IT'S the hottest summer in years here in London Town! A couple of days ago the mercury hit 34C, that's about 93F, which might be run of the mill if you're in Sydney or Dallas but trust me, that's REALLY HOT for here. Thankfully I have whizzy wide-opening windows and an upstairs balcony. My "pet" pigeon Jilly, who's chosen to roost there has laid at least two clutches of eggs. The last generation failed to hatch and has been festering in the sun (poor eggs!) but her other babies have been cooing at my window for the last month and a half. Believe it or not, that satellite dish I found on the street and wired up WORKS~!! Through careful angling, an accurate gut feeling and a lot of luck, I managed to point it bang-on at the correct Astra satellites forGerman TV!So I get back all those documentary channels about life under the seas and the "Inner German Border" (I luuurve the old Berlin Wall ~ got a real thing about it)... yes i get all that back. Plus dubbed versions of Dynasty throughout the night. For some reason in Germany, Dynasty was more popular than Dallas... (and I thought Germans were the most sensible nation on earth..?) And the pigeons are getting braver by the day. When I'm sleeping they'll venture in to perch on my dish, which is balanced on an armchair with the sticky-out bracket wedged between cushions. Sometimes, when they get brave, they'll go for a flap all around my living room and come sit on my other couch. Then I wake up and they eye me in surreptitious terror and stop cooing and flap out of there hastily leaving stray bits of down spiralling behind them. Nobody has crapped on my carpet yet. O yeah I haven't got a carpet yet. Ho hummm! I started feeling restless earlier and my formerly depresed mood has broken through into the full glossy, sparkly, glistering radience of summer. I feel beautiful ~ and I haven't done heroin or any other drug for days! Wow!! This music is transcendent, spectacular.... if music can sound this good on earth, what is music like in Heaven..?
... And doncha just luuurve a good Dynasty Cat Fight...?
WE got a letter last week warning that some person was going to intrude on our homes to do something or other with the boiler. I put a gigantic sign on mine saying Dear Boiler Man, please do not alter settings: hot water ON; central heating OFF. And what did the bastard do? About an hour after he'd left I noticed an unseemly rumbling from the corner, checked and found the radiators on. And when I looked more closely, I saw the hot water setting had been changed from minimum to maximum. I don't know how stupid he thought I was, but I'd obviously troubled, before he came, to draw a diagram of the all dials and settings. So I knew exactly how to undo his sabotage. Complaining to the landlord would do no good at all. If I only knew what company he worked for, I would have complained to his boss. Fucking bastard. If you don't want to deal with junkie nutters you shouldn't do jobs in rented accommodation! I don't even look like a junkie any more. Everyone says how well I seem ~ having put on weight and colour in my cheeks. They say I look especially well when my mood is "elevated". Which is one reason I don't consider hypomania [mild mania] an "illness". Even though it can prevent me sleeping for days on end...
Speaking of which, my depression appears to be evaporating. I still get bad moods lasting hours on end. But then again I get good ones, too. And that's about as "well" as I ever get. The only time me and my mood feel truly "normal" (no dragging tiredness; no lingering melancholy and I'm not angry all the time at nothing) is when I've just come down from a hypomanic "blip". In the aftermath of a psychotic episode I don't feel well at all. About ten years ago I got hit on the head by a truck and that made me concussed enough to spend the next week forgetting where I was, what I was doing etc etc. Well psychosis made me more confused even than concussion. And I'm talking here of the after-effects when the episode had worn off. I remember routinely typing short words precisely BACKWARDS. And the letters on the keyboard changing into snakes. I wrote a frank letter to my Mum that seems to have been a bit too frank. It's caused a permanent rift with my step-Dad... All this stuff when, as far as I was concerned, I was completely "sane".
I haven't managed to give up heroin, but I have seemingly learnt quite a lot of German. For some reason, a simple news report can leave me baffled, with barely a clue what happened. And yet documentaries on dinosaurs and outer space I can follow with ease. Partly because dinosaur names are the same. And astronomy vocabulary is mostly very simple: schwarzes Loch (black hole) roter Zwerg (red dwarf) die Erdumlaufbahn (orbit). The last of these is four simple words together: Erd means earth, um is around or about, laufen to run and Bahn just means a path or way, as in Autobahn. So it's simpler than you'd think. I have hardback notebook that, when I'm in the mood, I use to write down every word I hear yet cannot recall the meaning of. A lot of these words are very familiar. I've heard them scores of times but keep forgetting what they mean. So I write them all down, whenever I'm in the mood to do so, complete with translations. I've been in the mood quite a lot lately.
