it’s good to have an aide-memoir so i have started to keep notes of the things that i should do and must do and would like to do. i keep my notes in a nice little green book and i use a special nice pen to write my notes and all in all the whole thing keeps me happy.

in my new mood of actually doing things i actually did some things today. for example, today i solved the problem of cheap shoes which don’t fit. ill-fitting footwear has been the bane of all mankind since time immemorial, since when bad witches in ancient stories were made to dance themselves to an agonising death while wearing red-hot iron clogs - a bit like wearing the cheap training shoes that i bought yesterday from tesco.

a bit later on i’ll tell you how i solved the problem but for now you, yes YOU, can help me with another thing that i have a note about. i was doing another thing which was walking all the way to west byfleet (not in my uncomfortable new, cheap, shoes which i wish i had never bought) along the towpath of the basingstoke canal because i had to go to the doctor’s to collect a prescription and then take the prescription to the chemist. i remembered that i had a problem to do something about so i made a quick note and now here we are…

my problem is that i have carefully thrown away some bits of paper that i did not mean to throw away. but YOU can help me if you want to. if you really want to i would like you to email me your name and your alter ego’s name and your address and your telelphone number and your email and that kind of thing and that will help me because i meant to do all this in oxford but although i took my little green book i didn’t ask anyone for their pertinent details.

so if you really want to send me all these bits of info that might come in handy for me one day if i don’t throw them all away again, my email is: henrythethirst@aol.com

another thing that happened to me today was that trouty showed me how to get shot of red-eye on my photos. apparently i had the tools at my command all along but i didn’t know. so thank you trouty for being so technermological.

now in my book i see that i have to find out about electrics on boats, practice tying knots and start reading my how to stop smoking book.

oh, and before i go, if anyone has new shoes that are a wee bit too small, this is how you make them fit…

cheerio!

i’m off to art therapy at the hospital in the morning and i’m looking forward to it.

hoorah for getting things done!

yes, i’m back. back from oxford, back from the charlotte rose, back from the dead… it’s good to be back.

contrary to popular and misguided belief i have blueyish eyes. i like to think that they have a bit of grey in them because that sounds a bit more romantic than boring old blue. i like to look at peoples’ eyes and i always gaze in wonder because eyes are so beautiful. if it had been my job to design an organ for the capture of light and it’s transformation into brainular signals i would probably have come up with something like a doughnut with a coathanger aerial sticking out of it and not the simple orb of stunning beaty and power that is the eye.

featuring in art since the dawn of time, symbolic far beyond mere words, the eye sees all; watching and protecting, spying and revealing.

one of the treats i have in store from diabetes is blindness. oh please do not let me be cast into that land of darkness, never to see the stunning world again. until then i’ll settle for these watery bluey eyes of mine and be happy with them. at least, these days, for the moment they aren’t reddened…

but here’s some that are:

the 6.1 megapixies that live in my camera went to town with the red when they were left in charge of the pictures i took in oxford. some of the pictures i took were not too bad and this is quite a satisfying one and one that will teach me to read the instruction book and not just take piccies on ‘auto’.

here we see the figure on the left, sweet and innocent enough to make old men weep, and the figure on the right (what’s the opposite of sweet and innocent? sour and guilty? that sounds a bit harsh, i’d better make it sound a bit kinder…) ahem, and the figure on the right, erm, displaying some of the, er, ummmm, experience! yes, that’s it, experience of life to come, errr. well you know. she’s young and he’s not.

that’s enough about them what about me? it’s my blog after all. well, i have been doing quite a lot of thinking of late. some of the things i want to do is find out all about electrics on boats. i think i might be quite good at it if i can find a suitable course to go on. it can’t be that difficult because i know that there are all sorts of simply ghaaaaastly people my dear who can do all this electrical stuff so why shouldn’t i? perhaps i can go on a maturey-studentey-course or something.

i’ll put the electricity on the metaphorical back-burner in the thinking pot because the next thing i have coming up is the resumption of art-therapy. i’m so looking forward to it. i have planned the thing what i’m going to draw; working title ‘conversations with god part one’.

yes, i know it’s a pretentious title and i don’t care because i have come to realise since i crawled out from under my stone recently i can do pretty much what i want and as long as it makes me happy it’s just fiiiiine. f.i.n.e. - fine.

trouty said to me the other day ‘you’re good at everything you do’ and although i thought she was a bit over the top it gave me a lovely warm feeling inside and i was happy and i was grateful to who knows what and i resolved that i’m actually going to go round doing things for a change.

there’s not much point in being good at things if i don’t actually do anything.

