Silver Plate

I THINK I have been handed just about the best Coping Mechanism there is on a silver platter.
Schizophrenia/psychotic episode. Let's not beat about the bush. Psychotic episode it is, no question. The dr knew I knew this and didn't try to deceive me. Schizophrenia means a certain form of psychosis (bearing in mind you can also be psychotic and depressed and/or manic) and contrary to popular belief there is a scale of psychosis running from near the edge (whatever that might be) to just over to well over to barking to barking so much you don't know who/what/where/why/anything any more. Schizophrenia can get bad enough. About as bad as it gets without your brain literally melting and your dying.
Schizophrenia: had a real good cry over that one.
I'm not claiming to be suffering here, so don't pin a suffering label on my words. Confused maybe, suffering, not really. Hearing voices can be fun. Head echoes make me laugh. Paranoia I don't like. Riding buses I don't like when there are crowds of school kids making it sound like they're not talking about me when they ARE. + repeating what they say when right up close...
Crowds of people do my head in bigtime. People talking. Even thinking.
Or breathing. Or having faces. Putting things up to face. Eating. Food prog. on TV promted that little baby.
If this doesn't get better I know what it's going to be called. SCHIZOPHRENIA.
BUT ~ and there's a big but ~ if schizophrenia is what it takes to cope being in this shitty world, I'll take that before your nail-gnawing idea of reality, any day.
If you're wondering what I have in mind when I say evil in the world.
And this, the crux of the problem, is what I cannot get my head around: EVIL.
Think Africa. Think Rwanda. Think of a certain event in a certain African country where a coach load of (relatively) rich people was held up. The robbers' idea of what to do in such a robbery was to force at gunpoint every passenger to lie in the road (after raping/abusing/etc) and to force (also at gunpoint) the coach driver to run over these people repeatedly. Whether anybody survived I do not know. Frankly, I would prefer not.
So if you wanna know what I would do now, I would go to Africa to a diseased war zone and find some children, who might well be lacking one or both parents, one or both arms/other limbs, their virginity (at 8) and so on). And if it was a little boy I would be willing to play football with him, even though I don't particularly like soccer (more to do with stereotyping than the actual game, I discovered, years later) and am actually quite good at it. For a girl, supposing she wanted someone to do this, providing somebody divided the hair into squares I would sit there and braid or plait her hair for her. This I can do. It's to do with 3 strands and then over over over (including under).
I'm not claiming to be highly original in the "what to do with abused children whose language you can't understand" stakes, but I'm sure somebody understands.
The best thing you can do to a lot of people in or after a lot of cirumstances is Be Kind. And try to be understanding. And patient. Even if it hurts. And try to give more than you are ever willing to recieve back.
Somehow, if you are willing to do this, it can make everything All Right.

** Yes you can play football (soccer-type) with artificial limbs. Otherwise make it table soccer**

Kipper Addiction

I HAVE JUST REALIZED I AM ADDICTED TO KIPPERS... haddock, mackerel... smoked fish of all kinds. this is terrible! What am I going to to?!

Like a clucking junkie this morning I trawled the supermarket in desperation along the chilled meats isles. Finally I found smoked mackerel with peppers all over it (coloured and black, yes you can even get chili-peppered mackerel these days)... my eye drifted along to haddock and then "kippers". There is no such fish swimming in the sea as a "kipper". It just means smoked herring. Tescos yesterday wanted £3 for 200g ie £15 a kg. Morrisons own were 78p for 200g ie £3.90 per kg or nearly a quarter of the price.

I took them home gleefully and indulged in my habit with toast, behind closed doors.

What am I going to tell Narcotics Anonymous? Hi I'm an addict and I'm addicted to heroin, crack (as was, gave that up January 1 2009), drink, the odd Valium and KIPPERS! Ukh. But they're so moreish....


