There!

OK: I'VE NOW OFFICIALLY MOVED HOUSE! 79 Pancake Towers, Walford, London E20 9LP. OK if I were an EastEnders character that would be my address, but they say you shouldn't give out too much personal info on your blog. Which means I'm pretty f*cked, what with my heroin confessions of yore and all... Well I'm TRYING not to use it. And not entirely succeeding. Hey and guess what? My mood, for the last several days has been almost entirely NORMAL. Not high as a kite, and not too depressed either.

I started keeping a mood diary, where I rate the highest and lowest I felt that day as well as various other factors such as manic feelings: racing thoughts, hyperkinesis, etc. It's something I'm supposed to fill in every day, though many days I don't. Takes about half a minute to scrawl out the answers, then every week or so, I plot my highs and lows on a graph. Very interesting. At the beginning of the year I was hypomanic and suicidally depressed on the same day for more than a week. A complete basket case. Then we see clear-cut euphoric hypomania with no depression. Then the hypomania declines and depression appears in a characteristic wedge shape. With me, the mania usually looks like a shark's fin (peaking very soon, then gradually declining, though you may see two or three sharks' fins in a row). The depression gets steadily worse day by day, hits an all-time low; then suddenly, the day after, I'm almost better. Interestingly the letter S for "suicidal" DISAPPEARS when the mood plummets past a certain point. Anyway the rest of these notebooks are full of the most drivellous rantings possible, usually composed while manic and to be honest I'd like to burn them. What I like the most about being hyper and high is that when I'm right up there, my old neurotic self almost entirely disappears. Also in depression beyond a certain extreme, I'm not neurotic either. But my normal boring personality is so insecure and neurotic I irritate the pants off myself, so what effect I have on other people I hesitate to guess at...

By the way, the whole point of the mood chart is to correspond one's state of mind with whatever shit life has thrown at you that week. Weirdly the news that I'd been offered permanent accommodation actually set off depression with suicidal ideation. I kept thinking of this flat and telling myself: Now I know where I'm going to die... (Which might well be true; because I ***should*** have lifetime tenure. And if I don't die in hospital, the odds are I WILL die at home. That's just statistics for ya. (But of course when I'm really desperate I fantasize about dying in other ways and places. Don't think I'd ever have the guts to put that into operation though...)

Binky is STILL CONFINED TO A MENTAL HOSPITAL for the FIFTH TIME IN LESS THAN A YEAR. I don't even know what is "wrong" with her. She seems completely "normal" to me... But! She was severely punished this morning for calling the doctor the C-word and isn't allowed outside. A 49-year old woman grounded for having borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia and being in a bad mood. Which has me running all over the place purchasing cigarettes, paying off her multiplicitous catalogue bills... etc. Being as my new place is two miles from the nuthouse I can't get there every day any more. Hey last Saturday we had an interesting ride in Manic Girl's car. Bloody hell. I had just remarked how "normal" Manic Girl appeared and why on earth were they keeping her in hospital for so long... Then we got in the car and I realized. I don't think I have ever whizzed through the sinuous streets of London at such extreme velocity. When we got to the post office, Manic Girl said "I used to work there but it was so boring I jacked it in and travelled the world for three months". I wish I could be that spontaneous, but I'm very cautious and boring at heart.

Of course I have heard back NOTHING in my great fight to get keys for all my doors and windows and non-Turkish satellite TV.

I'm living on cheese coleslaw sandwiches. It's that posh multigrain malted bread, so I feel most bourgeois nibbling on these whilst viewing Abu Dhabi TV (formerly sky 796 now you must tune to Astra 2 28.2 east 11662 or 11623MHz horizontal) or Horse and Country (Sky 280 not on Freesat) or The Peace Channel Urdu (Eurobird 1 28.5 east, transponder F1 upper, 12559.67 mHz horizontal (not on Freesat or Sky). Yeah I had a go at tuning my German TV box ~ the one that made me hit the roof when I tried to get Hotbird 13 east and was instead deluged with hundreds of irritating channels in BLOODY TURKISH ~ into the Sky/Freesat satellites at Astra 2 28.2 east. You get about 300 channels free-to-air, most of which aren't on Freesat, some of which aren't on Sky either. I do love my satellite television, hence this massive gripe with the council over negligently miswiring my Hotbird feed and giving me F*CKING TURKISH TELEVISION INSTEAD!! Don't get me wrong. I love most things Turkish: cheap under-the-counter tobacco, large lamb shish kebabs with all salad loads of garlic sauce bit of chili sauce for £5.50 and jewellery that is far nicer than anything else you'll find in the low-to-mid price range (though Indian jewellers are also good). But I DO NOT WANT TURKISH TELEVISION!!!

Ukh, all this ranting... am I going manic again? The mere fact that I think about mania, or remember what it's like at random points of the day, is often (weirdly enough) the first sign of its return. That and fantastic adrenaline rushes lasting hours on end, woven into the psychedelic fabric of life's rich tapestry...

" /> Bloody hell I'm hungry. I'm going to have to run to Iceland for something to shove in my sandwiches. Good job it's winter: because I have no fridge, I'm just stashing stuff out on the balcony. Where, by the way, a pair of pigeons keep mating. First thing in the morning and right in front of my face.

Righty-ho. Better leave it there. Hope y'all have a chirpy weekend...

(And if it can't be chirpy, then may it be chirrupy instead...)

Link: my right to satellite television under EU law http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-01-913_en.htm?locale=en

Illustrated: these apartment blocks are far too pretty to be anywhere in London ~ what you see is Neukölln in Western Berlin...

MUSIC: DOLLY PARTON ~ THERE

I used to listen to this when I was very little: it was on the album New Harvest First Gathering