibet. At 15000 metres it's the highest railway in the world, with oxygen tanks on all trains in case passengers get altitude sickness!

As well as the Euro-route, the Chinese government are also planning a line via Korea to TOKYO.



The future's bright. The future's on rails!

Huge Bag Found on Street!

SURELY THIS IS A SIGN! I found an enormous sports bag ~ almost big enough to hold golf clubs and hence lots of German books and clothes ~ with trundlesome wheels on the bottom at the end of the next road along from me yesterday afternoon, so I thoroughly enjoyed trundling it behind me, imagining I was on the way to the Saint Pancreas International for the beginning of my Berlin expedition.

I know what y'all are thinking: Let's wait and see what actually happens. I've heard enough bluster and guff from this blogger to keep a fleet of hot air balloons afloat!

Well I am going to Berlin. Berlin is one of my top three "most want to see" cities on earth, along with New York and Tokyo.

I don't know how on earth I'm going to get there, by the way. Not a single website I've found will sell me one all-in ticket London to Berlin return. I don't know why. Only last month I heard a government minister blustering about high-speed rail infrastructure. What's the point of all those whizzy trains and new tracks if you can't go where you want? I am NOT going by plane, unless I really have to. It's the stopovers along the way (and it's looking like Paris at the moment, with a €50 sleeper "couchette" each way, which would push the cost of tickets up to £170) that are half the fun. If I took the Eurostar out of London on a Sunday, I could see the Paris bird-market, which is amazing. All those feathery little pixies tweetling away on the pavements...

Today I found a book by my illustrious old German teacher, who (I found out years later) was being tipped as a potential Nobel laureate ~ until he died in a car crash in 2001. Austerlitz by W G Sebald. He was known to us at UEA as Max Sebald and he taught my German grammar class. OK, I seem to recall it might have been just once when the ordinary teacher was sick, but he did teach me German grammar!

Click here for a beautiful blogger's writeup on the marché aux oiseaux in Paris ...

I'm going to Berlin!

200mph/320kph GERMAN ICE TRAINS will run direct London to Frankfurt in three years' time, it was announced last week. I found out at the same time that Deutsche Bahn offer fares (one-way though ~ there had to be a catch!) from London to anywhere in Germany for under €50! The only (other) catch is you currently have to change trains at Brussels. A rail website gave two prospective rail routes to Berlin.
ROUTE 1: Eurostar London to Brussels Midi; Brussels to Cologne; Cologne to Berlin. Each journey taking about two hours.
ROUTE 2: Eurostar to Paris Nord in late afternoon; metro (or just walk 10 mins) to Gare de l'Est; night train direct to Berlin. If you don't get a berth and are willing to camp out in an ordinary seat the fare is under €30 one way!
I LOVE TRAINS anyhow, but it's the fact that you're hardly allowed any luggage on budget flights that really swung it for me.
I wanted to return home with a couple of year's worth of brilliant German books. That is, a weight-restriction-busting entire suitcase full of weighty tomes. Which you can't even keep with you on an aeroplane, and then if you kick off at the terminal because your luggage has basically been STOLEN, BA will prosecute and slap you with a lifetime ban (if you're Naomi Campbell)...
(A THIRD OPTION could be to fly, e.g. by Air Berlin ~ and buy a Kindle!)
SO I THOUGHT ~ if this is possible on one ticket; and most things are possible if you want them enough ~ it might be nice to overnight in Brussels, take a late night train to Cologne, spend the day there, moving on at night to Berlin arriving late at whatever room I've booked there (or park bench/space under a bridge (joke! I'm not into that kind of holiday any more. I "celebrated" new year 1991 going into 1992 with a crazed Japanese tourist, sleeping with homeless Berbers at Fez station. My Welcome to 1992 came at 6am when an angry station master started hitting my companions with a broom. He stopped what he was doing and looked aghast when he spotted my blond hair and pale face. In a way it was good he woke us up as I'd woken at five, convinced the poor old man next to me had died in the frosty night.)
Anyway, back to Berlin. I'm so excited. I'm going somewhere! At last!
Now I need my eyes and teeth seeing to. No cig-stained gnashers and new glasses or contact lenses. I'm not travelling Europe with my current intellectual scarecrow look.
Also I was looking into taking a night train to Budapest or Prague. (Budapest, I think. Everyone does Prague.)
I'm so excited! All these years of German and did you know, I've yet to set foot on German soil!
You'll all know when this happens as pictures of clean streets and exotic posts shall suddenly appear ...
In times past, I had always assumed this type of expedition would have to wait until I'd cleaned myself up enough to be OFF METHADONE.
I didn't realize, you see, that I'm allowed to travel with methadone ~ which they'd give in pills to prevent spillage tragedies. All I need do is provide proof of travel (ie a ticket) and enough notice and the druggieservice will give a certificate saying I'm entitled to hobnob across the EU with hardcore narcotics in my possession...
It's nearly 12 years since I went anywhere abroad. My feet are itching now, even more than that pussing wound on my leg!

