gechcch. gech echech ew.

sorry while i gag but just look at that title. i really hate all that bollocky business talk so good job i no longer have to have anything to do with it.

a few bits and bobs:

here’s something really, really, depressing to watch…
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5946593973848835726
tune in if you fancy having a really nasty taste left in your mouth and a feeling that you can no longer trust anything ever again.

i really must get one of them little recorder jobbies for jotting in a recorded soundwaves kind of way any, um, you know, THINGS, that i come up with and want to remember.
i was thinking about my blog of yesterday and the skydiving bit. today i was walking along to art therapy and i thought to myself that the only way that i would willingly throw myself out of an aircraft would be if i could get the door open before take-off. and that’s quite a good line. not brilliant but quite good. it is acceptably good and i know it. and i’m a harsh critic.

the reason i was thinking like this as i walked along was because i was wondering whether it really is good to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’. let’s say, i wondered to myself, i had a go on one of them ‘open mic’ nights doing stand-up. apart from the unacceptable pong and mess of shitting myself inside-out with FEAR i could ‘do it anyway’.

and i wondered if i could get away with it. and the answer is, yes. i could get away with it.

and then i got to the hospital RIDICULOUSLY early because i had been about my private business in addlestone buying some glitter for the picture that i threatened to make last week. that’s the one, the ‘offensive’ picture. so as i was early i went to windmill house for the first time in nine months and said hello and had coffee. i like being told i look fifteen years younger.

and then i felt the fear and did the picture anyway. the picture is mildly more offensive than the cerne abbas giant. it is a picture that has been sketched on toilet walls since the dawn of time. i’d bet loads of money (if i had any) that the first picture ever drawn in the mud with a stick was of a knob. my one was done in glitter and because of what i had done and how the session went i would say it is my most important work thus far. i know this sounds like pompous shit but i’m getting on and building a framework for a life that i can truly live with. and there aren’t many people who would dare do what i did today.
fifteen years younger and a few feet taller. not bad for a day’s work.

on the way home i was looking at the blue skies and recalling yesterday’s comment from the excellent merman…

he mentioned what might as well be called ’simpsons sky syndrome’ which is where you see a sky and it is like the one in the beginning of the simpsons and then the music starts in your head. it’s a pale blue, this simpsons sky, from the lower portion and much nearer to the horizon than the zenith. the sky has to look just like the one on the tv for the music to work though. isn’t it funny when we find out that other people do the same mad stuff as us.

i was wondering earlier on whether, before mirrors were invented, in the olden days, did people do mad little things when they thought they were alone and no one could see them behaving all stupid? these days we do these things in front of a mirror. but not without one. how odd.

oh, and you could do one million times worse than spending your pocket money on a cd. in fact, this one:
‘twelve stops and home’ by the feeling.

it’s so summery and makes me feel all happy.

nighty night.

in which we: riffle through the psychology of men, especially where hammers are concerned; tap our teeth over meteorological matters; find a foul CALUMNY revealed, perpetrated upon guess who; think about scrumping, optimism and the possibility that there might be crocodiles…

(do me a favour. as you read this stuff please put on a track. it’s called ‘never be lonely’ and it’s by ‘the feeling’. got it already? that’s good. not got it? never heard it or of it? that’s too bad. you must now go and get it and don’t come back until you have. because it sounds just like how my mood is as i go typety tappity typety type…)

see that hammer? that’s the one i use for knocking pins into the bank. see that big bit of wood? that’s a big bit of wood. see that pointy metal thing that would hurt if you dropped it on your toe? that’s a ‘log grenade’ and is used, like wedges, for splitting wood but this thing does it in the singular, it needs no plural. log grenade does it - oh yes, don’t you worry about that.

what you do is you line up the LG in the centre of your sliced up log and whack away with the hammer, star-shaped splits appear and the round log becomes wedge-shaped logettes like in trivial pursuit.

except…

last night, moored up near newark priory, trouty had been committing arson in the vicinity of the stove and i wanted to help. there was a nice log on the back of the boat that i had got WEEKS before out of the weir at papercourt lock and i thought i’d split it up. i hammered at the LG and i hammered some more. then i hammered some more and then i rehammered. i hammered in the morning, evening and all over this land but would the bloody log split? no. it wouldn’t.