NAOMI CAMPBELL was in a crimes against humanity court today. Hurrah! I thought. Finally the beautiful monster is getting nailed for her offences to fashion, music, novel-writing and film. But no, it was some silly case that she would inevitably answer no to, because no-one will admit in front of the taxman to a potentially multimillion pound gift, that the President of Liberia gave her a whacking great blood diamond.

She says no (quelle surprise!) But she did wake up in the middle of the night at the Presidential Villa in South Africa with two mysterious men standing over her (she didn't lock her door, what a tart!) who handed her a "bag of dirty stones".

Hmmm...

I bet she gets more in free gifts off her millionaire boyfriends than she ever earns on the catwalk or in front of a lens. I heard she only makes £2 million a year, which sounds fine and dandy till you realize her agency takes a whacking cut, then the tax man ~ 50%! ~ which can't leave more than about £700,000 a year. And how are you meant to live and buy a decent house on that!!

Those horrible "real housewives of New Jersey" were boasting of the value of their homes. Well one was. And I translated dollars to pounds and thought, hang on a minute one of my old houses was worth that.

Yes a standard £500,000 London home, housing the poor and destitute!

Illustrated: kippers, Naomi Campbell ~ mobile-phone lobbing queen of mean, Millennium Star diamond ~ 203-carat D-flawless!


Naomi Campbell talks cocaine addiction with Oprah Winfrey



Vauxhall Corsa: the new supermodel 1992 commercial
Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington et al... and a car

More about Chogstable the Nightingale

SOME GOOGLING into the subject, has revealed that Chogstable, my nightingale, is probably a boy. And that there might well be two or three of him. Or else he has severe insomnia, because he's frequently to be heard singing at all times throughout the day. Nightingale is said to mean "songstress of the night". But the two assumptions ~ that it is the female who sings and at night are wrong. It is, so I read, the male nightingale who does most of the singing. In the early hours of course his song becomes far more distinctive for lack of warbling, tweetling competition. But nightingales are to be heard chirruping away at all and any times during the 24 hours.

If you ever go on holiday to Togo or Chad and think you hear Chogstable twittering his head off at 4:30am ~ you're not going crazy. It might actually be Chogstable himself! Nightingales winter in Western and Central Africa, returning here by mid-April (so how come I first spotted Chogstable in January? Looking like a small thrush without the speckles (ie just like a nightingale), hanging out around dense vegetation ie behaving just like a nightingale. Every night I spotted him around the same tree he sings in today.) How could Chogstable be here, when he ought to have been having a chirp in some mango-grove in Gabon?

The little nightingales are said to cross the Sahara Desert in one fell swoop (so to speak) sleeping as they fly (which some birds can do), thrumming their tiny wings nonstop. On they flutter, across the Straits of Gibraltar or wider Mediterranean Sea, finally touching down for a long-overdue roost in Southern Spain or Italy.

May is said to be the best month to hear nightingale song, when the birds are breeding. In June, they are tending their nests of babies as couples. By July they take to the skies once more, thrum-thrum-thrumming away, off to their second homes and luxury gîtes along the Gold Coast, the Côte d'Ivoire or the Congo or Volta rivers...

Actually having read their supposed migration-timetable, which implies they ping too and from Africa not once a year, but twice. I'm confused. If anyone has better information, please let me know...

LINKS:
Wikipedia nightingale
Wikipedia nachtigall
Springerlink: First arrival dates of nightingale to Central Croatia

Any good videos (if I can find 'em) und Deutsche Übersetzung kommen später/coming later.

SPEAKING OF SINGERS
This is pretty remarkable:
ROSLYN KIND: CAN YOU READ MY MIND
What do you think of her voice? Whose does her singing remind you of?



An old clip:

Strange flashes of life ...