Contrary to the oft-stated "fact" that the English language has more words than any other, German actually seems to have more. Off the top of my head, I can think of only two ways of describing a man's wife in English ~ wife and partner (can you think of any others?) Whereas German has Frau, Ehefrau, Weib, Weibchen, Partnerin and Gattin.
One of my satellite boxes has developed a fault, so instead of being able to switch between the two using just a remote control, I actually have to cross the room and switch scart leads. Meaning except when Dallas comes on at 9pm Wednesday I cannot be bothered and have been stuck with television in foreign languages. I shouldn't complain: I wanted foreign TV to expand my mind... and finally I seem to be reaping some reward. My comprehension of German seems to be improving already. (I was going to say my "command" of the language was verbessert, but this isn't true. I'm not even trying to "speak" German better, just to understand it. Partly this is because, if I ever do end up studying German literature again, there is no way in hell I'm reading the books in translation, the way most students actually do. Partly because the standard of language-teaching in this country is abysmal. At school we went from GCSE, where you are required to do nothing more complicated than write postcards and simple letters detailing your home, family and interests, to an A Level course where we were supposed to read Kafka in the original!
On Thursday my support worker made a sudden visit. He is supposed to be helping me through the Verwirrung of my council tax situation and other loads of crap. He has a BA in PPE (politics philosophy and economics) from a very prestigious British university and spent most of the time talking about the political situation in West Africa. He seems to think I have a lot of potential in me and offered to look into ways I could get into university (again!) and fund it. But British universities are unreasonably expensive these days. You have to pay thousands of pounds a year in tuition fees and it's all too much. Plus the fact that I've been a student before and dropped out midway through (yes ~ depression AGAIN) probably scuppers me even more. I looked into studying in Germany and it's a lot cheaper.
If I won the lottery, there's no question: I would want to do Japanese. If I it were practical to devote the best part of a decade to picking up and perfecting language skills and I wanted to do a course with more practical value then I'd pick Chinese, hopefully with Japanese as at least a subsidiary. (In Europe you don't do a liberal arts course with a "major" ~ you apply to do one or two subjects to honours level right from the start. Which saves a lot of time if you know you want to do something like languages, psychology or law.) I looked into how far oriental language courses take you from scratch and they seemed to be implying that after four years' study I wouldn't have much better command of Japanese, at least in terms of vocabulary, than I do now in German!
If I were able, I would want to study to be a translator. It's the one profession, except "creative writing" that I feel I'd be any good at that I could do from home. But to be a translator, you need a higher degree in the languages you want to work in. (And it usually is languages plural.) So it would be far more practical to choose German as the main language than some exotic tongue I barely know at all.
A few Americans have commented in the past seemingly unaware as to why my fascination with German. German has more mother-tongue speakers in the EU than any other ~ 92 million, as opposed to 72 million for French. English has only about 65 million native speakers in Europe. Of all EU countries, Germany probably the strongest economy. And German seems to be a less popular subject of study nowadays than French or Spanish, putting you at an advantage in the jobs market.
I seem to be the only person I know who is not happy stuck on benefits. If I'm going to be forced to live (and, to be honest, I would still rather die) then I want to DO SOMETHING.
OK; this is all I can say on the subject now. I have to go. Hope y'all have a charming weekend. I've got to run before my Iceland cottage pies melt and the Black Forest Trifles goo all over Sainsburys' own brand aspartame-free lemonade... XX
MR SAM FT KIRSTY HAWSHAWE: SPLIT She looks and sounds a lot better in this vid (than she did in Opus III) ...
VIVALDI TECHNOED UP I've no idea of the name of this tune, but it sounds OK...