this morning as we chugged along we regarded the log/wedge combo that was on the back of the boat looking like the sword in the stone but much more difficult to get out. nuts. it had never done this before, this being hammered right in until it was impossible to hammer further in either direction, in or out.

trouty is very wise and she thought the best thing to do would be to have a contest at getting the LG out of the L. i thought trouty was 100% right on this one. whoever you asked would immediately be the best person in the whole world ever at getting LGs out of Ls and would show us all blah blah etc. we thought the best people to throw down the log before would be ‘ken’ (a.k.a. admiral fairweather, boat: h.m.s. marital discord) and ‘vodka mick’ of this parish (a.k.a. ‘beard-druff’, boat: h.m.s. a model of ‘the victory’ with three pieces stuck together before he ran out of enthusiasm on a little table in his mam and dad’s house. he’s in his forties f.f.s.) as they are both complete know-alls.

fortunately this showdown never need come to pass because i talk to anyone and everyone and as we were going along i spotted ‘trevor’ (a.k.a. new trev, boat: tatty national trust punt) with a chain saw. and this is true, what i’m about to tell you, if you need something doing which involves men showing off with hammers ("tchoh, you want a SLEDGEHAMMER") or, even better, chainsaws just give the project over and watch them go.

brilliant scheme. trevor chainsawed a near wedge out of the thing and i hammered the LG out. and there’s the piccie, up there.

and here’s another piccie, down here…

it’s just a quick snap i took out of the front of the boat and i am ever so pleased to say that it fails ENTIRELY to do its subject (CLOUDS) any justice whatsoever.

the weather affects us deeply. imagine how glum you would feel if you were out in the wrong clothes and a hailstorm started and you were wet through on some hard and dirty pavement and a hailstone hit you really hard on your windblasted ear and stang you bad and made your eyes water up and when you turned a corner a freezing blast takes the glasses from your face because they are too big, like sails, and the arms don’t hold your ears and they skitter across the wet pavement, the lenses all scratching, and into a gutter and they are run over by a transit minibus full of damp traffic wardens and you are blind and cold and just want to die of misery.

and then consider the clouds. do you know? i often think that when there is a lovely sky i can look up just like every other man going right back to the stone age and i see what every other man has seen since the dawn of time. ok, so we pollute it with, well, some pollution i suppose and we make our planes ride the sky but essentially we haven’t changed it. as we tread the sour clod of the earth that we have irrevocably raped and ruined we can look up, up, up, forever upwards into the sky…

and then, just for a milionth of a second, i understand skydiving.

defy all physics, leap from a totally imaginary plane miles, miles high above the earth, above the clouds and hurtle down through the clear, bright air, turning and tearing off your helmet, and jettisoning your parachute, all your clothes, down through the cathedrals of the clouds, eyes half- closed, towering clean mountains of cloud, and mouth open in a slowly spinning, all transcending, st teresa ecstasy of god, of the air.

shame it’s not really like that. me in a plane? yeah. right. sure. that’s really going to happen.

but you see what i mean i hope.

you want to hear about the foul calumny now, don’t you. (no question mark required there because although it is a question it is written as a statement of fact and i just make it all up as i go along so there) well, what happened was an email from my past. i expect all voices from my past to sound rather ghostly, like this: “ooOOOOoooOOOOOOoooooo, i’m a bit ghooOOOooostlyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy". and in this email there was an episode referred to where i got chucked out of an english class by mrs fotherby because i stuck my finger into a hole in suzy do’s jeans. and that episode came back to me, flying through the years at one million and twelve miles per. i could take you right this very minute to the very seat in the very classroom…

except. it was ms. the do’s finger that went into a frayed hole in MY jeans. i would just like to take this opportunity to clear my slate. i was innocent all along. i feel that this sorry episode of the finger of ms. the do and my tattered trouserment has haunted me for too long, blighted my life and brought me to my knees just once too many times. begone, foul wraith of ‘a’ level english. you must leave us now. (points to egg-box style door in poky flat)

(winks) congratulations on your wedding, jules. may i kiss the bride? X

and THEN i realised as we chugged along, for the thousandth time, that really, at heart, i AM an optimist. but don’t tell anyone.