***I JUST CHECKED AIR BERLIN's prices and was quoted €294.95 departing London Stanstead on September 28, returning from Berlin on October 7! Something tells me it's gonna be the train.***

Deutsche Bahn: bahn.de
Rail Booking: seat61.com
European Rail Ticket: raileurope.com
SNCB Europe: b-europe.com/Travel
British Rail Tickets: thetrainline.com

AN INTERRAIL (EURAIL) PASS valid for travel on 5 days out of 10 costs only £224!
http://www.internationalrail.com/interrail/interrail-global-pass.aspx

A NEW COSTUME DRAMA hit our screens tonight. Downtown Abbey on ITV. In common with the BBC's dreary, bourgeois Larkrise to Candleford, it's an original, not based on any classic novel.* But it's quite good. A modern Upstairs Downstairs. And it stars Dame Maggie Smith. If you're reading this on foreign shores, keep a look out for it. If you like historical drama, you'll probably like this. I think historical is the only stuff produced for British TV that's in the same league as the best American telly.

My one gripe with the genre is its tendency to reinterpret the past in the light of modern (politically correct) outlooks. For example the master of the house objects to a war-wounded servant being referred to as a cripple. "I hate that word." But in those days that was the expression; nothing condescending or insulting was meant by it. Here's the trailer. Perhaps someone'll load a longer extract to Youtube by next week ...

*that statement isn't quite true: according to the BBC's website, Lark Rise is based on Flora Thompson's memoir of her Oxfordshire childhood...



THE WOUND ON MY LEG is less manky since I stopped covering it up and have been cleaning it with alcoholic ("pre-injection") swabs every few hours. It isn't oozing chocolate sauce, just a hint of strawberry. It still smells like a drain, just not as strong. My wound and I are off to hospital tomorrow to see what the emergency doctors think of it...

I hope y'all had a cheery weekend. What are you doing next week? I'm making a start cleaning my life up in a literal sense. My house is a mess. I have that festering sore on my leg. Not a clean stitch to wear. I have to wash my jeans as they've absorbed pus down the leg. So I'm starting by laundering my clothes so I can skulk into casualty (that's the ER to you Americans) looking at least vaguely respectable. Then I'll get the wound seen to and hopefully dressed. Then I can set about cleaning my house. It was cleaning my house that set it off last time, with things knocking into it making it bleed. It's been itching lately. Itching is a good sign with these things; in my experience it tends to mean they're healing.

The Stew Catastrophe!

LAST WEEK I made a wonderful stew with lamb and noodles {not noodles ~ DUMPLINGS; Knödel!} (I translated this post from German) and delicious spices. The ingredients were: 1kg (2.2lbs) neck of lamb; 2 large red onions; half a bulb (about 5 cloves) fresh garlic; a double handful mushrooms; a double handful okra/gumbo/ladies' fingers; 2 huge carrots; one tin black beans; one can chopped tomatoes.

The herbs and spices were:
Half teespoon ginger
Half teespoon garam masala
Half teespoon each: Tescos Value, Chinese and Jamaican (Mr Brown's) currypowder
2 tablespoons Lea & Perrins Worcester Sauce
About a third of a teaspoon Chinese five spice seasoning
About three teaspoons "chicken seasoning" (salt, 30% paprika, celery... etc)
Home-dried mint leaves
Mixed herbs
Half teaspoon Colmans English Mustard

I cooked it slowly for at least three hours, after which time the lamb was so tender it was literally falling off the bone. It did taste slightly burnt, which I blamed on the new pan...

The next day I reheated it to add my dumplings. Catastrophe! It came back all burnt! Like a liquid barbecue. Ugh. I could only eat the meat (I quite like incinerated meat). But carbonized vegetables are not to my taste.

It wasn't like everything went black or anything like that. Just this horrible burnt flavour pervaded everything. Not nice. And such a shame as otherwise the spicing, the dumplings... everything was perfect.

Where did I go wrong? Was my new pan too thin? Did I reheat too rapidly?

Or did a goblin sneak into my kitchen when I was too busy losing my old broadband down the loo and mess everything up..??!?


PS- You don't think excessive stirring (well, only once every 20 mins - is that excessive??)... you don't think that might have messed it up, do you...??

Hammy Saturday!

THESE ARE MY (LATE) ROBOROVSKI PYGMY HAMSTERS
Bashful, Itchy and Spherical... who were only 2in/5cm long fully grown ...



