A Reply!

FROM OXFORD UNIVERSITY'S PROFESSOR OF JAPANESE! He emailed me back! I can't believe it. I'm flattered that someone so high up such a posh ivory tower would write to a drug addict like me. (Of course my email mentioned nothing about my personal circumstances, but you get where I'm coming from.) He gave three book titles I was able to key into Amazon, and comparing reviews and other recommendations finally get somewhere.

I am still hammering away at (attemptedly) finding university courses that might be suitable. As it's now standing it looks like it will be FAR CHEAPER to study German IN GERMANY... and a lot of the universities I looked at offer it in combination with Japanese minor.

Tuition fees in Germany are nonexistent (Berlin Free University) or about £500 a year at some other places - compared to £3300 per annum everywhere here.

And if you ARE going to study German, it seems more than faintly bizarre to move to Manchester to do it... when I could get on a better course in Deutschland!

My German is presently WAY too weak to apply now - even if I DID win the lottery... but in a year or two's time ... who knows!

Longterm readers of this page might feel slightly confounded by my past fixations on Spanish... Hebrew... German... Japanese... Can't I pick one thing and stick with it? I'm afraid my mind doesn't work that way. I circle round, like an intellectual vulture (wearing reading glasses) and after tearing away at several putrid carcasses at last find a fresh one that pleases me...

And so it was with these languages. And if I DO apply to an undergrad course, experience has told me you ought ONLY go for things towards which you are highly motivated. Otherwise university will be a dreary time-and-a-half... Or to drop out and fail as I did ... TWICE!

Got to go. I'm off to check Amazon Reviews again...

Sad (What's New?)

SURELY ~ after I said I loved this time of year ~ I cannot have the autumnal blues?

There I was, posting how much I love the golden leaves and bonfires and how they "remind me of new beginnings". I clicked play on Eva Cassidy's Autumn Leaves ... next thing I knew, tears were flowing! And flowed on (intermittently) all day. And the next day. And the day after that. And I still feel down now. But what precisely it's all about I could not tell. (Because I don't know.)

*******

On to "new beginnings" ~ anyone remember my JAPANESE OBSESSION? This is nothing new ~ I have had a fascination with most things Japanese (not so much the food) since my teens.

I took Japanese classes for a few weeks at university when I was 19. But it wasn't part of my course, and on top of everything else it was too much, so it got dropped. So my Japanese language skills remain at the extremely elementary stage... as much as anything else for the lack of a half-decent textbook! Not a single one I've seen teaches the script along with the grammar ~ no doubt on the assumption that the casual student will find it too difficult. I find this extremely patronizing. Imagine a Japanese person turning up in London saying: "I learned English ~ only I cannot read or write it." Utterly ridiculous!

The one guidebook I used to have: Teach Yourself Japanese Script gave Chinese-originated kanji characters, along with their meanings ~ bamboo, river, mountain etc ~ IN ENGLISH! If you wanted to learn the Japanese words for these things you had to look them up at the back. After a few pages of this I was ready to scream and bang my head on the table. The fact that I still remember what bamboo, river and mountain look like yet haven't a clue how to pronounce them surely says it all.

To remedy the situation I sent of an email this morning to the British-born Professor of Japanese at Oxford. Surely if anyone can recommend a good book, he can ...

*******

The day finished off with my moody housemate ~ the one I was yelling at a couple of months ago after he claimed to my face that I hadn't said hello to him when I just did two seconds before... that person, who's forever convinced he's right, required my help assembling a double bed which screwed together ~ with non-screwing wooden supporting nubs in between. This man was trying to hold together two bed-ends and a frame with just the wooden nubs. He was planning to put the screws in afterwards. Surely I don't need to tell you how successful this approach was.

I endured ten minutes of such buffoonery before insisting I had to go. I have suffered too many fools over too many years ~ and not at all gladly. Nowadays my patience has run dry...

*******

AND how was your autumnal day?

Unless you live in Australia, in which case you're surely in the first flush of spring ...

Illustrated (descending order): Eva Cassidy's official biography; Chinese/Japanese characters for bamboo, river, mountain; self-assembley chaos ...

Eva Cassidy: Autumn Leaves

EVA CASSIDY: AUTUMN LEAVES




Eva Cassidy was a struggling painter and singer all her life, known only on a small live music circuit in Washington DC, USA.
I wondered why this singer with such an amazing voice had somehow managed to pass me by... didn't realize that she only achieved fame posthumously after the British radio DJ Terry Wogan (v famous Irishman on BBC Radio 2) played her version of Over the Rainbow. This received such a rapturous response that the recordings she had made were released in Britain, topping the album charts. Since then she has become recognized internationally, selling over eight million records worldwide.
Eva Cassidy died of melanoma (skincancer) aged 33...