in my world where knees should be muddy and the red apples i saw amongst the dark green leaves should be picked and kept in a bundle made from the front of my jumper, in THAT world i am optimistic. every bottle that i dig up will be the whole one, the rare one. in that world i expect that when i go on the swings i could go round and over the top. i bet brass is really gold and i bet that in the canal, along with the carp and the chubb,

there might be crocodiles.

thank you for coming to my party and reading my blog. next time, if i remember, i will pose this question:

how the hell do messrs lemon jelly do what they do? i mean, i know they get old records and things (i’ve tracked down one that they have sampled. it’s called ’shtiggy boom’ and it’s by patti and the flames - i LOVE that one and anyone who might electronically post me an mp3 of the whole song shall win an item of my intimate apparel) but how do they stick them together in this mixing process? if you are reading this, messrs lemon jelly, then perhaps before next time you might invite me to your fably wossname studios to show me. oh, and thank you for all your other tracks that i enjoy so much that i have stolen off the internet so far.

bye bye.

oh for god’s saaaaaaake. i forgot again. i was going to tell you that trouty and i had a bit of a chat at the weekend about me writing and painting and so on. something’s going round in the old mental cement mixer. i don’t know what it IS exactly but today it smells of optimism. there’s light at the end of the tunnel. for i make the rules when i do this. i do. no one else.

this is mine. i make it. it makes me happy to do so.

i smile.

i walked ALL the way to art therapy today. in my rucksack i had my cagoule and my cap because it looked more than a little grey up there, but i survived without a soaking. at the hospital i bought a packet of chewy mints, spearmint flavour, and then i went and saw mary and i finished my latest work which is called ’saint’.

seeing as how i don’t blog all that often it is surprising that i forget what subjects i have actually blogged about in real life compared with things that just rattle around in my head. there will be some changes to my art therapy. this will mean CHANGE and i don’t like change and i don’t know if i’ve mentioned this before. i have either got mad cow disease and have the spongy holes right in my memory bank or i might have an early onset case of alzheimer’s disease and am not long off raising my hat to parking meters and congratulating them on losing weight OR i suppose there is a vague possibility that i might have dripped some cider onto my memory and forgotten (!) to take the precaution of creating back-ups before piss-ups.

there will only be another three sessions of art therapy of the normal kind i.e. starring me and me alone. after that i have agreed to move onto a group kind of a thing. have i told you this already? i have, haven’t i? well i’m feeling twitchy about it, that’s all. i really don’t like change just like i don’t like traffic. the next attempt to rock the art world which i shall knock up in a NOT GROUP session will be a picture where i use the medium of glue and glitter to draw something that the majority of daily newspapers would call ‘offensive’. good show!

i only bought a small packet of mints because i have decided to stop stuffing my face with sweets. my entire head has become spotty. lots of little spots on my scalp as well as in the usual chin type areas. either i’m going to be invited to a party or i’m suffering because of my unhealthy diet. so, when i’ve finished this packet of clarnico peppermint creams that i have here in this tin beside me, that’s IT for me and sweets. it’s OVER. i have eaten my last choc ices this evening. what i am going to do is see if i can use my patent method of giving things up to help me give up sweets. it’s going to be quite easy really, from now on i can no longer consume anything interesting or tasty. i shall live on tepid tap water, brown rice and celery for the rest of my days. ‘if i want to eat it i can’t', that’s my motto from now on.

on the way back from the hospital i decided to walk. after i had gone about 200 metres i stopped and got my cagoule out of my bag. and then i carried on walking in the rain. usually loathsome oafs hail me from their shitty cars and inform me that i am either a bender or a wanker but that didn’t happen today. no, today i was splashed by a coprolite-brained man in a chelsea tractor who deliberately drove through a puddle. this, of course, happened in addlestone.

oh poooo, where’s my pomander? oh god i can SMELL ADDLESTONE! i think i’m going to be sick because of the stench of the people of ADDLESTONE! pooo! pooo!

three peppermint creams and one fox’s glacier ‘dark’ to go. oh well. i think i told you everything; if i didn’t i must have forgotten.

i went to see the neglected charlotte rose today; she must be so lonely as she hasn’t been talked to or cursed or kicked for quite a few days now. i reckoned that she would have quite a lot of rain in the bilges and that i’d best go and pump them out and clean the weed filter. so that’s what i did.

