i just did a blog. it was a really good one.

it was so good it disappeared.

so it goes.

let’s have some music on. bob dylan singing ‘girl from the north country’. i like that song. what a lovely life that would be if you could say ‘oh, if you’re going to blah blah, remember me to blah blah’ and it makes me think of like being on a horse way up on a trail through the tree line of a hill where the rain hits heavy on the borderline and freedom, freedom, freedom and an extended community stretching over the miles, eyes screwed up against the rain. (more of this twaddle shortly)

i was just fiddlin’ about with moosic here and i bet that what happened was an absolute first time ever event in the whole history of the universe. and i bet you will agree with me when i tell you that maria callas doing an aria from the marriage of figaro (the one that’s in ‘the shawshank redemption’) was followed by dr alimantado doing ‘the best dressed chicken in town’. that can’t have happened anywhere ever before.

and that bit up there ^^^ about amerikaaners on horses taking a beating off the weather in a romantic way and going round saying ’see that she has a coat so warm, to keep her from the howling winds’ is a bit, erm, like being on a narrowboat on the wey navigation which is what i’ve been doing these past few days. well i think it’s like it and it’s my blog so there.

except that the captain and crew of the charlotte rose are a pair of cripples. trouty’s legs have gone all rubbish and need to be chopped off. she can have two wooden legs instead. i have a trapped nerve around my sixth vertebra which is so painful at night that i should be prescribed a paddling pool filled with diamorphine to try to sleep in. tell you what, it’s not very funny to find yourself having to get up at two in the morning and sit upright and still with tears rolling down your cheeks. it gets a bit better during the day though.

when we get to a lock we have to hobble about like a right pair o’ raspberries (that’s cockerney rhyming slang, look it up) and we look like a sort of council sponsored disabled access to the waterways effort and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see ‘presented by the variety club of great britain’ written on the back of the boat. and, did you know that it’s the law that if you want to open an ice-skating rink you have to have so many ’skate chairs’ depending on the surface area for the disableds? it’s like a dining room chair but with four moveable skates on the legs. that’s what happens when you have to have disabled access to everything. all i get is paracetamol.

and this dog thing is still ongoing. not many people think about getting a dog for as many years as i have. i’d quite like a terrier i think. not too big, good at home, good on a boat. but wait! a jack russell might be ‘yappy’ and i can’t do yappy. oh no. and i don’t like the ones with short legs. i like the look of an irish terrier but they have a write-up that suggests they are highly dangerous. but the other day i saw a mum and some kids come past with a dog that i rather liked the look of. these days i just ask what sort of dog it is. this one was said to be a cross between a border terrier and a patterdale terrier.

now we’re talking. actually the lady, when i asked, said it was a ‘bloody nuisance dog’ and the kids started on with his list of previous convictions. from being abandoned at the roadside he had come on to be an undisputed merciless champion killer. rabbits, rats and squirrels had all fallen to his quick jaws. ‘AND he killed grandma’s cockatiel’.

HOW BRILLIANT IS THAT!? the lady said that they had to be very careful because just up there was somone whose garden backed onto the canal and they kept chickens and this FANTASTIC dog would just swim across the canal and kill all the chickens and then go on the rampage in every0nes gardens that he could get into and only come back when he had murdered everything.

have a look at those links. i’ve got a terrible sense of mischief in me and i might just go up the rspca in chobham (rspca, that’s rich considering his list of crimes) where this dog came from and see if they’ve got another one.

cheerio.

oh, by the way. i made up that thing about skating rinks but i bet you believed it, didn’t you?

if you want to increase your readership it’s really very simple. all you have to do is type:
“pearl, martha, jeremy, newsnight” (i call it ‘nooosnight’).
so let’s give a warm welcome to our nooo reader and that’s daniel.

i don’t watch the telly and i haven’t done for years. i haven’t had a telly for years and i wouldn’t have one if you paid me (where ‘if you paid me’ = ‘if you paid me a small amount’). i didn’t even watch the thing when my brother’s telly was hiding in my airing cupboard. so i don’t remember watching nooosnight but it’s nice to know that daniel pearl is tuning in and reading me. ahh this modern world we live in; you couldn’t make it up, could you?

at the doctor’s my prescription for opioid pain relief was not extended and i wasn’t surprised so i hadn’t even asked for it. so now i’m left in pain. ow ow ow. see?