BUGERLUGS, my fellow heroin-addicted blog-friend gave me a tip on how to make my laundry reek overpoweringly of Fabric Softener. Add an overdose of this to the powder-drawer during the last rinse; then it will reek overpoweringly of "blue". True to her word, the only brand that really works is Blue Lenor. My local Sainsbury's sells "x4 freshness" and x"7 freshness". Only the first of these was on 2x750ml for £3 special offer but I invested in the allegedly stronger one anyhow. I had to sit through the entire rinse-cycle with pen, paper and wristwatch, timing and numbering each spin so next time I can know exactly where I am in the cycle.
Because I was so paranoid, I ended up adding two capfuls each to the second and final rinses. The recommended dose is only a half or one cap. But I want everyone in the vicinity of my specially-treated garments to go into near-anaphalaxis, so I didn't mind wasting a bit on a second-last phase that was only going to rinse it out. You have to be absolutely sure you're tipping it into the very end of the wash, otherwise it'll only get drenched out leaving barely the faintest aroma behind.
True to Bugerlugs' word, only Lenor is potent enough ~~ and it absolutely must be blue Lenor. She has experimented with every other colour and nothing else works. By the time the final mind-blowingly extended nuclear-strength spin was done, it was too dark to creep into the yard to peg them out, and I was terrified that fresh air might blow all the artificial "blueness" away.
So they've been on my Ikea indoor hanger. They smell OK, but next time I'm adding ten capfuls, just to make sure. I want people's eyes to water when they go near me and I want my entire flat to smell like Valium Marilyn's place. She spends the twilight of her days in a beautiful top-floor apartment reclining chaise-longue-style in front of panoramic HD cable television. I keep warning her not to fall out with her son, who pays the cable bill, because without National Geographic, Discovery and Animal Planet, life as she knew it would be over... And her flat reeks of fabric softener too...
By the way, Bugerlugs: there is a most unpleasant warning on the bottle saying never to use Lenor on bedlinen or children's clothes and never ever to add it direct to fabric, as anything treated with their product becomes highly flammable. Offputting or what? ??~!?
I'm still sleeping marathon hours. I was in bed by two last night and woke up midday-thirty (I spend no time lying in bed awake ~ that is just too depressing ...) So I got straight up, put something on German television that I couldn't understand. Felt pissed off. And was back in bed within twenty minutes. This time I dreamed a lot. I don't like dreaming. I went back to Park Meadow in Hatfield, where I grew up. Then I was up again by three, not at all happy to be awake. I always think: if you have nothing to write then write nothing ~~ and yet this is a daily journal. So that is my non-diary for today...
Next time, maybe I'll have laundered more clothes. So wow. Maybe there will be something exciting to add to the record...
*
MUSIC JEANETTE DIMECH: SPAIN'S BEST-KEPT SECRET
When I was ten and my Dad got remarried, he and my new step-Mum brought two of her tapes back from their honeymoon...
SOY REBELDE "I'm a rebel"... this time with English subtitles...
EL MUCHACHO DE LOS OCHOS TRISTES "The sad boy of eight"...
LONDON seems to have been swelteringly hot the past few days. I don't know if it's because I'm ill with my bad ear, or because I'm on methadone, or both, but my body seems to think it's at crisis point with all this heat. A couple of days last week I got so hot I was wandering the house in just socks and undies ~ yet STILL so hot a river of perspiration was pouring down my back and I felt like I was about to expire!
I'm still hooked on the heroin, but not as badly as before... taking it once or twice per week, but the days in between I'm feeling flat and dull. They say that's par for the course with methadone therapy but I don't know. My mood has been settling down and creeping downwards, causing me to suspect depression was crouching round the corner ready to ambush me... Until today and an antidrugs group with an old acquaintance from the former Nutter Club ~ by far the best antidrugs group run by the methadone clinic. Jane and I are writing a letter to the Consultant Psychiatrist who had a hand in closing the old Nutter Club (a dual-diagnosis meeting) down. We're going to try and push for it to be reopened. It was the ONLY source of support during my psychotic break last year. Without it, I might not have even got diagnosed, as it was Naomi, the moderator of that Group, who pushed for me to see a doctor. She even drove me across the Borough to a mental hospital's Emergency Reception so that medical professionals could FINALLY see me in the Manic Moods I had long been complaining of. And it worked. They wrote a report, which my psychiatrist saw. And then he gave me a diagnosis I didn't actually want: "manic depression and schizophrenia" (ie bipolar schizoaffective disorder). I was so upset about that, I went home and cried...