i started off by walking to new haw lock. i saw les’s sister and said hello and then i saw sylv up by the lock so i thought i’d go and be rude to her. she and john were just bringing their boat into the lock, thay had been kept waiting for a few hours because a hen party on a hire boat had lifted one of the top gates and smashed it a bit in the process. it takes a while to get the men and equipment to replace the gate and patch it up. there is a fixed price these days for lifting a gate, it costs 250 quid. and that’s cheap.

i crewed for john and sylv on the way to the moorings. john has had throat cancer and has sort of recovered but his battle with the illness has really taken it out of him. interestingly enough he still smokes. if i was his surgeon i would kick his skinny arse out of my consulting rooms. he pokes quite a few pints down his feeding tube as well and this made me think about how marvellous i am. this week my all round goodness tally is:
booze - my nine monthiversary
fags - i haven’t smoked a fag for a sixmonth

at the moorings i saw mike and sue and mel and jan and barry and his wife. i love seeing all the people i know and that they wave to me and say hello and they talk to me and that they enjoy talking to me. for me this is uncharted territory. i’ve spent too many years being persona non grata as a result of my illness and what i did. don’t get me wrong, i’m not saying ‘oh poor old me, i was ill, none of this is my fault’ because alcoholism is not an illness like john’s cancer but it IS an illness. i say this because when somebody is in the grip of alcohol and its cruel ‘ism’ they are robbed of choice. i know someone who lived in a graveyard and when times were hard he drank petrol. show me the luxury of choice and i’ll accept that people who lose families and jobs and any shred of dignity through drinking, drinking, drinking, are just incredibly selfish.

while i was pumping the bilges (they drain to about six points rather than, the more conventional, one - don’t ask) i started to daydream. i daydream a lot, that’s why i have such a high boredom threshold. this time i was dreaming about my book, my book about drink. it will also be about fags because that’s part of the story but it’s going to be about drink. i was planning it in my head and i was thinking ‘this is MINE’, because no one can tell me how to do it or anything. when i was working i was a very good trainer. confidence in me was somewhat diminished when i returned from lunch smelling rather of cider and pubs. i used to drink four pints in a lunch hour. that’s not bad, half a gallon! but i’m a good trainer and my book will be good. i will write the kind of book i would want to read.

i’ve been on the site for lulu.com and i don’t really understand it. BUT - i know a printer who is just around the corner from me and i might go and see him about it and it might save me paying lulu a load of wonga that i can’t afford at all.

i can’t wait until my next hospital appointment, they all love me there and i can’t wait to tell them about my plan.

today i have also seen the very old man who always waves and the very fat man who walks four dogs and who i always see at the same spot on the towpath.

i love knowing loads of people and talking to them and having, well, friends i suppose.

i feel normal.

coo! i haven’t blogged for a little while and it’s so easy to get behind. and then i don’t feel like doing it. and then i really can’t be bothered but i must bother! i must get a bit of discipline going here! i’ve got things to do!

every day i think to myself ‘oh, that will be worth blogging about’ and then nothing else happens that day and i don’t get round to it. i was talking to sue on the towpath the other day. she has an english pointer called sasha. on the other side of the navigation were two jack russells, the short legged yappy type. they were going ape-shit because there was a dog for them to yap at. they didn’t see the mink climb out of the water into the garden next door. i pointed the mink out to sue and we stood and watched. we thought ‘no, the mink won’t go in there, he’s far too sharp for that’. but the mink sort of blew his nose a bit, towelled his arms with a leaf, waggled his little claw in his ear to get the water out and popped into the terriers’ garden for a look round. he got to within about two feet of these barking dogs and the dogs were so busy barking that they ignored him. one of them looked round a bit as you might when looking at someone else in a queue at the bus stop and then went back to barking. then he did a comedy double-take just in time to see the mink’s arse disappearing behing the wooden piling. stupid little dogs; i wouldn’t have one.

did i tell you i’d seen a little grass snake the other day? the size of a pencil he was. and a kingfisher sitting on a railing at pyrford lock for a while. and trouty and i saw a family of little baby roe deer, one was in the water for a drink, moving through the woodland near stoep’s bridge. a sizeable alder tree came down right across the water at old parvis bridge where the chandlery is and landed on a boat that was being given a lick and a polish. luckily chaz was there and he phoned up for chainsaws and the tree was chopped up and pulled out by stu’s 4 ton crane, ‘oily mist’. the waterway was only shut for an hour. i’ve sold a windlass at my new price of 8 quids and i also pulled out someone’s mooring hammer free of charge. as business is booming i’ve treated myself to a new magnet off ebay.