HELLO YOU TINY PYGMIES!




HAMSTER SLIDE SHOW



Wishing y'all a wonderful weekend ...

Broadband is back!

I HAVE A NEW SIM CARD firmly taped into the dongle from which a naughty goblin stole it (yes ~ when I was fast asleep. My life is nothing if not bizarre). I searched EVERYWHERE for the missing card and no sign. The only way it can have possibly left my house is by getting stuck to the sole of my boots and trodden out (highly unlikely; I checked the tread and it's not of SIM-card-grabbing proportions) or getting stuck on my bum, falling off in the loo and getting flushed away (my own pet theory). Or God took it to stop me wasting time on the internet (which is quite possible, in my opinion). Or a goblin sneaked in and stole it (my second favourite theory, though I actually believe in God more than goblins). So there we go.

NO BIG NEWS from when I last was "properly" online all those weeks ago ~ EXCEPT I have a horrible old wound on my leg, which is at least 6 weeks old and hurts and just will not heal. The fact that I "might" have accidentally picked at it constantly for the last fortnight after it started itching probably hasn't helped. It was oozing red gunge, so I thought I would "irrigate" it ~ ie wash it out with home-made saline (freshly boiled and cooled water + table salt). This only made the scab soft enough to partly fall off, and now it's oozing chocolate milkshake coloured gunge that reeks (mildly as running sores go, but still disgusting) ~ of rubbish bins. It's only about 1.5"/4cm diametre, tiny as necrotic ulcers go. But I'm worried it might turn into one.

I don't know what to do. I am fed up of being lectured and patronized by doctors about my druggie proclivities.

I covered it in toilet paper taped down with clean newspaper. Think about it, a newpaper fresh off the press is as untouched by human hands as anything else I can think of. 6 hours later I couldn't resist having a good look. Loads of gunge had seeped into the toilet paper ~ and it had dried enough to rip the edge off the scab. Ach!

Now it's covered losely in taped-on (clean) newspaper. Then again it is the 10p Daily Star ~ what's possibly clean about that?? This has stopped the scab getting constantly rubbed off when I walk, which was getting increasingly painful. But the newspaper doesn't stick to the wound. Which will hopefully heal now. Have I done the right thing?

Ach, I must go. Kippers under grill. Hope y'all are well, see yaz!

PS: perhaps I should have maggot therapy

Winter is here!

IT'S RAINING. IT IS MISERABLE. I am miserable.

So I went to Morrisons and bought cheapest brown bread, tomato soup, ground black pepper (to go on the ridiculously over-salty Value Soup), kippers, tea etc etc.

Winter hibernation here we come!

Also my goblin cure should hopefully be with me tomorrow, or the next day at latest. Then I'll have the luxury of home broadband back. Hurrah!

Goblin cure on way!

THE CURE FOR MY BROADBAND GOBLIN-ATTACK should be with me by the end of the week. That is, a new SIM to put in the mobile broadband dongle I was using before.
Then I should be able to stay in touch PROPERLY, as I was doing before this fiasco...
That naughty net-goblin lies vanquished and dead!

THE GOBLIN IS DEAD!
LONG LIVE THE GOBLIN!!

Coloured Chicks!

Multicoloured Friday on Saturday...



Wishing y'all a wonderful weekend!

The News from Britain

POP SINGER George Michael is being severely punished in Pentonville Prison for crashing his 4x4 into a Snappy Snaps photo-shop at 3am while stone out of his brains on cannabis. His third offence.
The newspapers have had a field day. Best of the feast of headlines being "LOCK ME UP BEFORE YOU GO GO"!

HIS "HOLINESS" the Pope is on a State Visit to the UK. I watched the ceremonials on TV with fascination, including boring platitude-ridden speeches, thinking, "If I hear 'hallelujah' sung out in such gormless tones once more I'm gonna punch a hole in the TV set!" Thankfully my knuckles and its screen were saved when the old charlatan, who is as holy as he is young, jumped in his Pope-Mobile and wizzed off.
(Or did something like that.)
I don't know, because I fell unconscious through sheer boredom. I hope any Roman Catholics aren't too offended by my opinions. And I hope the Pope doesn't read this: perhaps he will call fire down from heaven to punish me!

ON A MORE POSITIVE NOTE, I've nearly finished my little story ~ 5000 words done. That's not as much as it might sound to a non-writer. Only about 13 pages in properly set book type. Or about 17 pages in ridiculously blown-up 300-words-a-page modern typeface.

Now I've only nine or so other tales to knock out until I've completed an entire book!

If we could talk to the animals...

... they might say something like this!

TALKING DOGS, CATS AND HAMSTER

...