i think i’ll start with the camera book. here we are… page 16… flash… red-eye………

hhhhhhngh

hhhhhhnghhhhhhhhhhhhnggggghhhh

(flips listlessly through yesterday’s copy of the ‘walton informer’)

hhhhnnngh hhngggggggggghhh

it’s no use, there isn’t enough roughage in my mental tract…

(has two spoonsful of ’syrup of gags’)

one last try

(screws up eyes and clutches keyboard until knuckles turn white)

hhhhHHHHHhhhhHHHHHHGGGGGGGGHHHHHhhhhhhh

oh well, maybe after the weekend. the oxfordshire air might get things moving again.

one of the many ailments which i suffer, uncomplainingly of course, is interphalangeal distal osteoarthritis. this was brought home to me, shall we say ‘with a BUMP’, when i was forced, at whip-point, to play volleyball the other day.

we played volleyball with a ‘not-a-volleyball-at-all-ball’ which was a rather heavy sponge-rubber kind of an affair. we had to make loose fists to knock the ball about and that meant hitting it with cruelly exposed distal finger joints. ooh, ow, ooh ooh, ow. it hurt me.

look at those heberden’s nodes forming on my poor hand ( shown here surrounded by quack nostrums appropriate to this particular condition).

anyway, the end result is not that i’ve lost my grip so much as it bloody hurts when i try to exert much pressure with my fingers. this caused a problem when the washing machine’s cold input hose started to leak in the tap area. have a look at the lower tap shown here in the immaculately clean environment of thirst hall’s kitchens.

as you can see there isn’t very much space to get a finger in there and i couldn’t get the coupling undone.

so i went and bought some long-nosed grips and hey presto!…

…the job was done. i cleaned up all the threads and seals and applied a coating of waterproof grease, which is kept on the boat, prior to reassembly. it hasn’t started to leak again (yet) so i’m happy.

if i say so myself, it was a job well done.

really i think i should have been employed to use my aids for the disabled to mend battersea bridge. aaaaaaages ago it got bashed by a boat and it has taken up until now to mend it. battersea bridge will be open for traffic from tomorrow.

but,

bear in mind that we are supposed to be hosting the olympics in 2012. latest news from this farce is that the paddling pool won’t be finished on time. it will be two years late. at the moment it will be TWO YEARS LATE. and, guess what?, COSTS ARE SPIRALLING. what a notsurprise.

even i could have built a paddling pool on time as long as i had my trusty long-nosed grips to help me.

goodnight.

price of return ticket: UK£ 2.5
excuse me but i merely wanted to VISIT woking, not BUY the whole thing. especially at such an inflated price.

number of depressing railway stations visited: 3 (100% of those surveyed)

number of grimaces of distaste performed by surveyor upon reaching woking: 1
length of time spent performing grimace of distaste: 3 hours ("oh god! oh poo, i can SMELL WOKING! oh poooooooo")

number of scummers wearing hoodies, baseball caps, white trainers seen in woking: statistic unavailable as clickometer broke after recording the first 10k+

number of residents who look as if they can’t speak english: see above

number of residents interviewed who look as if they CAN speak english but CAN’T: 2

number of residents interviewed who look as if they can speak english and can: 8

number of residents interviewed who look as if they can speak english and can but don’t know where claremont avenue is: 8

number of people interviewed who will gladly send you to where claremont avenue is not: 2 (sample interview: “’scuse me, can you tell me where claremont avenue is please?” “yes, it’s that road down there” “that road where the sign says ‘constitution hill’?” “yes” “thank you very much”

percentage of population of woking who actually DO know where claremont avenue is: 0% (extrapolated)

number of relapse prevention groups attended by surveyor: 1

feelings of ennui and deja vu experienced by surveyor: 106

number of suicide attempts by surveyor on way back to station: 1 (it’s a shame that steamrollers go so slowly; it gives the driver time to put on the brakes before he runs over your head)

actually it wasn’t all bad. i quite enjoyed myself if truth be told. but things wouldn’t be nearly so much fun without the fibs.

talking of fibs, have a look at this thing what i done all by myself:

lock by lock

i worked so hard on it. i must be much cleverer than even i suspected.

so that’s two ‘dot coms’ that i’ve got under my belt. surely it’s only a matter of time before i become one of these dotcom millionaires that i hear so much about.

have a lovely weekend. tomorrow i might tell you about my new mole-grips and what i did with them.

no, not the bird but this one…

it will be such a shame to see it go. it was built in the 50’s and, judging by its serial number which is 15862, possibly in 1958. but that’s just a guess.

look! it has a 6 pot lister engine instead of the original, and that alone must be worth a few bob, but it will go quite soon i should think to the scrapyard in the sky. the poor old thing, she’s as old as me.