in response to several very kind comments that i have had recently and also with regard to sue from canada (hi there sue) agreeing with my plan i have been giving serious thought to a book.

there is only one subject for me to write about at the moment and that’s my long-term love/hate relationship with my mistress and enemy, celia cider.

i have been sending emails to sue in canada (hi there sue! wave wave) about what happened to me when i stopped drinking. i think there’s a book there. i’d like to do some artwork for it too because that will take up a few pages and save me having to write too much. i’ll use quite a big font as well. i’ve thought it through you see.

if i could only capture right now how i feel about it, if i could inspire someone…

calm down henry, you haven’t even started to write it yet. anyway, that’s my little plan but i’m a terrible one for enthusiasms so i’ll have to make a real effort to keep this one going.

now i’m going to bed. i’m tired and i’ve got the physio in the morning.

nighty night.

i was jealous of stu because he had a blog statistical breakdown thing that he could use to see some of the searches that people were using when the search engine pointed them in the direction of his blog. they were funny. i was jealous.

yesterday i was talking to simon and he showed me that i too could see the searches that had led baffled intermaweb users to conclude that standards are slipping and that the country’s going to the dogs.

if the statistical breakdowns are to be believed i truly am world famous and it looks as if around 300 people A DAY are looking at my blog and those figures are not just me, checking for the umpteenth time to see if anyone has left an ego-boosting comment.

a few of the searches caught my eye for the way that they were phrased. one searcher wanted “beard jokes” and that’s fair enough; plain, simple, he wanted beard jokes and hopefully beard jokes are what he got. i wonder if any of my beardular anecdotes have been woven into a best man’s speech in new zealand?

somebody wanted “japanese girl met pub kiss". sounds like a hopeless, mad, burning desire to recapture a fleeting moment, a stolen kiss… surely even the hairiest and most tattooed of lezzers deserves romance?

“funny boating things". desperation is seeping in here. our best man is back again. it’s three in the morning and he’s got a speech to deliver in less than twelve hours. “things"? what does that mean? i bet he searches for “please god funny boating bloody any things” next.

the last one sort of puts me in mind of a story about my mother when she was little and the film of the wizard of oz. when my mum was small she dabbled in the black arts. what happened was that her dad made her a magic wand to go with a fairy costume. i think it may have been delivered in a christmas stocking because she was in bed when she got this wand and she summoned up all her powers of witchcraft to put it through its paces with a test-drive spell. when i dream i can fly i sort of just take of and swim through the air and it’s so convincing that i’m half convinced that it would work if i tried hard enough. same for my mum; it probably won’t work, this wand, but i’ll give it a try: “magicka magicka - make this eiderdown turn into A CAT!!”

same thing with this last request then. picture someone doing the search and sort of treating their compluter like a mystical, living entity. like approaching the wizard of oz behind his screen our searcher nervously asks, “show different pictures of vodka” and then runs away and peeps out from behind a cushion to see what has happened.

have you ever had counselling? i haven’t and a good job too because despite never having had it i strongly suspect it is a load of old rubbish because they don’t tell you what to do they just spend weeks and weeks at great expense sitting there and nodding while you take the best part of a year to work it out for yourself.

when hunter s thompson decided to top himself he typed the word “counsellor” in the middle of a piece of paper and then shot himself. perhaps he’d had counselling.

at school i got cross about poetry because it was never about what they actually meant. if writing about a pig getting into a lady’s flower bed and eating all the tulips is about venereal disease in the early 19th century then why not just write a poem about sprinkling arsenic on his bell-end in an attempt to cure himself of the clap? say what you mean and keep the 4th form entertained, that’s what i say.

but here’s the solution that i just can’t get for myself. i’ve been trying for nearly half a century to come up with a satisfactory answer and i haven’t yet. it’s like a non-stop counselling session with no answer.

do me a favour, boost my ego and look at the comments on my last blog. they’re great and they make me very happy. here’s my problem; i know that i should do something about getting published but i don’t think it’s my blog that would do it. simon has shown me in a statistical way that i’m more widely read than i thought (hey! YOU out there! do you think you could leave a comment and say hi and introduce yourself? go on) but i think i need to put my work together, perhaps with a bit of artwork, yes - put it all together as a

what?

i don’t know. i never have known and i suspect i never will.

please, counsellor, tell me what the answer is this time. please?