i asked about chiropractoryisation or whatever it’s called and the doctor said that some people have good reports of it but that it’s very expensive. so now i’m left in pain because some doctors will prescribe it on the nhs but not mine and i am too poor to afford it. so now i’m left in pain. ow ow ow ow ow.

i’m writing this on friday night and i’m listening to radio lbc 97.3 and YOU can listen to this station too thanks to the mighty power of the intermaweb. on friday night they have a sort of ‘psychic’ programme (where ‘psychic’ = ‘rubbish’) from 22:00 until 01:00 saturday. the thing that really IS fascinating about this twaddle is that so many people are interested in it and even seem to believe it is true. and every week they spin a show out of this gossamer and the twists of credence. have a listen to it and see what YOU think . whooOOooohoooOOOOooooooo……….. spoooky.

i prefer nick abbot who is on on saturdays from 22:00 til 24:00. i really like his delivery; it’s so flat and condemnatory. i love it. give him a listen, do.

my doctor always claims that whatever i have wrong with me, he’s got it. he draws the line at diabetes but just about everything else he’s either got it or he used to have it. he agrees that when you have some neural damage at around the sixth vertebra that it feels like ‘an iron nail going down the inside of your bones’ all down your left arm. but because i’m an alcoholic i’m left with this agonising sensation; i cannot have painkillers that work in case they turn me into a drug addict. ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.

night all. night mary-ellen, night john boy. night YOU. night daniel pearl.
goodnight children, everywhere.

been directed here with views on booze-hounds? wind down to the previous blog.

now then, here’s a conundrum for the professors…

ridicule - ridiculous
marvel - marvellous

in my mind’s eye i have won the lottery and i keep all the jaded professors in a special room round the back of thirst hall. in the corner would be a special wicker laundry hamper containing all sorts of staff room stuff to stir up their memories and stop them getting alzheimers. to help this there would be no rhubarb cooked in aluminium saucepans but there would be a lot of tweed jackets, leather-patched elbows, gowns, cups of tea in thick white china cups, leaky pens, reference books galore, pipes and tobacco and a boxing cup from 1964. they could dress up as much as they liked and then i would drop bombshell queries on them like the one above. ‘where did the extra letter L in marvellous come from, eh?’ is what i would ask my tame professors.

my arm hurts so i’m going to bed. g’night.

hello! henry (writer and artist) here, and i’ve got a kind of a blog for you tonight/this morning and including a bit of a question.

i’ve got a few questions to mull over at the moment and i like to mull them for quite a while. one of these questions which has been mulling on a low light at the back of the stove for about three years is whether i should get a dog and, if so, what kind.
another question is how to mend my bike with the limited tools i’ve got. now you can’t see the bike and you can’t see the tools so i’ll have to mull it myself. i think the rear wheel spindle is sheared but i’ll work it out for myself in the end. then we have another question…

here comes the little old man driving the old banger of a question. he is wearing a hat. whoops! up comes the first indicator; is he turning yes? hey! now the other indicator has flipped up; is the little old man turning no? crikey! now he’s got both indicators indicating. so we need your help.

the question is do i turn this blog a bit more into a drop-in centre for alcoholics who have, like myself, stopped drinking and for people who are drinking too much and want to slow down or quit. should i?

and, if i do, how do i do it?

i have personal arguments for, which i won’t bore you with right now, and a lot of realistic arguments against. i don’t want a load of tenants super cans left lying around all over the blog and pissy-trousered nuisances not getting the message.

so don’t worry, i’ve been mulling this for a while and i don’t mind mulling a lot more. it’s important and therefore needs a serious face to be worn when i think about it.

but i need other input. i want to know what YOUR viewpoint is. tell me, is this yet another of my brilliant ideas or does it, frankly, stink.

whaddaya say, hey?

hi there h. fans!
my name’s henry and stu and sarah thought it would be a good idea if i said i was a sort of writer chappie (smiles and moves from foot to foot)

hang on! this isn’t supposed to be going like this at all. i’ll start again.