German Writer Wins Nobel Prize...

OK: she's Rumanian-born, but Herta Müller grew up in a German-speaking village on the old East German frontier. Now resident in Berlin, she is famous for her tales of the Ceauşescu-era Communist East... Although translated into 20 languages, her books have never been especially popular in Germany. A situation that will surely change with the glare of attention a Nobel laureateship inevitably brings ...



... and as for Barrack Obama winning the Nobel Prize for Peace... have the judges gone off their heads?!?

Degus

FURRY FRIDAY (ON SATURDAY)

DEGUS look like fat furry rats.





In the wild they usually live in colonies of up to ten. Though "degu-cities" of over a hundred individuals are said to occur. But degus are mostly known as tubby rodent pets... Being about a foot long, their cages need to be the size of small aviaries:



They are highly social creatures, somewhat reminiscent of chinchillas. Just like chinchillas they are native to Chile and the Andes:





... like all small animals they love getting out of their glorified prison home. Look at this one's perky face:



Degus don't mind being handled, but will not tolerate being squeezed or poked and they have a fierce bite ~ the swines! This reluctant passenger reminds me of another South American furry, the CAVY or Guinea Swine!



Degus typically live 5-8 years, which is not long ... But look how cute the babies are ...







LOOK AT THE TUBBY LITTLE SWINES HERE!
... and hear their chirpy singsong!

Does Anyone Ever Really Get Clean..?

THIS IS A PICTURE of the Australian drug-memoirist Kate Holden, who published her story of middle-class girl's fall from sheltered upbringing to heroin addict a few years ago to international success. After taking heroin for some months she hit the point all addicts hit, when friends will no longer lend money, credit cards are spent ... etc and something else has to be done to raise money. So she went out and sold her body on the streets. One night a man picked her up saying he worked for a brothel that needed new girls. Two brothels later she had become one of Melbourne's most prized "ladies" of the night.

After a five-year "battle" with the drug. (An expression I that always makes me smirk inwardly: for most of an addict's battle involves automatically going on taking the drug, no matter how much they feel and say they want to stop...) ... she eventually detoxed on reducing methadone, continued working several nights a week in an upmarket brothel, and used the money she saved to fund a trip to Europe.

But all I could wonder about, on finishing the book was what did she do next? Do you think this picture gives an answer..?

To me it does. It underlines a sad reality.

I have a friend who "got clean" via Subutex (buprenorphine) after a 35 year + habit. He is full of stories of the legendary days of the 1960s. I cross-checked some of his facts and the tales appear to be true.

He was a good friend (ex-partner) of my old friend Lucky who suddenly died just over a year ago. She was the ONLY dead addict I ever cried over, so I hope wherever she is she feels privileged ... anyway:

How amazing: if someone so heavily addicted to heroin for so long can go clean ~ isn't there hope for us all?

Then, as I spent more time with him I realized the uglier (more obvious) truth. Of course he IS still using. Even after all this treatment, after all this time. He's still ~ albeit occasionally ~ using heroin.

Which just makes me want to jump out of the window.

When I get clean ~ I know this ~ I will NEVER go back.

Which is probably why I find it so very hard to GET clean...




*******

EVA CASSIDY ~ Fields of Gold
Cancer Research UK ad



Lucky always said she used to deal Chinese heroin in Soho. And she did indeed have a very faded Chinese tattoo on one hand ...
... I'm never sure whether or not to believe such stories, but hers did have a ring of truth ... if anyone's interested, here are some facts about the "olden days" from Black Poppy magazine ...

I Love Autumn

SEASON OF MISTS... and all that. Lots of folks I know deplore this time of year because it reminds them of death and dying. But I love it. I associate it with new beginnings. Especially when there's the smoky tang of bonfires in the air ...

PS: this is a note to self really ~



Grimms' Fairytales: Complete edition
ISBN (978) 389 555 2380 Amazon link.

Hear this: this is sublime...
EVA CASSIDY



I don't know about you, but I always think of this as the "original" version ...
EDITH PIAF

It's a Beatle's Life ...

I APPEAR to have found a university course where you can study German as a foreign language in Germany ~ at the University of Heidelberg (in cuckoo-clock-land!) ~ which, founded in 1386, is the oldest university in Germany.