THIS BLOG DOES NOT MAKE SENSE AT THE MOMENT BECAUSE, LIKE MY LAST MISSING BLOG, I GOT A 412 PRECONDITION FAILED ERROR MESSAGE UP. BECAUSE I AM SO TECHNERMOLOGICAL I AM GOING THROUGH IT PIECE BY PIECE IN EDIT UNTIL I FIND WHICH PART READS AS FALSE. I AM RATHER PLEASED WITH MYSELF BECAUSE DESPITE BEING VERY TIRED AND TEMPTED TO DEFENESTRATE THE COMPUTER I HAVE WORKED OUT WHAT THE PROBLEM IS AND I AM NEAR TO SOLVING THE PROBLEM MYSELF. AND THAT, FOR ME, IS PRETTY GOOD AND THIS FEELING WILL HELP ME GET THROUGH THE DAY.
I’M GOING FOR A LIE DOWN. I’LL SORT THIS LATER.

a while back i realised that if i go to the optician or to the dentist or i get referred to any as yet unexplored (by me) medical territories i have to give them a list of the medications i am on. and, let me tell you, it’s turning into quite a list.

at the moment i am having four or five injections of insulin (two different types) a day. as regards tablets i take eighteen a day of seven different sorts plus up to eight paracetamol.

i take tablets for my heart, for my stomach, for my blood pressure, for my cholesterol, for my cravings for alcohol which i don’t have, for my painful spine thing and for my nervous system. as i don’t have any memory tablets i can’t remember what all these things are called but the nhs has thought about people like me and has come up with a handy aide memoir: the repeat prescription form.

hoorah! for the repeat prescription form.

go back in time a good few years… diabetes has a lot of complications to look forward to. basically anything in your body can get badly mucked up by diabetes. blindness, renal failure, the blood vessels in your feet and legs can get damaged and gangrene sets in and choppity chop, off come your legs. other blood vessels can get damaged too, the ones in your knob.

doctors tend to assume that diabetic men of a certain age are going to be more, well you know, more ‘flexible’ in their approach? take the ’soft’ option? not raving ‘bonk’ers? and that they are unlikely to want to admit it. you get prescribed one tablet of sildenafil per week. one bunk-up a week is the government approved standard. so there it is, right at the top of the repeat prescription form. sildenafil.

zoom forward in time again. because of my wretched hurty neck i have to go to a physiotherapist and the first time i see him i know he will want to know what medicaments i shovel into myself. so i take the repeat prescription form and at the appropriate time in the consultation i show the form to him.

now i don’t know what part sildenafil may play in a physiotherapy session or rather i do but i think that surely it wouldn’t? would it? no. surely not?

let me also add that i am now standing in a screened-off area next to one of those massage table things with a hole for your face. i am standing very close to a physiotherapist who i suspect may be an enthusiastic fan of shirley bassey.

he points at the word ’sildenafil’. i hate the word. it is a word i never want to see again. he asks me “do you take this?”

some tumbleweed blows through.

my face doesn’t move. i don’t say anything. he is holding up the paper and pointing at the word. sildenafil.

and then we got on with it. no, silly, we got on with the treatment. on tuesday he gave me exercises to do: rotations and retractions. therefore on wednesday i was paralysed with agony. on thursday i was just in pain.

friday morning i went to the doctor and he prescribed me some super strong tramodol*. yes, new tramodol*! it’s the opiate painkiller that’s fun for all the family! four refreshing fruit flavours and eleven secret herbs and spices! slip into some flared velvet loon pants, put on a pink floyd record and say ‘troops out of vietnam, man!’

friday afternoon i went back to the physio and he pummelled a lot of knots out of my back and gave me some more exercises to do and, do you know?, it’s GREAT! i feel like it’s getting better. hoorah!

i was thinking, when he asked me if i was taking the viagra i should have looked him in the eye and said…