I've certainly been getting my money's worth out of the Astra 1 satellites and their Central European entertainment... My tellybox is programmed to receive multiple satellites, if you use a motorized dish, or one with multiple pumpumms. So when I press the wrong button, hosts of exotic TV stations suddenly appear from far-out weird and wonderful locations named things like Nile-sat, Türk-sat, Hellas-sat, Hotbird... how evocative. Being in touch with the rest of the world in my own living room is so exciting. One of the best new channels is CCTVF ~ Chinese state TV in French. This particular chaîne de télévision has a more involving mix of entertainment than CCTV in English. There are some very entertaining soap operas. Just about every episode a character seems to wend their way into hospital. China is a Communist (or at least Socialist) country and yet education and healthcare are not free... How on earth can this be? I long to be able to understand the history, politics and outlook of the Chinese Nation. For example: why the Cultural Revolution? And what was it all about? It's my goal to perfect my French and German (hence the new tellydish) and to pick up Chinese and Japanese. I long to be able to read East Asian texts in the original. I want to know what it was like for "intellectuals" living through the Cultural Revolution. And I want first-hand accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki... And what did they do to clear up the radioactive wilderness of those great towns so effectively that today they have populations of hundreds of thousands who appear to pass their lives in atom-bombed locations in relative safety...
It took me about five days to do this, but I've finally pruned all through my new German satellite TV channels, reducing the number to 69 by, removing home shopping, adult channels (which usually broadcast a still picture of a reasonably attractive woman sprawling over a series of premium rate phone numbers. In the late evening the girl suddenly has her tits out. But that's as "adult" as it gets. There were also a few music channels that appear to be offering compilation CDs 24-7. So I kept about 3 or 4 genuine music channels, a couple of kiddie ones and 3 or 4 religious channels (Bible TV, Catholic TV etc). Where channels were repeated over regional variations I picked the most exotic region, eg WDR Cologne, Pro7 Switzerland, RTL Austria, Southern Bavarian from deep in the mysterious Alps (instead of Northern, from the foothills) and so on. I get something like 20 or 30 BBC1s ~ that carry general interest programming of high quality plus regular national and local news bulletins. English satellite channels never carry the evening news.
Every single keyword that appears time and time over I have looked up and written down and I'm trying to memorize the vocabulary lists. At this rate I'll be picking up around 2000 new words a year, so within 18 months my German should be pretty good.
I forgot to say re the German TV licence (yesteday), not only does German television have more than double the income from licensing the BBC has, but the State-owned TV channels also carry advertising, meaning they are swilling in money. There are probably more than twice the number of television jobs going for actors in Germany compared to the UK. Last night I saw an incredibly atmospheric and wonderfully filmed and produced police drama called Borowski and the Silent Visitor about a heroin-addicted "working girl" with a toddling little boy who is obviously the sunshine of her life... until he mysteriously vanishes from her 20th-storey flat. Turns out the postman, who has masterkeys to every apartment in the building, has snatched her kid and the WOMAN, the victim, ends up in a police cell, having a fight with a "thrusting young policewoman"... and then she does eventually get her little boy back. But not before she very nearly takes a flying leap off her balcony...
Now it's a hot day and I've got a carrier bag full of frozen food from Iceland waiting to melt on me, so I must go and P-I-NNNNG..!! I hope you all had a charming weekend... and, sorry Bev, but I never did a post on my bedspreads. Only news as far as they're concerned is the heavy spraying they got with Blue Febreeze last night. I washed clothes dowsed in treble the recommended dose of fabric conditioner yesterday, hung them out, and in they come smelling of nothing more exciting than the acres of Fresh Air that get into your clothing from a good airing on the Washing Line... why is this? How do you manage that Fabric Softener Overdose aroma that you talked about, Bugerlugs? What brand do you use? Is it ultra-concentrated? Do you put it in the watery compartment to the right of the powder drawer? Do you line-dry your clothes? This gets rid of all the smell from mine, even when I've doused them in THREE capfuls of Jeyes' Easy; how do you keep your aromas in? PLEASE leave a comment explaining all...