HI THERE H. FANS!

for those of you who don’t know me i’m a writer and artist. today i’m here to talk to you about electricity.

every now and then i have to go to the petrol station to buy a packet of electricity. it usually costs a tenner although sometimes i get the bigger box which costs twenty quids. they never have bogof deals though.

well, it should be every now and then but i realised that these days i have to go every now.

and sometimes when i walk home with my packet of electricity i notice that the box looks a bit mildewed, smells a bit stale and has got a mouse shit stuck to the bottom of it. AHAH! exactly as i thought! i’m being sold HAPPY SHOPPER ELECTRICITY!

what i’m going on about is the olden days. in the olden days the electricity board was a reliable institution and was probably, apart from running the electricity for the whole country from the scillies to the shetlands, the very electricity company off of the monopoly board.

in the olden days a bucket of fresh electricity cost a shilling and what a thing it was! a bright white with a hint of blue like a sheet washed in daz. rich, creamy, full-fat electricity with a longer-lasting lather. it kept for ages in the fridge and men in caps with woodbine yellow fingers would scrape up the last little bits and fill up their bicycle lamps with them and they alone would last a fortnight. but it’s not like that now.

i know you’re not supposed to but the other day i tore a little hole in my packet of electricity when i was walking home with it. the electricity had cost me ten pounds, same as always, but what do you think i saw when i looked inside through the little hole? i know ‘contents may settle during transport’ but this was ridiculous! what a pathetic excuse for electricity this was! all i got in the packet was five electricity nuggets made from ‘chopped and reformed mechanically reclaimed electrical slurry’. never mind the spicy coating, that’s just to make the lights come on and con you into thinking you’re getting a good deal. IT WAS BLOODY HAPPY SHOPPER ELECTRICITY!

a while a go when i spoke to the electricity board about this on the phone i asked if i was being charged a different rate to feed the electrically hungry items in thirst hall because, after all, how much could it cost to run a light bulb and a bunion rasp? an oleaginous voice from somewhere on the indian sub-continent assured me that to do that they would have to alter my individual meter.

so that was alright then.

hang on! no it wasn’t alright! they must think i’m one of these people that has to have a plug in every socket in case the electricity leaks out, unseen, like gas. they must think i’m fucking stupid!

i’ve tumbled them. i’ve cracked the conspiracy wide open. all they have to do is keep charging you a tenner…

(camera tracks past henry as he taps the keyboard under a guttering, hissing, bare light bulb. we see the door handle twist and the door start to move silently open, we see a gents black shoe and trouser leg coming through the doorway)

you see! they CHARGE you the same amount of money but inside the box…

(the camera zooms in. just behind henry’s head we see a muscular forearm in a raincoat sleeve, the hand is in a black leather glove and is clutching a chloroform pad)

…inside the box there is nothing but weak, useless, watered-down, HAPPY SHOPPER…

(the camera sees the gloved hand with the chloroform pad is ready to strike)

…ELECTRICAL RUBBI

(the hand strikes, henry’s face is smothered with the cloth. henry is pulled backwards, struggling, towards the door)

UUUUUUGH HHEEEEELLLPPPPHHHH UUUuuuuu ahhh hhh h

(we see henry’s feet being dragged backwards through the doorway into the darkness - fade to black - cue theme tune)

not everybody knows that there is a famous amerikaaner comedian and film star* who plays absolutely SCORCHING banjo. he (there’s a clue) used to contain a bit of banjo in his stage gigs. you want to hear him tear the arse out of ‘foggy mountain breakdown’ with earl scruggs. anyway, this is what started it all. i spoke to 24hr record dealer about him and banjos and up came a little snippet where he says that banjo music cannot fail to make you happy and that in his times of troubles richard nixon was probably going around in shorts and with a metal detector and feeling sorry for himself and that he should have been given a banjo and that would have cheered him up. yes, that’s where it all started.

i spoke to 24hr record dealer again about banjo music and now i have about a million gig of banjo banjo banjo. i don’t know much about what’s what but i think it’s bluegrass that i like but there’s other styles too, country and so on…

and i conclude that * is right; you cannot fail to be cheered by banjo music. give it a try. visit 24hr record dealer and check out grandpa jones, lester flatt and earl scruggs. that’ll be a good start.

anyway, it got me started too because now i wanted a metal detector because of this snatch of a * gig and that’s how i found out i’m not a ghost. it’s true and it happened like this.

i met up with dad and at a buttercup field near the ruins of newark abbey he handed over his trusty metal detector. GREAT! later i went detecting and i detected a lot of lager cans. and this started me thinking about something i had wondered about before. it’s this…

where does all the earth come from, eh? what i mean is that everything that is old is buried underground and has to be dug up. now old things couldn’t dig the earth up and hide, a roman swimming pool with a mosaic floor (i bet the beckhams have got a swimming pool with a mosaic floor of the chanel logo and filled with chanel perfume. good old Thick and Thin, they never fail to amuse. one day i’ll do a blog about his autograph and voice training), couldn’t bury itself nine foot under so it must have been covered up. but where does it all come from? if matter cannot be created where does all the earth come from? it does my head in all that kind of thing.