I KEEP HAVING THEM. Strange flashes, where I feel, or I imagine, that I'm actually living. Flash-backs or flash-forwards? I don't know. I smell things. I feel things. I feel anticipation. Not the anxious-tinged waiting for a dealer... Unless I know them really well I cannot trust them. I mean, in the most basic way. I've only been properly ripped off a couple of times. But every time I score, the reality is there: it might happen. Then I would be doomed. Not that I'm not doomed already, I can hear you say.
Doesn't it happen to us all? The magical feeling we only get on awakening after a vivid dream? When present situations are bathed in a new light. When new things seem possible.
I dream of France. Repeatedly. Paris.
In my head I wind backwards to Morocco. My blogospherical friend Gattina was posting from Morocco last week. This was the first place I went to on my own, off my own back, for no particular reason except that I had the chance to go. I went by train (and boat) all the way from Wales. Through London, down to Dover, crossed the Channel. Calais to Paris Nord. Metro. Gare d'Austerlitz to Hendaye. Hendaya (as it's known on the Spanish side) to Madrid. Madrid to Malaga. In a little urbanización called Mijas Costa I spent a week over Xmas with my Mum. Then I took the train to Algeciras, a boat to Tangiers ~ where I saw an old man smoking hashish on the street, who looked like a wizard from a Rupert Bear story. I got out of Tangiers as soon as I could, on the night train to Marrakesh. Waking up first thing in the desert, an oasis went floating past our windows. It was an old-fashioned compartmentalized train with tourists lined up along the corridor, just gazing at the views.
The sights and sounds and smells of Morocco constantly come back to me. Arabic cigarettes and black coffee first thing in the morning. Tangerine juice and hot flat bread for 15p. Courtyard hotel rooms for less than £3 a night. The view from the window was like a scene from Arabian Nights.
Sunrise in Rabat. The burnt colours of earth: umber, sienna, ochre were flooded in gold. I wandered the entire perimeter of the palace walls, gazing at tangerine trees in the first light, thinking over and over: Wow I'm in Africa! Later that morning I found the Royal Gardens, which were open to the public. There were storks' nests up the palm trees. I wandered down a lush pathway, alone. It was like an Islamic paradise.
All these things come back to me still, with the golden dream that they could happen again. And I don't feel trapped any more in an eternally revolving present, between drowsiness and despair.
Somehow, I know, I won't always be like this.

4:24am: Chogstable the nightingale, who shares the cherry tree with Flapper, is chirruping her head off as we speak. She's amazing...!

04:24 Uhr: Chogstable die Nachtigall, die oben im Kirschenbaum mit Flapper die Ringeltaube lebt, zwitschert laut! Sie ist wunderbar!

ASBO Kids

ASBO Kids: ~ doesn't the one on the right look charming!!?!" ~ these two were described by the London press as "mini Krays"...
The Krays were pantomime gangsters in the 1960s. (i.e. they were real people but those who know say they were mostly show ~ no real shady businessman would tolerate his face in the papers the way Ronnie and Reggie Kray seemingly so enjoyed.)
An ASBO is a New Labour Government introduced Anti Social Behaviour Order, as imposed on young hoodlums. Now worn as a badge of honour amongst certain of the "lower orders" ...

Nuisance neighbours: I will post properly on Monday. Suffice it to say they're I am not the nuisance magnet ~ as I've been told repeatedly it's my type of emergency housing that's the magnet. None of the antisocial behaviour has been directed at me. It's just a general disrespect for the house and the others in it. E.g. the front door being smashed in by someone who can't be bothered to carry a key. (Where did I see THAT happen before...??)

WOW! for once a diamond photo showing a little bit of fire!

... so which famous stone is this, then?

One can find some rather pleasant jewellery online at BlueNile.Co.UK ~ go on, have a click!

Talking of bling: my COMPETITION IS STILL OPEN
ROLL UP! ROLL UP YOU HORRIBLE LOT! AND STAKE YOUR GUESSES
WHICH STONE IS WHICH??

~~~***closes Monday!***~~~

ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOUR ON THE SAVANNAH
"BATTLE AT KRUGER"
sorry about the idiot amateur newsreaders, but this was the only clip I could source quickly without endless minutes of nothing much happening...
Lions vs buffalo vs enormous nile crocodile ~ amazing!