... but I've barely had time to peruse the course-description. I don't find reading such information online much fun and will have to get a proper prospectus if the course sounds any good. See: I said I was looking at all the options ~ if I decided the uni route was right for me ...

... Apart from that I'm hacking through Kafka's Verwandlung ~ we did do it at school (and I barely understood a word) but somehow my comprehension has improved so well of late that I breezed through Kafka's surrealist prose ~ about a man who wakes up in bed one morning transformed into a monstrous beetle! ~ with less words-looked-up-per-page than Christiane F's memoir of teen drug-addiction!

So there we go: must fly. About to be timed out yet again ...

FRANZ KAFKA ~ "THE METAMORPHOSIS" ~ SHORT FILM
YOU DON'T NEED GERMAN TO GET THIS ...

A (Deutschsprachig) Literary Day Out!

I DIDN'T GO INTO TOWN and buy the German news magazines this morning... that's because I blew all the money on drugs instead..! No! I'm kidding ~ I rang University College London (the most central London college (of high repute) ~ it's in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum. Bloomsbury is the nearest London has to the Left Bank in Paris... stately, (relatively) quiet. And a profusion of mature trees dropping conkers on yer 'ead up just about every road)... I rang UCL and asked the Students' Union whether they had a bookshop where I might pick up secondhand coursebooks. The nice lady said, "No dear. But there is a Waterstones on Mullet Street. Most people go there."

It took me five minutes to figure out that the road in question was actually called Mallet Street, and when I called in there was no shortage of coursebooks in every subject imaginable from Japanese to medicine. I kept myself firmly focused on German.

I've never seen new and secondhand books sold together; but because they're a university branch, this Waterstones did indeed stock used volumes as well. They had the best selection of German literature I've seen anywhere in a long while. (A far better range than our local library stocks, for sure!)

They'd sold out of big secondhand dictionaries, but I did get some works by Goethe.

When I was paying, the assistant asked, "Are you a student?" (Because they offer a 10% discount on production of valid ID.) I said, "No, but I'm hoping to become one." She said: "That's what I like to hear!" And then got very helpful when I asked where else I might find an old dictionary, giving detailed directions to Skoob Books, which I hadn't been able to find anywhere near Holborn tube (where they used to be). That's because they'd moved to a place called The Brunswick Centre.

I hadn't felt at all sure of finding a decent second hand dictionary and had set out this morning fully expecting to pay £35 for one. So imagine my "appointment" when I found a 1997 Oxford-Duden for just £15.

All in all I spent £27.50 on books. These were:

Thomas Mann: Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice)
Holderling: Dichtung; Schriften; Briefe (Poetry, Writings, Letters)
Franz Kafka: Die Verwandlung ("Metamorphosis")
Goethe: Faust I; Iphigenie auf Tauris; Torquato Tasso; Das Märchen

I did the Kafka as an A-level set text... In fact of the three books we studied in German, "Metamorphosis"/Die Verwandlung was the only one I got much of a handle on ~ and that was mostly thanks to my trusty Penguin Classics translation! Perusing it on the tube home, I was pleasantly surprised at how much of the original I can now understand... I don't know what's happened, but my reading comprehension is now better than it ever has been ~~ and I achieved this purely by reading texts that appealed to me, listing every word I didn't understand in an exercise book... Maybe my brains were too crowded out with school-school-school when I was younger. I don't know. But at this rate I might actually be able to read the stuff I've always dreamed of reading ~~ without any recourse to a translation...

So all in all a very intellectually rewarding excursion!

And now I have to go the irritating computer's about to time me out ... but

Goethe ahoy!!

****

Barbra Streisand was on Jonathan Ross's chat show last night...

I wonder if this was a homily to that Argentinan singer who just died(?), but I love this kinda music:



Mercedes Sosa! That's the name ... Dead at 74, highly-strung tunes... in the style of "If you go away" as sung by Babs above ...

Ne Me Quitte Pas by Jaques Brel ... no wonder it's good: it's French!

The Bravest Mice in the World!

(THOUGH I'M NOT ENTIRELY SURE the one with the leopard isn't a RAT..!)



1: Posted on Youtube as "leopard vs mouse" ~ I'm pretty sure this is actually a rat. Coming in for dindins at the big cat's feeding time, the expert predator barely has the heart to nuzzle the durry-furry rodent out the way ...





