for some reason i don’t really like commenting on my own blog; seems a bit like cheating or something. anyway, i did on the last one and what i wrote was a fib.

that’s right, i never LOOKED it up, no, i MADE it up and i wouldn’t want anyone thinking that i misled them. it was a story.

‘misled’ is a funny looking word. it would be easy to say MYZELLED instead of MISS-LED.

ooh! look! it’s a beatnik wrestling a banjo.

it’s not really. but i suggest you watch it right through though.

university of the 3rd age painting in the morning. night night.

i’m a terrible one for harrumphing, me.

this is me, right, reading the local freebie newspaper…

“oh for heaven’s sake.” shakes the paper so it ‘rattles’. “just look at this… tchoh” makes sniffing noise. “look at this moron, what a scummer” throws property section straight in bin. “they’ve shut the bloody library now!” chucks paper to one side, raises eyes to heaven. blah blah blah….

i always moan when the ‘community’ (that i pretend to care about but in practice don’t) loses something. like an under-used branch of the library. or the scout hut gets set on fire. or when i go to a ’super little shop’ that i last went into fifteen years ago and it turns out to have gone bust and shut five years ago and i didn’t know. things like that make me harrumph.

we saw the advert for the quiz. the quiz was to be held at the community centre. i had only been to the community centre to vote before but my brother has been there a good few times to mend the windows after the lil asbos have been having a smashing time. guilt forced my hand. i made the call and booked us fish and chips twice for the supper (we could have had chicken and chips) and, last saturday, along we trotted.

there were eleven teams of which trouty and i comprised the smallest. the other teams were about eight apiece and were all ages from one racy old girl who had an apricot rinse to the young lad who collected all the answer sheets to save our poor old bones.

it was six quid a head and the raffle tickets were a pound a strip. bring your own everything else, smoking permitted (!) and supper in a box at 9.15pm. ONE HUNDRED quiz questions including two picture rounds and a good night was had by all. and we won a box of biscuits in the raffle and came about midway in the quiz.

i’m glad to think that we supported the community centre. i see that they have U3A (that’s university of the third age) painting group there every other thursday and it’s my intention to sniff that one out and see what’s what. and then, when i read in the paper that the community centre is to be closed, i shall be able to say to trouty “we supported that community centre and now the bloody government have closed it! tchoh!” and for the first time in my life i’ll have earned the right to harrumph.

IN OTHER NEWS
it’s nice to have a few random ambitions in life i think. that way, when they come true you can pretend it was your idea all along and that everyone is just copying your idea (take bliar for example. i started hating that twat LAST CENTURY and now everyone is copying me) and if it doesn’t come true no one will remember that it was your idea anyway.

here’s a few things i’m going to make come true. you see if i don’t.

1. bring back the word SNIT. i used it in a blog a while back and then, blow me down, it was in the evening standard just the other day. everyone copies what i do i just never get any credit for it. remember the word: SNIT.

2. make CANNIBALS more popular than PIRATES. i reckon pirates have had their day. my money’s on CANNIBALS although (see the next thing) HIGHWAYMEN could have a chance.

3. THE TRICORN HAT. it’s hard to imagine a cooler hat than the TRICORN. i was thinking the other day about how i would spend the 120 million i had convinced myself i was going to win on the euromillions lottery. i decided that i would buy a lot of land with woodland on it and i would dress up in a sort of para-18th century stylee and have some ferocious dogs and a blunderbuss and i would pop out from behind my trees and scare people. of course, on my head would be a bashed up tricorn hat.
apart from wishing that i hadn’t been born two hundred years too late i would go around doing GOOD WORKS and i would do them with a tricorn on my head. and then, like the man who, for a wager, invented the word QUIZ by chalking it on dublin walls until everyone wanted to know what it meant, i would have everyone wanting to wear a tricorn.

probably.