another thing that is doing something weird to my head at the moment is the opioid painkillers i have been given for my arm. they are called tramodol and they are also an anti-depressant. that bit works a treat but my arm still hurts. it would be tempting to take more than is recommended but that might turn out making a four day bender with oliver reed and keith moon look like a half hour dollies’ tea party with mr teddy and a four year old girl with a lithp and a frilly betht dreth.

fed up with lager cans i thought i would resort to the woods on inval hill, one of the sacred sites in my mythology. certainly no lager cans buried there but i did find a 1p and a united arab emirates coin of no discernible value and a picture of what looks like a coffee pot or whatever kind of jar thing that genies come in.

and in the woods i got chatting to a young dutchman, “jost, it rhymes with toast” and said that i used to live “over there” indicating ‘keffolds’, the kids home that i used to live in. you guessed it, that’s where jost lives now in the house which is now divided into three homes and his home is the middle one. and he invited me in…

how weird. being back inside the building that i hadn’t been in for getting on for 30 years. how different with all the structural changes. i needed to really stretch my memory and spatial awareness to try to grasp it all. and then i realised that i am not a ghost. no. i am an anti-ghost. there are now walls where i used to walk or run through chasing children, playing games, dropping mud off my wellies…

and now i’m going to have a home hairdo. with my neck the way it is i should be feeling tortured. my recommendation for the weekend is that you do not break or otherwise dislocate your neck as i seem to have done.

cheery-toodle-byeeeeeee

eh? what? oh, who is * you are asking…
* is steve martin.

when i win the lottery and have loads of money i shall employ worn out professors, jaded teachers and the thoroughly knackered of the educational world to follow me about and answer my questions. right now, right absolutely now i’m listening to mozart (figaro - callas) and a bit of the floyd (piper at the gates of dawn - poor old roger barrett) and some keef richards (solo stuff - i only liked him and charlie watts. ron wood’s alright i suppose but his drawings are crap, the sort of thing that used to get sent in to ‘look in’ comic when i was a kid) and i’m thinking about the words ’secluded’ and ‘reclusive’. it’s 04:31; i had to get up because my poor arm hurts so much.

come on you professors; both these words share a ‘clu’ but they don’t share much else, in my grammar at least, of anything else except meaning. you can’t be ’seclusive’ or ‘recluded’ and that’s a shame because i think i’d rather like to be recluded.

on wednesdays i go to art therapy. i like going there. one of the things i did was a joke about being recluded. it’s just a pencil drawing with some green paint on but i feel that it’s finished now and i don’t have to go back to it. it’s called ‘i live on an island in the middle of…’ (here comes the joke) ‘…the 18th century’.

my art lady is called mary. today she told me that she thinks i should go to art classes.

walking from the hospital to the boat in order to water the flowers on the roof i passed by a skip in a garden in addlestone. hmm what’s this? a flower basket thingy? i’ll have that, thank you very much. and then, walking through addlestone with my new flower basket a little later, a queue of traffic and i hear “OI! HAROLD SHIPMAN!". it takes me three steps to process that this remark is addressed to me, a moment of auditory triangulation tells me that the shout came from a car which is on the other side of the road and facing the other way and is now behind me. so i feel safe enough.

the young people of today like to shout things at me from motor cars, usually it’s “WANKER!". one day a young man in the passenger seat of a car in a traffic jam engaged me in conversation as i passed, he wanted to know where i had bought my woolly hat from (it was very cold). then he wanted to know where i had bought my neckwarmer from. oh DO keep up. it was a JOKE. he was a HUMORIST. it was a scummer/car/my beard joke.

the night before last, on the radio, they were wondering whether the ‘wimpy’ chain still existed and, if it did, was there still a ‘brown derby’ (dessert) and a ‘big bender’ (sausage thing) on the menu? i was sure there was a wimpy in addlestone and, of course, i was right so i thought i’d check the menu for derbys and benders. then a man hoves into view, a man who enjoys a super-lager breakfast, i could tell just by looking at his face. so, just a couple of minutes after the “SHIPMAN!” shout i had a vagrant zeroing in on my beard and trying to cadge some cash off me.

i started to grow my beard because i am lazy and i don’t like shaving more than once a week. then i thought i might grow it long enough to tie a knot in it like viv stanshall. now i think i’d like to have it forked and plaited and have beads dangling from it like pirate captain jack sparrow what is played by johhny depp in the ‘carrots of the pirabbean’ films but imagine what abuse i would get if i really did. but why shouldn’t i? it’s MY BEARD.

