Epic Escapes from Communist East Germany

FINALLY I'm getting my money's worth from German telly. Several of the channels are doing a season on life in communist East Germany. My favourite programme was one that told in detail how the "inner German border" and Berlin wall were fortified and how people managed to escape.

Outside Berlin the border consisted of a strip of grass several hundred metres wide with watchtowers overlooking a fence no higher than many people have in their back gardens. The problem was that the "lawn" was strewn with two million Soviet mines. One day, a pair of East German border guards spotted a group of West Germans at the fence. They strolled over and shared cigarettes and beer. They were only half-way back when ~ BANG! ~ both were blown up by a mine. The border guards, who were basically teenage boys in the year between school and college, hadn't even known the mines were there. The West Germans climbed through the fence and fearlessly ran across the mine-field and carried the injured guards back through the fence, where they took them to a West German hospital. Despite having attained "freedom", both insisted they wanted to be returned to their own country...

The best story was about a group of people who made their own hot air balloon, which flew them to within 600 feet of the border only to run out of fuel and crash-land. So they make another even bigger balloon and actually do make it to West German soil. Disney made a film about it titled Night Crossing.

I'VE DECIDED to give up the heroin yet again. I know you've heard this time and again. But I'm far too psychologically dependent on it because it's the only thing that raises my mood. Alcohol doesn't. I've had three drinks in the past three weeks ~ half-litre cans of Lithuanian Fizz brand cyder. I only used to buy it because they drown out the taste of alcohol with overpowering cherry flavouring.

I'm terrified I'll plummet right down to the darkest abyss of depression, because I've been feeling bad for a month now, and it's been steadily getting worse. Dr Lovelace said I seemed broadly the same as two weeks ago and today I probably was. But I felt terrible at the weekend and have too much experience of low moods to be taken in by a two-day, probably heroin-induced, improvement.

I know I'm going to feel like crap, but I just have to grin and bear it. I have to live the rest of my life without illicit drugs and I'm going to have to start some time. So that time might as well be now...

Sweating Like A Swine: Methadone Problems

IT'S a boiling hot day and thanks to methadone I've been sweating like a swine. Or perspiring like a pig, if you prefer.

I'm reading a really good book: Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir. It's the true story of Lady Jane Grey, great niece of King Henry VIII and cousin to Edward VI and Elizabeth I who ended up in the Tower of London to be executed as a traitress in the days when being Catholic or Protestant could lose you your head when the wrong person was in power.

I've just been down the druggieclinic purely to get the time of Thursday's doctor's appointment in writing. I'm freaking out about some hiccup keeping me in limbo between the two services for weeks on end. After I fell foul of foreign-accented clerical staff and went all the way to the hospital for nothing this morning, when my rebooked appointment was actually on July 26th, I decided to leave nothing to chance.

Nobody who promised to write me proof of address (apart from my mother) actually has done. But I've been in luck thanks to unexpected correspondence from the Gas Board, the Council and The Support Worker Service. So I've now FIVE proofs of address. Surely that is enough for everyone..?

On Friday afternoon someone is coming from the mental health support team (which is an independent charity and not alligned to the psychiatrist I don't have) to oversee my "needs". So I might hopefully finally see the free bus pass I was promised a year and a half ago!

My methadone is in crisis. Ever since the 25-20mg drop it hasn't held me properly so I've been using on top, then feeling lousy when I try to go "clean". I might have to ask the doctor to put me up 5mg. Which feels like the biggest cave-in on my part. But otherwise I find myself drinking extra methadone bought on the street. And/or relying on heroin. And a person on methadone should never "rely" on heroin. That reliance is precisely what methadone is "supposed" to end! So what should I do? I don't know. I'm face-down in the dog-muck yet again. I just want this nightmare to end...

The new methadone doctor's appointment can't come soon enough. I never thought I could or would feel at home in a methadone clinic, but having been exiled to the London Borough of Crudsville for that awful year, I now see home is where the heart is ~ and my heart is here. (I'm in the methadone clinic's gardens as we speak.) Here hopefully to stay. (Barring other ****-ups...)

I even bumped into my old druggieworker who had left to have a baby. Her baby is now two and she says I have changed beyond all recognition although my voice remains the same (that is how she recognized me).

Changed beyond recognition...?

I HOPE IT'S A CHANGE FOR THE BETTER!



AND NOW FOR A MUSICAL BREAK...

SCIENCE LAB: FLESH AND BLOOD
I know this from the Reactivate 2 rave compilation, though I do remember it being played at one party I was at... The sample is from Shakespeare's King Lear:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!