“it’s hard to say".

have a great weekend,

henry. (writer and artist)

* the word it doesn’t like is ‘lodamart’ spelled backwards. it doesn’t like it because it thinks i am a spammer trying to advertise prescription pharmaceuticals. and i didn’t freak out and go bananas but i kept my head and used google to work out what ‘412 precondition failed’ means and fixed it. funnily enough, having done that has been a real ’shot in the arm’ for my self-esteem. geddit?

i did a blog.

it was a good blog.

it was a long blog.

it took me a long time to get it just right.

and it just disappeared and was not recoverable.

and that, after two things that happened to me today, just about puts the tin fucking lid on it.

fuck.

thanks for the cassoulet rich.

hands up, i’m a bit of a chameleon.

voices, voices, voices; i’m a holy terror with them. don’t put a voice that i find attractive anywhere near me because i’ll have it. i was a sod for it when i was young, to the point of mimickry and even now when i am so very ancient i can catch myself at it when i’ve been listening to nick abbot on his saturday night wireless broadcast.

why should this be? i have, after all, rather a lovely speaking voice but maybe it’s my magpie habits that have made it what it is. i know my voice is lovely because hardly a day goes by without a beautiful lady or two stopping me as i go about my business (you know, telling people where they are going wrong and what i should do if i were in their position and so forth) and telling me that i have the perfect voice for radio. or is it ‘face’?

voices are marvellous things. to me they can be beautiful just as they can be ugly but i think that what a voice makes resonate within me is ‘the balance of power’. when i hear a voice, direct or recorded or over the phone, it gets piped through my own powerometer. it’s all a very personal scale of course but it works for me. some people judge a man by his footwear. me, i don’t care whether you’re wearing flip-flops or hob-nails. i listen to the radio A LOT. talk radio naturally. honestly, some of those presenters. tragic. and david beckham, i don’t know if he has been to voice school like he has definitely been to autograph school but when i heard him speak i realised why there are a lot of pictures of him but not many recordings.

i’ve spent 47 years fannying about learning how to talk, but what of this art therapy? i was thinking about this today and i can see that i seem to have a ‘tone of pencil’ but where on earth did it come from? i did art for a bit at school (where once i passed off a drawing of a welsh hillside that had been drawn by a friend of my aunt’s as my own) and i can draw a bit i suppose. if we were to have a look through my collected works up at the hospital (hold on there you cork street gallery owners! have you brought your cheque books with you?) we would see that i have a definite tone of pencil and that my latest work, ‘I HAVE BEEN ILL EVERY DAY FOR THE LAST FUCKING SEVENTEEN YEARS’ is a good example. rendered in poster paint, felt pen and pritt stick it has the usual reliance on red, black and white, some writing, a bit of line-drawing and a marked reluctance to sign the wretched thing.

i can’t draw what i see in my head. this is not because i see fantastic visions, like blake, but visions so elusive that mortal hand cannot frame them but rather because i am just not good enough at drawing. i rather like a painter what is called waterhouse but, unlike having heard nick abbot’s voice of a saturday evening, i don’t go to art therapy and think that this week i’ll knock up something with a hint of waterhouse to it.

i’ve been asked to consider doing something a bit spontaneous but i have said that i can’t ‘do’ spontaneous. why is that? and where did my ‘tone of pencil’ come from? i’m not clever or competent enough to mimic an artistic style.

it’s a mystery. maybe mary’s right; maybe i should go to art classes.

have you ever shouted for help?

have you?

did you go like this: HELP! HHEELLPP!! HELP ME!!! HELP!!!!

let me tell you a story. i was on the boat last sunday morning. i woke at six and breakfasted on puffed wheat because i had no muesli. usually i have muesli and it keeps me going. puffed wheat is crap. puffed wheat is sugar puffs but without the fun. it is a drab load of old rubbish and it does not keep you, me or anyone at all going.

i had my insulin and i had my tablets. then i listened to the radio for a bit. at about nine i got going. i said goodbye to ken and chris who were going back to the mooring. i was above walsham gates and as anyone who knows the wey will tell you this meant i was on the river. the river is wide and deep and has a fair stream on it as it heads for the flood gates and, of course, the weir where the cut separates from the river.

the weir.

