Gledwood Vol 4 (new main blog)

Monday, 13 October 2014

Rain...

RAINING RAINING RAINING...

Isn't it beautiful...

Thursday, 2 October 2014

Mysterious Languages of the Arabs, Berbers and Italians...

I UNPLUGGED my TV aerial (again) and tuned in loads of Italian channels (Rai 1, Rai 2, Rai 3, Rai Scuola, Rai Storia ...etc) plus a couple of good ones in German (ZDF and Das Erste), TV5 Monde FBS and TV5 Monde Europe in French... plus over 120 channels in Arabic. So I'm doing courses in Italian and Arabic just so's I can understand my own TV set's polyglot babblings ...

أنا أتكلم العربية قليلا

Yes I've been learning a bit of a mysterious Semitic language! (Arabic.)

In my attempts to acquire some of the native lingo, I've been following quite a few Moroccan soap operas in the night. Perhaps the term "following" is a little optimistic. I watch the dubbed shows, gazing at things like street signs, cars, architecture and countryside etc to try and figure out which country these programmes originated in. Quite a lot seem to come from Pakistan (Asian features and manic-episode-style Arabic script) and Turkey (weird-taste interior décor and the Latin alphabet, eg Turkish police cars =labelled POLIS).

So I've been banging away at the Arabic, a little every day. I "mastered" (in the sense that a two-year old child "masters" it) the script in three days, but in the 3-weeks+ since,my command of it doesn't seem to have drastically improved since... also they don't commit as much of their words to paper as we do (most short vowels are left out) ~ so Arabic is a bit like trying to learn to write a foreign tongue via txtmsg-speak.

Arabic words are very difficult to remember. But once I know them I can recognize them straight away in conversation eg when they're babbling away on Al Aoula TV, which is my new favourite channel, I can pick out expressions such as mumtaz and mumkin with ease. Which was never the case when I did basic Chinese (a lot of Chinese words sound the same, and it's not just the tones...)

Moroccan TV has a lot of early-morning programming in French, which is great for an insomniac like me. I've been to Morocco... surely the boat-trip from Spain has to be the most drastic journey on earth... Europe to Africa... it's like voyaging into another dimension...

In 2011 the Moroccan government gave legal recognition to the mysterious Berber language of the snowy hashish mountains and shimmering camel-trotting deserts, which is written in its own ancient runes... How cool is that! Here's a Moroccan roadsign in Arabic, Tasselhaït and French... don't you think it's cool...?

The Italian's coming on really fast. Faccio un diario segreto in italiano. Lo trovo piuttosto semplice perche la grammatica italiana corre in parallelo con la francese. Per esempio, se vorrei dire che qualcosa accada a Milano, userei la stessa parola "a" come in francese: "à"...

Does that make any sense to you? It does to me now! (I'm not claiming to have any command over grammar whatsoever, I just kind of dunk it here and there, like a corgi's nose at a Royal Tea Party...

So I'd really like to go back to Morocco. + Italy. So these foreign idioms are going to come in extremely useful one day not too long away...

O well I must rush.

Spero che tutti sono bene...

أتمنى لجميع بشكل جيد.

Friday, 29 August 2014

The Most Beautiful Tune in the World

FINALLY I've found out the name of the most beautiful classical tune I've ever heard... it is NOT "Ave Maria by Bach" (which is two tunes intertwined, not entirely successfully)... but it's

BACH'S PRELUDE NUMBER 1 IN C MAJOR
It sounds especially good plucked out on a harp...

Isn't it amazing!

Friday, 25 July 2014

Still Not Smoking... Or Smoking 1 A Day...

HELLO this has to be a very quick post. I am still not smoking! (Ukh I hate to admit this but I DO average about one real cig a day; having said that I have just as easily gone days without, so I know that technically means I am smoking a tiny bit but it really is just that tiny bit.) Having said that, I bought shisha pipes for other people, and I'm the only one of the three who appears to have genuine intent to stop. The other two just want to get round the smoking ban, so they use them in waiting rooms, hospitals etc. I actually enjoy the e-pipe more than real cigarettes. I honestly didn't realize how much I wanted to stop until the opportunity presented itself to me. I **briefly**, it has to be said, looked up the "dangers" of e-smoking and couldn't find ANY. Yes nicotine is addictive and deadly in overdose (the fatal dose level is about 30-60mg, equivalent to 30-60 entire cigarettes at once). I get the impression that nicotine is (paradoxically or ironically) a lot like heroin in that it is severely habit-forming and fatal in overdose (what drug isn't fatal in overdose?) but that if you let it clear from your body it leaves your system strangely intact. It's the TAR in ciggies, not the nicotine that causes all those smoking-related heart and lung diseases... so it seems.

Oh, and by the way "nicotine stains" actually means "tobacco tar staining"... "nicotine stains" just has a catchier ring to it!