CONCLUSION
see what i did there? quiz at the top and quiz at the bottom. nice and neat. and while you marvel at that here’s a picture of a nice hat and also some nice socks. shame i haven’t won the lottery because i lack the brass neck to wear this stuff without the financial back up.

but i can dream. and, now you know where to get your tricorn hat from, don’t forget i want to hear you saying ’snit’ while you are wearing it, if you have the chance.

vodka mick came round this morning and it was nice to see him because he hasn’t been around for a while. i like vodka mick and it’s always a relief to see him when he’s alright and not too down. we talked about dogs mainly.

more rain this morning. buckets of it. you really wouldn’t think you could get that much water in a sky. it’s been raining a while now and the navigation is bulging with brown water and the whole effect is like being in the circulatory system of a fatty old thing; choked with fluid, backing up. the charlotte rose filling like a bucket left out in a back garden.

i walked to the boat in the afternoon and thought about THINGS on the way. like the no direction, no script to follow, life that i am inventing as i go. don’t get me wrong, i ain’t complaining, but i need to feel i’m getting somewhere.

rather than get straight on with pumping bilges i found BOATMEN to talk to about DOGS and that took up a bit of time and made me feel very happy. in my new life i have loads of time for walking about and talking to boatmen about dogs and i don’t ask for more than that. if anything i just have to get my head set on the FACT that this is what i am supposed to be doing. i am following the advice and instructions of men better qualified than i. they have letters after their name and i don’t. i have ruined my life when i was in charge of it and they haven’t. i just have to keep on keeping on.

after i had pumped about six million gallons of water out of the boat and thought about a pump of my own specification, WHICH NOBODY MAKES, i walked home in the dark.

when i got home, trouty had arrived from londinium. HOORAY.

now, she had said that she liked my last picture from art therapy, the sun and sea one, so i got it out from my top-secret safe to put on the wall so that she could see it a bit more. in the same folder was ‘the drowned man’.

trouty had never seen the drowned man in the flesh before and i hadn’t seen him for a while. he fills up a sheet of A2 and so he’s bigger than you think from the pictures that i have previously shown on here.

the drowned man was lying on the table and he started giving off his power. when i painted him i had trouble dealing with the FACT that it was me who had just made him. he gives off something, you know? it’s a weird picture. and it was ME who painted it.

it is possible to imagine that picture being sold for real money. it is possible to imagine that happening. really.

and so that’s another PLAN X moment. another thing that tells me i’m going right, doing right.

i said to trouty that seeing as i have been told that i won’t be going to work that i might as well get used to it and accept that i am going to have an unconventional life from now on.

i’m going to paint the kind of pictures i want to paint, i’m going to get myself a dog. i’d like to talk to people about why they drink but no one’s asked me to do that just yet.

it’s a very weird feeling like i’m just doing what i’m supposed to be doing. that if it’s meant to happen, you know?

and the drowned man is up on the wall behind me now and i can feel his dead eyes on my shoulder. i’m going to have him framed so he looks respectable. the poor drowned man who came out of my poor old drowned life, the one i’m not going back to, he tells me ‘don’t be dead like me, don’t drown any more’.

if i have to knit myself a mad-looking new life out of scraps then so be it. i’ll let god tell me how.

in my childhood, we had a dog on wheels, somewhere in the mists. or maybe i had a toy dog that wasn’t on wheels but if that was the case i don’t know where THAT little doggy is now.

and then i saw the picture above when i was looking at pictures of irish terriers.

perhaps i have been humming and hawing for too long. i want an irish terrier.

here’s the last painting i did at art therapy.

i’m thinking of calling it ‘rubbish painting done for the sake of it’, but perhaps i’m being a bit unfair on myself there.

the point is that this is my last art therapy picture, ‘done’ against the clock, but it’s a beginning too. i had to go back to the hospital to collect my pictures and have a bit of a talk about things, you can probably imagine, and when i was on my way home i had to wait an hour for a bus so i sat in the cafe there and drank a cup and doodled on the paper cover i had to protect my paintings.

now i have some idea at least of what i am going to paint next. paint at home. paint on the FANTASTIC stretched canvas that i have bought from my local SUE RYDER shop.

these charity shops have started selling a range of arty materials that are so cheap i wondered if my local branch had priced them incorrectly. i bought an A3 stretched and primed canvas for 2.49 quids!

anyhoo, i’ll have a bash at a stylised seascape which will be my first time out with acrylic paint, with a stretched canvas and with home artifying.

everything seems to be fitting in horribly well with PLAN X (that’s the famous plan which exists only as a tantalising whiff in the nostrils of my mind and which has no sense of direction whatsoever).

i’ll be a startin’ on the artin’ direckly. promise.*

*is untrue.

cheroodles!

i’m enjoying this. it’s great to write all this stuff down and just sort of pour it out of my head. there was enough time spent pouring stuff into my head so it’s interesting to see things going in a different direction for a change.