i went past john 1.5 legs and spoke to him on his boat as i held water in the midstream and then a little further i saw mike and sylvie on nexus II and i chatted to them and said cheerio and then not much further at all i was nearly at the spot where the stream comes round the back of the ruins of newark priory when i started having a hypo.

oh fuck.

i am on a boat. i’m in midstream. i am on my own. there is a weir behind me. i am having a hypo. and i can’t see.

when i say ‘i can’t see’ it’s not that i cannot see at all. it doesn’t all go black or just nothing like trying to see with your leg or something. no, as i said to my rescuers later (there is a happy ending to all this) “i can still see but it makes no sense, it’s all coming in in chinese".

hypo-blindness is, for me at any rate, like what you see when you are horrendously drunk, a condition with which i am not unfamiliar. patches of vision strobe on and off to provide some visual clues. there is the persistence of vision, the knowing that the sky is up and the reed beds were to the left and the water was in front and, i think, there were boats moored further up and to the left and there wasn’t another boat coming that i could remember seeing before the light got scrambled.

then there is the analytical process; those are voices up ahead are they not? what must i do right now? prioritise. i must eat some glucose tablets that i always carry in my front right pocket. my vision has gone, and fast, so this is one of those hypos that comes out of nowhere. what may happen next? i may fall over, conk out, maybe fit. i am in the middle of a fenced cruiser stern. i can’t get to a safer place without surrendering control of the boat. the stream is against me and fast. there are boats and a weir behind me. i must knock off the power in case i go unconscious and leave a boat weighing tons under power and adrift.

all this processing takes less than a second in my sugar-starved brain.

i take the power off and put the tiller over. i can hear and feel that i am in amongst the reeds and rushes that i remember from the fading sight pictures i have in my head. this is now better but it is not good. the current will get around the nose and spin the boat and send me back the way i came. i must do something to secure the boat. i must drop anchor (i haven’t got one) or make sure that i am tied in. i don’t know how far off the solid bank is. i am blind.

round and round go the cogs in my head. it is embarrassing. round and round. think think think. boy am i going to have a red face. this shouldn’t be happening to me, the king of the canal. i help other people; i don’t ASK for help. oh the embarrassment, the shame, the shame.

fuck it. ahem. help. excuse me. help anyone? (whistles nonchalently) any chance of some (oh well, in for a penny in for a pound) HELP!!!

HELP! HELP!

the sound of running feet in the grass ‘are you alright mate? wassup?’ splash splash and there’s someone on the boat. and it turns out that they are diabetic too and i don’t have to explain and i’m told to sink trembling to the deck and eat glucose while they steal my money and wallet and camera - no, that was a joke. they took the gangplank off and hammered in the pins and pulled me as close into the bank as possible. thoroughly good people. they were off a narrowboat that i had remembered was up ahead.

i took the rest of the day off while i got my sugar levels sorted out and recovered. my rescuers popped back later when they were about to depart.

so the moral of this story is never to be afraid to ask and to shout for help as soon as you need it. don’t leave it too late to ask for help or to give it. funnily enough someone has asked me for some help recently and i like to think i’m doing my best.

the karmic wheel goes round and round.

i am now going to listen to nickel creek who i rather like and to pack up my old kitbag for a spot of boating. the weather’s right for it.

cheerio.

love from henry (writer and artist)

we won a film on ebay. it cost 1p plus post and packaging and comes all the way from china, shanghai to be precise. the p&p was a fiver so not bad for this great film.

we had a copy of ‘david copperfield’ all the way from there too (doesn’t shanghai sound romantic?) and that turned out alright. i know they are bootleg but i really don’t care; i love the packaging and just getting a jiffy bag from china.

this one is covered in chinese pictograms and on the back is a kind of sentence in english that outlines the plot. see if you can guess which film i’ll be watching when trouty comes back from londinium…

“The young Jim is the son of a hotel storekeeper, Jim got a treasureless map from Bill lived the hotel is of keepsake, Robber robbed treasureless map would kill him, but he got away, He went to treasure island for looking for Frint’s treasure, After he got island by ship Sailors started to revolt, Jim and other peoples proceed sturdy resistance, They won the pirate, They got treasure”

blimey! like i say it’s quite an easy one.

what’s that you say? you got it already? - that’s right! ‘brief encounter’!

well done!