i cycled down the towpath to take these pictures and to go to pyrford to do a bit of cache maintenance. who should i see ambling along in a long coat? none other than vodka mick! i hadn’t seen him since ooooh, last night actually. when i cycled back from my aa meeting up at the windmill he was already here, watching a dvd of ‘the bargee’ and itching to use an online translator to translate zulu tribe names into english. but that couldn’t be done; not by me at any rate.

i left mick at the chandlery (that’s where the crane is) and i toddled off to the cache and found that someone had left a small bottle of chocolate liqueur inside. naughty naughty! as that kind of thing is verboten i retrieved it and as vodka mick was still making a nuisance of himself when i got back he was the lucky recipient.

this place

was my next port of call. have a look at some of the little clips in there. i had to muck about with pausing and playing and pausing and playing etc to get some of them to go but i enjoyed a few of them. i liked the motorcycle flying into a van, the man who sets his parachute on fire with a gun, the bush/bliar mash-up, folding a t-shirt in less than 2 seconds (i’ve seen something like that one before but now i can actually do it), the human/fish one and right at the bottom the cup girl. how the hell does she do that?

more to the point, how do i do links on here? well you’ll just have to copy and paste it.

oh, and the flying lawnmower is good and the japanese dancer holding her own head in her hands (at waist level - i think it’s a trick).

not a bad day, considering.

cheerio.

(anyone wanting a coles crane for about one quid should contact stuart at tlc. he’s already had two offers to take it off his hands for nothing. as i said yesterday, buyer collects)

riding my pushbike and getting up to level 80 on ‘qwyzzle’ (not both at the same time).

so i am a bit puffed out and must go to bed.

oh, by the way, anyone know anyone who might be interested in a 1950’s coles crane as a restoration project?

buyer collects, would suit an, ahem, ‘enthusiast’. i might take a picture of it tomorrow. or i might not.

sleep well.

yesterday i finished my treatment programme at the windmill.

a week of detox and then six weeks of a programme that i feel has changed me quite a bit. i have had a lot of thinking to do. i have had to work, for me at any rate, quite hard. it’s been a bit up and then been a bit down but it’s been bloody interesting.

and then you leave.

and i got my little certificate with a bit of a goodbye summing-up in there and, and… and…. well, that was about it really. honestly, don’t these people realise how special and different i am? (that was an aa joke)

and that was that. all over. the damp squib ceremonilessly handed over. that was that, all over now. except it wasn’t. oh no, it wasn’t over at all…

oh, before you go i need to have a word with you.

really? in this room here? this sounds a bit serious…

well…

well what?

your last urine test came back positive for benzodiazapines and we didn’t realise until yesterday and we thought that as it was your last day we wouldn’t bother about it but…

(at this point i maintained my usual calm exterior but inside… well, you know how your pc sounds when you put a dvd in it and it starts going zzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ and revs up? that’s how my brain was going. BANG! all the information processed in the blink of an eye but i never even blinked and i didn’t stop smiling either.
how could this have happened? it was either a cock-up or an accident or - and this is the worrying option - nobbling.)

…but i’ll need another urine sample from you now because i need a negative result if you are to come back in here for aa meetings.

my conscience was as clear as my urine sample proved to be; i haven’t been munching valiums, pecking at the libriums, been anywhere near a benzodiazepine but how had this happened? and the more i think about it the more i think that there may have been a whiff of nobbling about the whole sorry affair. there was no point in protesting my innocence as no one would have believed me so i just put on my ‘there’s been a cock-up’ face and got on with providing a squirt of the urinary equivalent of evian water.

but the whole thing leaves a nasty taste in my mouth (the allegation that is, not my urine sample) and before anyone says “well, you would say that, wouldn’t you” let me explain the nobbling bit. i’ve been thinking about this quite a bit and i have started to put two and two together; little comments here and there, the fact that i have rubbed a certain staff member up the wrong way, that staff have constant access to diazepam and just one rubbed on a finger while handing it out could spike a sample well enough.

having a dirty sample is just about a hanging offence and there is no arguing about it; i could have been chucked out just like that.

no one holds thrall over me. having any old job does not confer respect due; respect has to be earned and when i run into anyone who is frankly stupid and who waves their job title at me and expects me to run away frightened is in for a surprise.

back to the world then. back to the nasty old world that never changes. but i’ve changed, oh yes i have. i’ve changed alright. i’ve got my power back.

i walked away across the carpark and disappeared into the mist.

i finish up the windmill this saturday so today was my last art therapy group. my six pictures completed over the six weeks of the programme have been returned to me and i thought you might like to see them.