right, we’ve decided that it’s time for you to stop drinking now, haven’t we? okay then, stop drinking.

oh yeah, i was just saying about pouring my thoughts out of my head and here you are reading them! isn’t that great!?
what i believe is that when i was drinking i gave all of my power away. what i mean by that is because drink was at the back of every aspect of my life i was always on the back foot. always defensive and covering up… what exactly? i didn’t know, i couldn’t remember. phoning people up at midnight and crying drunkenly at them for an hour and then not remembering the next day is a good one. a good one for shortening your christmas card list. having no one trust what you say, breaking promises, having to hold your breath in lifts because of the spiritous vapour you can feel dragon-breathing from your nostrils, behaving DISGUSTINGLY and counting on the manners and forbearance of the good, offended people to ameliorate, wholly undeservedly, your sense of guilt, your sense of shame…

no wonder that i drank. drinking my way into blackout and blacking out the LIE that i was living. being SEEN THROUGH ALL THE TIME. all my power GONE. and there are other people who can smell, like sharks, a bleeding life. when you are haemorrhaging life they will come and use you and take everything that there is left. and then you have NOTHING. you ARE NOTHING.

do you know what? i have friends. i have friends who listen to what i say and who don’t raise their eyebrows and do that quick ’swiggy’ motion of the hand holding an imaginary glass. i’ve restarted my life and i fucking LOVE it. i really do.
there is a theory that my kind of drinking, and maybe yours too, puts the pause button on your development and if that’s true i have three decades to make up. i feel like a kid at a new playschool and here i come with my arms outstretched for wings and machinegun thumbs, DAGGADAGGADAGGA i am a fighter pilot, ZOOOOOOOM out of my way, i want to play with the sand and the dressing up and with the paints and all the other boys and girls and i’ll make friends and DO EVERYTHING!!!

have you noticed? i’m trying to convey a newfound excitement with life here. what’s that you say? i didn’t make a big deal out of the STOPPING drinking up there? aah, you noticed. well, giving up that drinking business isn’t really worth making a big song and dance about. you have decided to stop so just stop. don’t wait until your birthday or until new year’s resolutions or anything like that. you have decided that you don’t want to drink any more because it’s ruining your life and you want your life back. so just stop.

you stop every day, when the booze runs out or when you conk out on the couch. you stop every day. it’s EASY. and we are here to do this the EASY way.

you see, the secret of stopping drinking is that you stop drinking.

there we go, i told you you’d want your money back.

when i was in my early twenties i still bit my nails. they looked fucking awful and i was ashamed of them. when i went on tube trains and found myself sat opposite a BEAUTIFUL LADY i would knit my fingers together so’s my fingertips were all hidden inside. ugly, chewed, stumpy litle nails. and, do you know, it was me that bit them. no one came round at night and chewed them for me. if i wanted to not be ashamed of my nails i would have to stop biting them and let them grow. it was my problem. i was the only person who bit my nails and i was the only person who could stop biting them. in four weeks they looked much better. i wanted to stop and i did what i wanted.

it’s so much easier to just do what you want and that’s why i say you must be sure that you want to stop drinking.

when i stopped smoking i used some of the ‘tools’ i had learned in windmill house (blessed be its name) and also i read the ALLEN CARR book (great book, i understand he does one about drinking too) and i made a list of all the reasons why i smoked. except there was only one reason. my one reason was that i thought it made me look cool to be on the boat and throw my cigarette end into the water like i owned the whole fucking canal. pathetic isn’t it? i just stopped smoking because i didn’t want to do it any more. amazingly, no one has come along and forced me to smoke and so now i haven’t had a smoke of anything at all for nearly nine months.

but i’m not magical and i don’t have much willpower. i just stopped. i didn’t want to drink and i didn’t want to smoke. so i did what i wanted. EASY LIFE.

lovely life. lovely new life. what on earth are we going to do with it?

here’s a couple of hints for you:
don’t have alcohol in the house. you don’t need it so don’t have it anywhere near you.
did you used to drink in the pub? well don’t go there again. don’t have a stupid ‘goodbye to booze’ party in the pub or anything. just don’t go there. imagine you have a friend who is a problem gambler and he says to you “i stopped gambling but i still have to go to the betting shop because all my friends go there". yeah. right.