And PS Anna Grace I am not, and never have been a woman. Someone is having a laugh. I DO have a Roborovski Dwarf Hammy named after me, owned by Bugerlugs. She thought her Gledwood was a boy, until Gledwood gradually got tubbier and tubbier and one day gave birth to tiny, wriggling "baked beans with paws"... robo-pups! If you go to Bugerlugs's page you can see my namesake ++plus++ Entertaining Babies rambling like the clappers on their wheel...!
PS this is my name in ChineseGēwō鴿窩 (traditional) 鸽窝 (simplified characters) it mean's "Dove's Nest"...
PPS I've found an excellent poetry blog by a lady named Ruth Johnston. This girl really has something... Not only is she an A-grade poet, but she was born in Finland. English isn't even her first language!
Illustrated: Dual Disorders Recovery Book for addicts with psychiatric issues ~ I'd love to get a copy of this; Chinese soap; Brit comedian Vic Reeves; Borowski und der Stille Gast: der Entführer (the kidnapper-mailman! Who looks like Vic Reeves); a golden hamster ~ my tubby lookie-lykey!!
MUSIC: I didn't used to like derivative ravey pop, but I luuurve this tune...
HERE is a beautiful picture of "Zao ice monsters". Zao is the name of a mountain range in North-Eastern Japan. The ice-monsters are frost and snow-covered Aomiri firs. It's a combination of these trees' particularly dense needle coverage, and the fact that moist air flows over one mountain range, discharging itself then reaches Zao with exactly the amount of water required to turn the local trees into thickly covered snow-statues. I know all this because I saw it on Japanese state television last night. The English version. By the way the biggest city on that bit of coast is Fukushima, site of the famous nuclear disaster. So next winter, they'll probably have radioactive ice-monsters.
I GOT SO DESPERATE to sort my infected ear out that I've gone back to using the Otomize antibiotic spray I had in June and that I didn't like because it made me MORE deaf, not just for a few minutes like water in the ear, but all day long. The old infection was worse because it felt like I'd gone to sleep in a forest and a pine seed had fallen in my ear and sprouted, growing a fucking great pine tree right through my head!
Every day, when I wake up in the early afternoon, because I'm so exhausted, I feel like living crap. Today (and I'm writing this on Saturday) I had to rush to the post office before it closed. I could not run. But the entire walk there the world appeared to be swaying, the way it does when you've been on a boat for a week and haven't got your land legs back. It's not an inner ear infection, which could affect my balance. It's in the outer ear, on the external side of the eardrum. The nurse-practitioner said I was very yeasty. And covered in dandruff. Well that's as may be but the dandruff isn't that severe. It doesn't leave white frosting all over my shoulders, like in the stereotype. Anyway I told her I was going to get rid of it by dying my hair. She said it would have to be very strong hair dye to get rid of dandruff. It is: it's ammonia-peroxide ultimate platinum A001, the lightest you can get. Last time I put it on my head was burning. And the dandruff disappeared for about six months. My hair actually seemed to be in BETTER condition after the dye. It was nice and plasticky and dead straight. Not soft and wavy, like my hair is naturally. I asked Valium Marilyn, who also dyes her hair nearly white, whether it's normal for dye to make your scalp burn and she said yes. My friend Pinky who dyes her hair mid-blonde also said that type of dye also kills nits far more effectively than any nit shampoo. So that's worth remembering. If your kids have intractable nits, turn them platinum blond. They won't be scratching any more.
I've pruned my television channels down from about 550 to "only" 200. I did this by sorting through by language, getting rid of adult and shopping channels and adding the remainders to three favourites lists. Before I did this I was drowning in so much television that whenever I found anything that looked good I quickly lost it again and could never get it back.
By the way I know why German telly is so much better than British. It's because in Germany there is a compulsory €213 television licence fee (that's about £200 or $320US) they even have a €79 internet licence fee! The BBC waste their money on NINETEEN regional versions of BBC1 purely to broadcast less than an hour a day of local news, and to make very occasional regional programming that could just as well be shown nationally. Germany's ARD, the German BBC, have seven regions showing entirely different programming. My favourite is Bavarian TV. I kid you not, they really do have programmes full of middle-aged men in lederhosen and people wandering the Alps in traditional costume singing ancient songs! You only have to do the maths to see why German television is so much better. In a population of 81,859,000 they have just over 40,000,000 households paying £200 each, a total budget of £8 billion. With 63,100,000 inhabitants, Britain has only about 30,000,000 households paying just under £150 each, a total of "just" £4.5 billion for the BBC's coffers.