I did NUMEROLOGY on my name and found out my numbers for this pen name I want to use (a secret) EXACTLY match those of Charles Dickens... pretty coo for a would-be writer, huh?

LONDON is supposedly in a heatwave. Like hell it is! The temp here is only 28C. Tokyo is 35C, Oslo Norway was 36C last week. Death Valley was 51C just yesterday. There is no heatwave! It just feels hot. Because it's summer ~ duh.

ANYWAY I gotta go. Take care y'all and don't fry to death in this hot weather!!

Oh one last thing, and this is a real PS because I'll forget to put it in later... I read the autopsy reports on Peaches Geldof (daughter of Sir Bob Geldof) who died of a heroin overdose this year. She had in her possession just under 7g of "importation strength heroin" (61% purity ~ average UK street purity used to be about 50% a few years ago; it's about 25% now) and a blood-heroin level of 3mg per litre, which was TEN TIMES the amount they found in her mother, Paula Yates's body when she died of the same thing 14 years before...

But anyway for the first time EVER since I've been an addict I thought far less along the lines of "give me that spare bag of gear" than "what an evil drug that heroin stuff really is"... how weird is that. And I wouldn't say I'm doing amazingly because I'm still using intermittently but I've gone a few days without and whatever I was buying I seriously doubt was anything like as strong as 61%... or even 25%... it was such rubbish (or my system is hammered to bits, I never can be sure...) that I feel almost exactly the same on just methadone as wasting all my spare cash on that CRAP CRAP CRAPPY SHIT!

Illustrated: I don't actually use the type up top, I use a nicotine pipe as illustrated down below... it gives WAY more vapour... middle pic=Peaches Geldof as a tot with her mother Paula Yates who also died of heroin overdose...

uuuur i'm sorry i can't go around commenting today i'm running out of time...

OH GOD isn't this the most beautiful tune...
BACH AVE MARIA TECHNO'D UP

Saturday, 12 July 2014

I've Given Up Smoking!

ALMOST TWO WEEKS AGO I bought a nicotine pipe (not an e-cigarette) and have gone days without smoking any cigarettes at all.

The type I got takes refills from a bottle. A 10ml bottle of 24mg/ml nicotine solution costs £3 and lasts me six days. Ie I'm "vaping" 40mg a day, which is about the amount of nicotine in 40 full-strength Marlboros.

I have tried e-cigarettes, but they (1) aren't strong enough: the strongest I've seen were only 18mg and more importantly (2) they don't give out nearly enough vapour. Lastly (3) they are far too expensive.

I don't reckon you'd save very much money at all smoking e-cigarettes with their poxy cartridges. Last time I tried smoking one, I'd exhausted the entire disposable cigarette with half an hour's constant puffing. I would never puff for half an hour on my wizzy new pipe, because you don't need to vape on it for that long. In fact, I'd say I spend a lot less time vaping than I used to smoking, because if anything my pipe is stronger than real cigarettes. Also with a cigarette constantly smouldering down you kind of feel duty-bound to finish it, hence taking more puffs than you otherwise might do, purely to get your money's worth. With a pipe I take between three and ten puffs, then that's it. The other difference is that I tended to blow cigarette smoke straight out, whereas with this thing I take double and treble puffs and really hold it in.

For years doctors have been telling us that most of the dangers of smoking come from the tar, and that someone, somewhere might be preposterous enough to do that. I'm sure that someone, somewhere has experimented with nicotine patches just for the hell of it, got addicted to nicotine that way and gone on to smoke ordinary fags. But does that mean nicotine patches ought to be banned?

nicotine is relatively benign. But at last that an efficient nicotine-delivery system has been developed that does not require smoking, a load of mean-spirited physicians are up in arms about it, making ludicrous claims that children might take up vaping and switch to smoking! How extremely ridiculous is that! Now I'm not denying that

I know there are health risks associated with nicotine, but they are far far smaller than those associated with tobacco smoking. Tobacco smoke contains over 7000 chemicals, of which at least 1200 are said to be toxic. Some, such as benzene and arsenic are extremely carcinogenic. Though as we know, human beings appear to be selectively susceptible to these harms. Some die off early. Others have been able to smoke daily for eighty years or more with no apparent ill-effects.

Another great advantage of vaping over smoking is the vastly reduced fire hazard. There is no more need for lighters, ashtrays. My house no longer reeks of fags.

Plus my teeth are whitening by the day.

I didn't even know how badly I wanted to pack in smoking until a viable alternative was available to me.

I'M REALLY GLAD I STOPPED.

Illustrated: Shisha Time vaping pipe, like the one I use... "Tobacco-flavour" e-liquid tastes of stale hamster-wee so I use lemon-flavour instead... The next one I'm gonna try will be mint... Nice white teeth (mine aren't that white) (also, when I wear lippy, I far prefer "plum paradise" to that rather bland shade...