don’t forget, you have a new life here. A NEW LIFE! and it’s yours to do whatever you want with. some people won’t like you when you get sober and the reason is because you get your power back. which means that they lose theirs over you. watch out for that one happening.

something i thought of is to do with the great wide open spaces of your new life, your UNSTALLED life, that you have to fill. try imagining that you have won ten million on the lottery and that you can do what EVER you want. anything at all. and then go for your dreams. you are allowed to have your dreams and you have a lovely new life in which to indulge them. you might not ACTUALLY have the ten million but you will have a lot more money sloshing around in your pockets than you did when you were drinking.

so come on then, WHAT IS THERE NOT TO LIKE about your new life? drinking will not be a problem because you don’t want to do it. because now you’ve got it. you’ve got the thing that i got out of nowhere a year ago. and i’m still excited about it.

what i have tried to do here is to package up my theories, squash them together like a snowball, and throw them at you. somewhere in what i say must be the secret, somewhere what happened to me must be waiting for YOU too.

if you are down at the moment, if you are sad, if you are in trouble, if you have done wrong, if you have been wronged and all because of the drink then i am sorry for you, i truly am, because i know what it’s like.

there’s good news though, there is someone who can help you. there is someone who can turn all this around. go look in the mirror.

IT’S IN YOU.

back again!

how are you? ok? really? - i’m glad to hear that, i really am because i had a good day too. i took an online IQ test and was happy with the result and i wouldn’t have done that a year ago. and yesterday i met some people i know and had a great conversation. little pleasures.

i’m glad you’re not feeling too bad because that will help me explain something that i feel is true. not every drinking day is a bad day. it’s certainly never intended to be at the outset either. some of them are golden days that light our lives! but, be honest, they are the minority, aren’t they?

but today you are concerned. today you are reading this because, deep down, you are worried about drink and you. you want to stop because it is for the best. if you didn’t give a fuck you wouldn’t be here right now. no, you’re worried alright because inside you, YOU KNOW.

when i went into that treatment centre (windmill house, blessed be its name), exactly one year ago today, i knew i could do the programme. it was only eight weeks. my personal best was six months sober and i had been a policeman once and i knew i could behave, jump, obey fiddling rules, whatever for eight weeks, piece of piss. i knew i could do it but what i wanted was the secret, the secret of how to be sober AND BE HAPPY.

shall i tell you the secret? shall i? it will sound so obvious when you hear what it is. you’ll want your money back except you haven’t paid any.

what’s happening here is a modern miracle. it’s where you get something for nothing. and you get it because i got it. anyone who knew me before and who knows me now will tell you how different i am. i am still the same person that i knew i was inside all that unhappy time. i’m like you don’t forget. we feel things the same way, you and i, because we are alcoholics. and you would love what i get, the doctors being so chuffed and calling you a star patient when they assumed that i would run out the door (it’s always open!) when i started treatment. i love it when people say i look fifteen years younger, two foot taller. i love it and you will love it too. you will love not being ill every fucking miserable day.

last time we were talking about how you can’t have ‘no consequence’ drinking. you can’t. you might get away with it for a long time but the consequences will be there. so now you have to ask yourself what it is that you want. do you want to keep trying to get away with it or have you got to the stage where you have seen the REALISTIC future? come on, you aren’t stupid so don’t pretend you are. this is why you are here because you are sick of what has happened so far or what WILL happen. and i guarantee you that whatever stage you have got to so far WILL GET WORSE. if alcohol has become a problem for you in any particular direction it will happen again.

when i was drinking i didn’t care what happened to me. i thought so little of myself and of everybody else that i knew the shit would hit the fan every now and then but i just kept on. what a nasty little history! but i didn’t care UNTIL…
i felt my brain going. i think that was my final straw. i was damaging my brain and i knew that, unlike some liver damage say, my brain damage was irreversible.

we all have our own tipping point.

now’s about time to go to the doctor. i was lucky; my doctor is brilliant and he really stuck by me, supported me thoroughly. yours will too.
you will jave to be completely honest of course. if you had gone to medical school for years and become a G.P. you would want some rubbishy drunk coming in and trying to LIE to you, would you? give the doctor respect.