2: This daring little tyke definitely is a housemouse. Just look at the bemused reaction of the humungous housecat!



PS~~ This is absolutely disgusting: three of the most revolting creatures on earth pitted against each other ... in Japanese ..(!)

From Cute Overload...

FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY...

CuteOverload.Wordpress.Com is the cutest blog of all ...












Surely this is the furriest blog in the world!

Sad

I STARTED READING THROUGH various university prospectuses re: language studies and wish I hadn't done it because now I feel this longing building up and I don't trust myself ever to apply and successfully complete any university course. Ever.

The one that got me the most was Cambridge (why apply anywhere crap?). Two stipulations I have about a course in German are that 1: the department should also teach Dutch. Because if you speak French, German and Dutch you an almighty swathe of Europe becomes "yours". Dutch is very similar to German so learning it is a process of conversion rather than discovery anew... The last place I studied didn't even offer Dutch (though they specialized in Scandinavian languages ~ more people speak Dutch than ALL Scandinavian languages together!) And Oxford, by the way doesn't do Dutch. And point 2: they MUST give details of modules or "papers" and reading lists in advance. Which Cambridge do, and perusing down them only increased this sad longing. And Cambridge is such a beautiful town (much nicer than Oxford). In the end I just wanted to cry.

I'm going to leave it there before I have a pathetic breakdown ...

Illustrated: King's College Cambridge (the one with the most spectacular buildings). Cambridge University is split into 20 or so colleges peppered about the town (ie there is no "campus" as such). And as you can see it's a gorgeous place ...

PS: talking of SAD, someone at my old house, what I now look back on as a bourgeois paradise, the house I first moved to in London, once remarked how bizarre it should be that I, by far the most "academic" person in the house, should be just about the ONLY one there without a degree ...

Bus Driver Row*!

I WAS UNFORTUNATE ENOUGH to take the bus today. A bus that got snarled up in traffic for what felt like half an hour but must have been about ten minutes at ONE set of traffic lights. Itchiness of feet and Egyptian-tomb-like claustrophobia were eating into me so bad I felt I couldn't take another moment on this thrumming sardine-tin torture machine. So I very nicely asked the driver if he would let me out. But the old moustached petrol tanker exploded on me "What? Let you out here? In the traffic? With quite possibly an undercover instructor on board??"

YES!

No. So I skulked back shamefaced. Not to my seat, but to the second set of doors (it was an ultra-long bendy bus) where I attempted emergency door open ~ something I only ever used (recently) when three massive inspectors bounded on and I hadn't got a ticket ~ but that's another story... Anyway the bastard OVERRRODE the door opener, which is inside an openable plastic case ~ and you have to be tall to reach up so heaven help you in a multi-vehicle pile-up if you're short of stature!

Having accepted the doors would not open for me I irritatedly took to flicking through one of my Kraut-magazines. Only for said driver to interrupt my "peace" (the kind of peace a pot has when it's boiling over, I have to say) with "I saw what you tried to do!" and threats to call the police.

If I'd had TIME to deal with constables I'd have gladly argued my case (it's not a "breach of the peace" to open a door, is it! And what crime can it possibly be? If I'm desperate enough to open a door in full (motionless) traffic, surely it's my lookout if I'm going to get run-down.) But anyway we were at a stop and the bus driver continued haranguing me. And saying "You're lucky I'm in a good mood"~!! So I told him to f*** off. And regretted it. I actually wished I'd told him I wished he would crash. That would probably get to a bus driver more. Then I thought about it and wished I'd kept my face blank, my mouth shut and merely risen above it all with quiet dignity... but hindsight is an awfully great teacher ...

*I believe our friends across the "Pond" don't use the word "row", which rhymes with cow and means a verbal altercation ... is this true..?

~~American Heritage book of English Usage definition of "row" ...

Yummy Petits Pains

SO I'm trying again ... meanwhile I'm having freshly baked hot bread (that I buy as a risen dough and bung in the oven) ... and lovely coffee ...

And that's about all I have to say today. Cheerio!

Here's Madonna claiming she would have done more for Michael Jackson ... if only ..(??!?) ... do you believe this..??

I mean, what COULD she or "we" have done ..?

Sorry about the spanische Untertitel ...

Stung by the Killer B

YET AGAIN: what's new?

In recent times I have shied away from detailing my drugs use in blow-by-blow type accounts. Or for that matter my endless resolutions to quit ~ and then the inevitable "lapses". They seem to exasperate y'all too much.