This crap they shove down our throats about the BBC making the best television in the world is just complete tosh. The first thing I would do if I were in charge of the BBC is to close down local news except for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and then I would shove all the broadcasts on to one dedicated channel, to save money. The BBC are so cheapskate that BBC3 and BBC4, their new digital channels, share frequencies with CBBC and Cbeebies, the kiddie channels. You can rent satellite space for less than £70,000 a year, so I don't know what excuse they have. Surely £4.5 billion can streth far enough to fill four full-time stations? With such a massive archive, why don't they show more repeats? We have all paid for them over the years. We ought to see them again. Well this is my TV rant over. I'm getting bored of television I'm going to go back to books for my diversion. I have gone years without watching TV at all. Because I didn't own a TV set. Most of the time I don't even "watch" it. I just listen to it, while doing something else. By the way, if you just want to watch catch-up services over the internet, you don't need a TV licence at all in this country.
O yeah I went out last night to buy elderberry-flavoured white chocolate and bumped into a crack-addicted prostitute I know. We ended up in an alley with people wandering past while she hit the pipe. Then she ran out and started yelling for this mad woman I see in the local shops. The mad woman has a habit of running up to anyone with a toddler, lunging dangerously close to the child while telling the terrified mother how cute it is. I spent about an hour wandering around with her saying hello to local drug addicts. I barely know anyone at all where I live. I probably have what Americans call "social phobia" because most of the time I feel no inclination to socialize. This, by the way, is supposedly a hallmark feature of schizophrenia (gradually losing interest in socializing). But what is schizophrenia? Everyone I know who has it believes they haven't actually got it!
How did I get on this subject. O yeah prostitution. My local high street happens to be an after-dark haunt of prostitutes, but how you're meant to know which woman are just normal females clacking home in their heels and which professional streetwalkers I have know idea. I asked Nikki how her punters knew what she was out doing and she said she didn't know. Real prostitutes where I live look nothing like the hookers from American TV dramas.
O bloody hell I've got to go. I hope y'all are having a most charming weekend. Don't drink too much (I have given up alchol). Don't waste your time on the internet. And don't watch too much TV.
Illustrated: ice monsters and skiers, ultimate platinum, ice monsters and cable cars, elderflower white chocolate
EUROPEAN TELEVISION has arrived at last! They finally turned up yesterday, one day and three hours late, put a whacking great dish on my house, drilled yet another hole in the wall ~ there is now a spaghetti junction of wires behind the TV set from 2 satellites, telephone and cable (I don't subscribe to cable). I get so many new channels it took eight sides of A4 to list them all. About 200 in German, 22 in French, 12 in English and a scattering of others in mysterious Eastern tongues. Remember the other day I was moaning about foreign stations not subtitling in English? Well I now do get Chinese documentaries and Korean soaps with English subtitles. I didn't know what to expect from German telly before I got it, but it's better than I thought it would be. Basically I get for free the type of programming you'd have to pay for if you wanted it in English. Lots of diving with the fishes, ice-cave exploration and documentaries about Madonna. Years before we actually had the digital switchover I remember a British government spokesman proclaiming how British multichannel TV would be the best in the world. Well he's a liar. He failed to mention back-to-back Judge Judy,
Coronation and Emmerdale repeats (terrible British soap opera) and endless Jeremy Kyle (famously rude and bigoted talk show host whose programme consists almost entirely of lie detector and DNA tests for rowing lower-class families. I even found a German equivalent to my favourite programme which is called Judge Barbara. She's a criminal court judge with dyed red hair and the witnesses say "Scheiße" a lot. (It's not reality TV, it's actors.) In fact Germany seems thankfully largely devoid of reality TV and what they do have involves far more interesting perpetrators (eg the animals of Frankfurt zoo). I do miss Judge Judy though. If she hadn't been a lawyer, she should have been a hand-model. She has the most beautiful hands in television.