i could shave it off but because i am so beautiful and youthful beneath it i would start getting reported as a truant from school again as i went about my business poking about with sticks under english hedgerows in the warm afternoon sun and mucking about in streams.

anyway, so i was looking in wimpy’s window for a big bender and there was this fucking vagrant asking me not IF i could ‘help him out’ but by how much and guess what? you really couldn’t make my life up if you sat up all night scratching your head and frowning with HARD THOUGHT. he was eating A PICKLED ONION. i told him i’m on incapacity benefit and walked off.

oh, for a seclusive life of reclusion. it’s now 05:25 and my arm still hurts, bad as ever.

i really must get a little dog.

the weather has been beastly hot, hasn’t it? at the weekend i enjoyed a method of instant cooldownification, it went like this…
some friends were moored up between walsham gates and newark lock and we moored there too and joined them in the evening. we sat on those director chair type thingies on a grassy bank next to aiden’s boat, ‘dot’. when the barbecue was lit the smoke made straight for my face so i thought i’d better move to the other side of it on rather a steeper bit of bank. i remember jerking my thumb towards the river and saying to jan, “i bet i wind up in there before the night is through".

what happened next was funny for three reasons: firstly that i was the only person who had not had any swig, secondly that i had seen the future as described above and lastly for the speed with which i emptied my pockets after i had got back out.

picture the scene; the night was darkening and the merry banter flew back and forth, i adjusted my chair, my chair adjusted its relationship to the vertical and the surface of the river wey adjusted itself from being a few feet beneath me to right over my head.

what happened was that i went down the bank, hit the side of the narrowboat and then fell into the gap between the boat and the bank and then under the boat. it was the first time that i have fallen in completely, previous expeditions having just been the odd leg or two or just a bootful. this was the real thing.

i soon climbed/was hauled out again though and had to speedily empty my pockets. my motto being ‘don’t keep anything in your pockets that you wouldn’t throw into the cut’ i had, of course, got my mobile phone in my pocket. i got it out just in time to see it die.

by the time i had gone away to dry and change my clothes my scurvy companions had just fished out my glasses with the aid of a boathook and a searchlight.

and my phone dried out by the next day so that was good too.

but sometimes a bit of refreshment is needed and that’s what happened to trouty as we wended our way home. we were hot and we were tired. trouty wanted a pint of lemonade and lime from the anchor pub. we had run out of nice, cold drinks on the boat and i started thinking that an orange juice in a pint glass topped up with soda water and with loads of ice would do me fine too. yum yum. we looked forward to it.

in the pub i asked for a pint of lemonade and lime. the girl asked me if that was a large or a small. i thought pints were pints but then i worked out that she was doing that annoying thing of talking to someone else while not looking at them. then there was a discussion about how they were running out of lemonade. a sign on the bar told me that they had already run out of ice. i decided that i didn’t want my drink with no ice but trouty DID want hers. i was presented with a grubby glass filled to a centimetre short of the lip with a mixture of lemonade from a 2 litre bottle and a grudging splash of lime. and then i got asked for the money…

yesterday’s best guess was by rich. he guessed £2.57. but he was way, way out.

for this lovely, refreshing drink i was charged three pounds thirty. £3.30. sixty six shillings.

so i have decided to commence a campaign of annoyance against the anchor. i wonder how annoying they would find it if people kept telephoning the pub and asking if it was true what they had read on the intermaweb? if people kept dialling 01932 342507 and asking if a short measure of lemonade and lime with no ice really does cost £3.30.

it’s fun being me.

a lot has happened since last i blogged. i went haslemere and found out what it feels like to be a ghost and also that i wasn’t one. i haven’t had a drink for seven months and haven’t had a fag for four. i now have a metal detector. i’ve had one ambulance out and been to a&e twice. i now take a personal record of twenty two tablets per day plus three jabs of insulin. i have been for a lovely, refreshing swim at very short notice under a narrowboat in the river wey. i have found a few interesting odds and ends and have decided to have a campaign of hatred against the anchor pub at pyrford (a pint of lemonade and lime, grubby glass, short measure, ice machine broken… go on, guess how much…). and lots and lots has happened and i’m sorry that i haven’t been keeping you all up to date.

and i think i might be having a change of bloggular direction but my brain is still chewing this over so no news in black and white for you yet.

but maybe soon, eh?