BIRD TELLS CATS "YOU DON'T NEED TO CHASE US ANY MORE!"



NO BIG NEWS to report. Still working on me story. I've only done 3300 words, but I'm hoping no major goblins are in the text.

No broadband at home has helped me out in a big way. It's made me realize I've been wasting an opportunity to improve myself. To write great literature and change my life. I'm like the man who owns a Lambourghini and only uses it to drive to the corner shop for milk, sugar and a packet of fags!

Must dash ~ "darn" internet caff about to terminate me, as per usual!

The Goblin is dead!

I HAVE VANQUISHED THE GOBLIN... the computer-goblin, that is. Hopefully. Should be back online properly within about a week or so.
Thanks for all your the comments, I've not been able to do much visiting. But hopefully things should all be back to normal soon.
The druggie goblin has been causing me gyp ~ but what's new?
I have been using my time constructively by WRITING INTELLECUAL LITERATURE. OK, not intellectual and not literature. But I've been writing. I completed nearly an entire story!
Sorry I must dash as I'm in a cafe and about to be terminated as per usual.
See yous all soon again, I promise. Take care everyone. I miss you!

THE GOBLIN IS DEAD.
LONG LIVE THE GOBLIN!!

Bonjour!

HI FOLKS. I've still got goblins in the broadband so I'm at the internet place round the corner. I tried logging into my neighbour's system, but could't crack their password... Oddly though there are two networks, BTOpenZone and BTHomeFon that will let me, after registration and a costly SMS payment, log in for the princely sum of £3 for an hour, £5 for a day or £39 for a month! So what is this? Broadband for those who can't be bothered to get it installed? I was on mobile broadband before, which worked perfectly until ... GOBLIN ATTACK!
I could also take the computer to the public library, which is wifi'd up, but I'm afraid of getting infections in the machine... is there any risk? If so, what is it..?

WELL IT'S A ROCKY ROAD to recovery of any kind, as I'm discovering. Every time I try, or even think I'm somewhere near level ground some PERSON will appear, ANOTHER PERSON ~ SOMEONE ELSE will come in and throw everything up in the air, like a mad psychiatrist shovellng cows' diarrhoea in his rose-beds.
All I want is to be left alone.
And to feel OK.
My biggest, biggest problem with methadone is how lousy I feel when I wake up in the morning. Unless I can save the entire dose all day and sleep with it next to me,ready to drink at 4am ~ so I can get up before eight with the level in me high ~ then I will wake feeling like a block of ice, unable to get warm (yet sweating heavily if I wrap up) and craving craving heroin out of my mind while the methadone takes its one hour twenty minutes to come on. (Yet another thing I hate about methadone, it takes so very long to kick in, even if you've been sipping it faithfully for years.) You'd think that by the time I feel OK again I AM OK, but that doesn't usually happen. My mind's in so many pieces by this time, it never goes back together all day.
The worst days on methadone are such empty stretches of blank despair the only constructive thing I can do is go back to bed, cursing my body for ever bothering to wake up and wishing I could have some slider switch installed on the back of my head so that when I'm depressed I can sleep for 23.5 hours out of 24. And when I'm not depressed sleep not at all (sleep, after all, is a big waste of time if you have anything to do). When I used to work proper hours I never had any time outside work for anything except jumping in the bath, eating and going back to work. The entire rest of my life was spent working or sleeping.
I didn't have particularly good mental health in this period.
If I had only discovered heroin many years ago, I'd have gone on it then. Back in the days when the only cure I had for depression was cakes and cocoa and lying in my Arabian Nights style bed with about 15 pillows and eight quilts watching telly. I also used to smoke one cigarette a day. Just the one. Which I'd ponce each evening off the mandy secretary downstairs...
Then along came heroin, a far more efficacious painkiller. And life seemed amazing for a while. The first two years of full-on heroin addiction were like Christmas every day. I got to use my drug of choice morning, noon and night.
Of course I had to beg on the street to get the money to score ~ but even that was a novelty. And I was young.
And didn't look like a bloated, puffy old alcoholic ~ which is how I looked at my worst.
Anyway I decided to throw that life in the trashcan of the past. Still everything is going badly. (Actually I don't expect things ever to go well...)
And I must run. Else the goblins in THIS computer will time me out!
See yers all soon :-)

Time for something new...

THIS ISN'T WORKING ANY MORE.I think I've finally proved to myself that me and heroin do not mix...

If I've learned anything from all those counselling sessions I attended with very mixed feelings over the past year, it's that I've been asleep, and while I slept calamity came. And now it's time to get up, clear up and move on...

I hope you like the hammy picture. It's totally irrelevant, I know; but I thought it looked nice!