In the past I only managed to stop for a few days at a time and I only achieved that by either spending all my money, or keeping it in a post office that closes at 5:30 pm ~ and I don't have a cashcard.

But that method of "quitting" if you want to call it that ~ can only ever score me a few days off.

Because as surely as night follows day Monday morning comes round again. And then the itch to use becomes all-consuming. And heroin always feels better after a few days off, even if I have held myself on a heavy dose of methadone in-between. Despite what the doctors seem to say ~ and I can only speak for myself ~ methadone simply does not sate the old receptor sites anything like as effectively as heroin. Even at doses over 100mg a day. I think if the drugs services and medical profession sincerely wanted to crack heroin addiction (and I'm not convinced they truly do ~ a lot of them are content merely to turn up and get paid...) then they want to look away from methadone-methadone-methadone. Opiate addiction can in theory be treated with any of the scores of opiates and opioids licensed to relieve pain.

Having said that I do feel "OK" on methadone. Just nowhere near as OK as on heroin.

Heroin ~ heroin. A hard nasty drug. I can barely believe I'm writing this.

This morning I was perusing the Oxford University prospectus; this afternoon I took home a "10B" ~ that is, a fifth of a gram, a £10 bag of brown heroin ~ and then spent a good two hours unconscious in a chair. (That's what heroin does to me these days ~ either pretty much nothing, or else I'm knocked out cold ...)

I'm not willing to wait however many years until some miracle treatment makes quitting as easy as a goodly part of my would like it to be. Quitting is always possible if you want it sincerely enough. If you are determined enough. In decades past many people came off cold turkey. It was the only way out available to them.

I tried "'clucking' it out" ~ I did eight days clean, nearly lost my mind (I was acting very out of character ~ and in my parents' house). I'd never willingly do that again ...

But methadone is there for me. I'm already on a script. I'm lucky.

What's that saying? Nothing that's truly worth achieving has ever been easy~? Something like that. I would title the German translation of my still (possibly) forthcoming addict memoirs Mein Kampf ~ which means My Fight ~ for surely giving up hard drugs can only be a fight and a big fight at that ~ even with methadone... if only that title hadn't long ago been appropriated by a certain Herr Hitler ..(!)

So: tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow I pick up more methadone from my friendly pharmacist. Tomorrow I try again.

Illustrated: the evil killer B ("B" means brown heroin); syringe selection (I dread to think what kind of druggie would use the 60ml one to the far left ~ I could fit £20 of drugs into 1ml ...); Oxford Uni logo; "Bridge of Sighs", Hertford College, Oxford; a fight ~ not of the kind I'm destined for ...

A Big Day Out

INSTEAD OF DOING THE USUAL thing I inevitably find myself doing on Monday morning, I got up late and ventured to Central London in a hunt for German magazines.

I got off the tube at St Pancras International, where you get the Eurostar train to Paris and Brussels. St Pancras is surely the most beautiful station building in London if not Britain:



I found Der Spiegel and Stern on a newsstand outside. The hubbub of French voices drew me into the hi-tech inner hall where screens displaying 13:28 Paris Nord set off a frisson of excitement and longing inside me. It's been such a long time since I travelled anywhere at all except just down the road...



The last time I saw a newsstand with a half-decent selection was near Baker Street tube. Baker Street of course being famous for Sherlock Holmes... Madame Tussuad's museum is right by the tube station so the place is thronging with tourists (unlike in this snap!)...



Madame Tussauds is next to the Planetarium:



I picked up a weekly Take-a-Break -style magazine called Freizeit Revue. It is an old woman's magazine but I bought it for the endless crossword puzzles sandwiched next to advertisements for piles ointments and surgical support stockings ...

Then I meandered down to Regents' Park which is a Royal Park and so extremely well manicured.



The houses overlooking the vast greens are pretty impressive too ...



... then it was nearly rush hour so I had to fly home before the trains were too crammed to breathe.

And there we are! My first day out in London-London in over a year!

*******

Have a look at the arrogant French woman in the bottom clip ~ this is absolute classic telly!!

THE LATE, GREAT KEITH FLOYD was one of the most classic TV cooks of all time. There was a retrospective on his life and work on TV last night and these were the best clips shown:

Here from his best series Floyd On France, is his attempt at a mushroom omelette ~ with "angry dragon lady" "simmering" behind ...



And here's the most classic clip of all. This wasn't a set-up ~ the French-Basque lady was for real! "FLOYD CAN'T COOK!"