I haven't given up on English TV forever though. How could I when the most important event of the 21st century occurred last night at 9pm on Channel 5 yes DALLAS IS BACK. The only soap I ever watch. That Bobby Ewing is a loser. If you had TWO BILLION barrels of premium-grade crude under your house wouldn't you get drilling away? When brent crude is currently going for £114.55 a barrel? (And a barrel holds 42 gallons; 159 litres.) By the way I think Lorimar are really racist: premiering the series in America on 29 June yet making Britain wait till September 5 ~ as if we are some unimportant backwater when really America is in the middle of nowhere ~ both geographically and economically.
I can't wait till I'm emperor of London. The policies of my government shall be simple: rainbow streetlights and the tallest buildings and fastest trains and low taxes for the rich. I would get rid of the "Green Belt" that is strangling this city and have London expanded in size until the population tops 100 million. I would scrap restrictive building regulations and leave just 2. No tower blocks permitted of less than 150 storeys. No buildings, apart from houses, allowed to be less than 25 storeys. Everywhere would be mixed use. No zoning, which kills cities and leaves dead zones. I would get Boring green spaces like Hyde park transformed into stately formal gardens.
On a more serious note, I would love to study town planning. However my opinions on the matter are so strong (I'm in favour of high-density mixed use with residential properties built on top of businesses) I couldn't handle the powerless, thwarted feeling of having my views ignored. Which is why nothing short of the job-title "Emperor" will ever satisfy me.
I have infection in my ear yet AGAIN and I've just seen a nurse-practitioner who prescribed me antibiotic pills (I don't want to spray anything else into my ears. They've had enough of being tampered with). She also gave me a Seroquel (quetiapine) refill ten days before the due date. I had been taking half doses to make my supply last and already I'm feeling constantly excited over nothing (ie the manic feeling is coming through). When you look up my medical notes "SCHIZOAFFECTIVE DISORDERS" comes boldly through (as if I've got more than one of them). Thankfully "raving junkie" does not. I'm extremely careful not to mention my drug habit, or the fact that I'm still knocking back methadone every day beause I don't want prejudice and I don't want them refusing me sleepers when I need them (I really cannot see a connection between addiction to heroin, which is an opiate and taking sleeping pills occasionally, which are not opiates, never make me high, and cannot substitute for them. And yet my old GP, who was snotty and condescending said "I am not prescribing drugs of addiction!" when I asked for humble ZOPICLONE!!)
Why did I steer all through the controversy on Anna Grace in my last post which was only there to say 1 she has put up Youtubes of herself and 2 she sounds like a cartoon character ~ really cute. And yet there I am ranting about personality disorder issues. Totally irrelevant. And I don't even think I was manic when I wrote that. (Mania being a primary cause of tangential expositions.) I hope Anna isn't annoyed with me. It wasn't meant to be a hatchet job, although it kind of looks like one. Also I insisted in calling her pet Porkshire "Eleanor Rigsby" after "Mr Rigsby" in Rising Damp. Knowing all along that Elle's actual name is Elean or RIGBY ~ after the Beatles' song...
Well I have ranted enough for one day. I really must get back to have Iceland Chunky Cod fillets with American Crisscross Fries and my very own Tomato Surpise (the surprise is that they're chopped up, doused in black pepper and vinegar and... well, that's that. Tomatoes in vinegar are much nicer than tomatoes on their own...)
Illustrated: Judge Barbra Salesch; Judge Judy being a rudy, as per usual; the Burj Dubai, also known as the Burj Khalifa, currently tallest skyscraper in the world putting London's tinsy-winsy 72-storey "Shard" to shame; a satellite dish on a German building; Anna Grace cradling her Porkshire...
Believe it or not, that satellite dish I found on the street and wired up WORKS~!! Through careful angling, an accurate gut feeling and a lot of luck, I managed to point it bang-on at the correct Astra satellites for German TV! So I get back all those documentary channels about life under the seas and the "Inner German Border" (I luuurve the old Berlin Wall ~ got a real thing about it)... yes i get all that back. Plus dubbed versions of Dynasty throughout the night. For some reason in Germany, Dynasty was more popular than Dallas... (and I thought Germans were the most sensible nation on earth..?)
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