actually i don’t care whether you do or not because here they come…

this is the first one that i did. i wasn’t really sure what i should draw (someone suggested to someone else that they should draw a plane crash; that made me laugh) so i just did a picture of the charlie rose waiting at the bottom of coxes lock. you can click on the piccie to enbiggify it and sharp-eyed boat persons might spot the fatal flaw in my drawing:

what happens is that you get a half hour to draw or paint or whatever and then the group retires to the juniper room to mull over the works, one by one. the artist gets a chance to explain the work and then neil (the art therapist, very nice guy) and the group make their comments. it’s amazing what gets thrown up by just simple drawings. we decided that this one might represent a journey and the deep lock a challenge. the fatal flaw? the balance beams on the bottom gates are pointing the wrong way.

here is my second picture. i should have called it ’surrender or die’ but i forgot to write it on. see what i did there? - it’s addiction related. one of the other customers said that he never wanted to see the picture again because his crack addiction had nearly killed him and he’d had the last rites read.

those pirates knew what they were doing when they started on doing scary flags. this marks the beginning of my ‘black period’.

picture number three is the genie and the bottle. my appalling photography has cut off some of the words, the genie saying ‘piss’ and me saying ‘tee hee’. make of it what you will, i think it’s quite self-explanatory.

now we come to my little doggie picture.

i like the little doggie. i would like a little friend; one to take on the boat. but i fear that the neighbours might not like it if he was a yappy dog and that i might not be responsible enough to look after him. so he lives on in my dreams only. his name is ‘adder’. neil made me cry when he discussed my seemingly innocent picture. he found it very interesting that i choose to go by another name and that i feel i have had to murder my old self. he thinks my childhood holds some secret things but what they might be i don’t know. he wants to work with me in the future. he’s a good man; very interesting.

here’s a picture of a bed.

yes, a generic hospital type bed. i drew this on the day that i said goodbye to my bed at the windmill and transferred status to days and my mum was in a hospital bed because of her operation (she’s doing well, gawd bless ‘er). what’s written above the bed is a joke and the ‘next’ bit is because it got me to thinking about the cyclical nature of life; birth, death, old, new, when one door closes another one slams in yer face. that kind of thing. also, i wanted to see if i could draw a convincing hospital bed from a kind of memory and i think i got away with it.

i liked to draw interesting things that might provoke discussion. most of the people do rather bad drawings of houses with smoke coming out of the chimney, forks in the road ahead, question marks aplenty and things like ‘why?’ and ‘hope’ and ‘fuck off!’ scrawled across them.

here’s the last one, the one i did today…

this is a picture of a young man i met at the bus stop last friday. he was with a friend and they were enjoying a few cans of fosters in the dark bus shelter. they ponged of booze. but this young chap engaged me in conversation, he asked me if i had had a nice christmas. his friend suggested that they could go to staines for ‘a couple of beers and a smoke under the bridge’. this all made me very sad and i was stunned by the futility of everything, of all of it. i made sure to wish him a very happy new year when my bus came and i had to go because i felt that the last three decades had whirled away and that i was looking back through the veils of time. at myself.

i do hope that you liked my pictures.

goodnight.

what a brilliant idea to travel in a stately manner upriver to oxford for the simong meet-up on the 28th inst.

ooh, ooh! what a brilliant idea; how long will it take to get there?

(consults admiralty chart and waves compasses about, licks finger to check wind direction, consults seaweed etc) about five days i should think.

really?

(reconsults charts and factors in available daylight over bone-idleness squared) oh about five to ten days i should think.

scene changes to thames lock yesterday, a pirate ship hoves into view…

PLAN A had been to go out onto the thames and get some diesel and a bottle of butane from shepperton or walton marine or something and then go back to the mooring but thames lock was shut for lunch. we would have to wait twenty minutes and probably have run out of light so we elected to renew our licence for the wey navigation and turn tail and run before we all froze to death (especially simong who wouldn’t borrow a fleece).

what happened next would have been more exciting storywise if it had happened like this:
a wizened old pipe-sucker overheard our plans for oxford and knocked the dottle from his clay into a horny hand. hawking and spitting what looked like black cauliflower cheese into the cut he spoke up, “no you won’t young zur, there be stoppages from jaaaanuwarry roit through til the maaarch, heh heh heh, oxvord indeed, heh heh heh, old shebberton, she’m be shut for months and windsor too, they’m godder change them gates y’see. you city volks, you’ll never understand the ways of the cut as long as you got a hole in yer arse and” KERSPLOSH!!! “help! help! oi can’ts swim!”

but that didn’t happen. it was the bloke off the cindy lou what had come in behind us what told me. so, a million curses and boos to the smelly river thames people. we shall not be arriving in oxford in style and we won’t have a bed to sleep in either.

but i’m not downhearted, i shall just have to pay £1537.50p for a return rail ticket to oxford and £2940 for a B&B for the night.

(goes away to try and win the lottery)