because i was so physically addicted i was detoxed on DIAZEPAM. this was in case i had a fit. it was all part of my treatment in the windmill (blessed be its name). i was also prescribed ACAMPROSATE and i’m still taking it now, six tablets a day. it’s supposed to help with cravings and stuff i think. maybe acamprosate is entirely responsible for my recovery? i just do what i am told by doctors, even if i disagree, i just do it. i advise you to throw yourself at your doctor, spill the entire beans and do anything and everything they say. it’s doing things EASILY.

now, back to YOU. we’re sort of coming up to a decision time but don’t worry, i’ve said it before, IT’S IN YOU, you will know what to do.

what happened to me was that i wanted to stop but NOT like how it had been for me in the past. every time before i had been consumed with thinking about BOOZE, how much i wanted BOOZE back. i thought of lovely booze as a fickle mistress who in the midst of our most loving embraces would turn on poor, bewildered me and hoof me in the nuts and stab me and wreck my life. but she was my love. dame cider was my love and my life. so this time i wanted it to be different, i wanted it to be easy, i wanted none of the anger that i had had before when i couldn ‘t have my sweet, sweet CIDERELLA in my arms.

and, because i was ready, i got what i wanted.

and YOU? we shall see. let’s do this the EASY way. i think we all feel better if we are doing what we want. so let’s do what we want.

if you want a drink you must drink. don’t even think about stopping because you haven’t had enough yet. you will always want more. always. every day you will want to drink. every hour of every day you will be thinking about the drink THAT YOU CAN’T HAVE.

i promised you that this would be easy because it’s been easy for me. when i go to the hospital they say that i have worked hard to get where i am but i never feel that i have. i feel it’s been just so and i know that for YOU it will be as easy as YOU want to make it.

see you next time and i’ll tell you what i think the secret is.

g’night.

DISCLAIMER - what follows is a jazzed-up account of what happened to me and how i feel about my alcoholism. i am not a doctor and i am not qualified to give medical advice. we are all different; what worked for me might not work for you. all i can do is write from my heart and offer you a hand out of the wreckage.

hello! welcome! come in! come in and make yourself comfortable! we don’t stand on ceremony here.

we don’t beat about the bush either; you look like shite! from your aching feet to the yellowing whites of your eyes, you look terrible and i bet you feel worse. but never mind about that, we’re all equal, have a drink if you want and if you brought some with you. i don’t bother with that stuff any more.

if you are here, reading this, then you must be one of my regular readers or you must have arrived here for a look round. did you google for an article like this? did someone suggest you have a look? if it was someone else who got you here i think we should forget about them for the time being. this is just about us. well, actually, it’s just about you.

just a little quick word about me. my name’s henry - pleased to meet you, and i’ve got this blog here. when i started it i was still drinking so my blog has seen some ups and downs. of late it’s seen mostly ups and i think that the reason i have reached this happy state of affairs is that almost exactly a year ago i took my last drink out of a plastic cider bottle. i was in my sister’s car which was in the carpark of a treatment centre. my alcoholism had taken me there after thirty years of abusive drinking.

when i say ‘abusive’ i don’t mean that i was physically abusive because i wasn’t. rude and obnoxious at times but i’m not physically violent. perhaps that’s why i got away with it for three decades. i only got arrested once although i ‘came to notice’ a few times more. but i’m not here to show off, just to tell you that my drinking was a problem. first it was a problem for me that i kept hidden and ignored at the same time. then it was a problem for other people but i just carried on. then it became a problem that i could no longer deny, a monster out of all proportion. then it became a problem for everyone. i was out of control.

and i didn’t know what to do.

and this is where you come in. you’ve got a problem with alcohol or you really wouldn’t be here. have a read of what i’m writing and see what you think. there’s a comment section below for non-abusive comments and you can use whichever name you fancy. all i ask is that you read and digest and don’t do anything too hasty.

i had to stop drinking completely. there was no way i could have cut down because i couldn’t do that and i didn’t want to do that. i wanted to stop completely and not have any little reminders of drinking by allowing myself silly little useless drinks. i wanted to stop BUT i wanted to be happy. i’d tried to stop before, i’d been attending AA, on and off; mostly off, for sixteen years but that hadn’t worked…

before i go any further, let me say that i admire the work of AA, i think the fellowship is a marvellous thing, but just because it didn’t work for me doesn’t mean it won’t work for you. please try AA, we are all different and we should all try anything we can. even if it only works for a week we’ve still learned something.

…all that happened when i wasn’t drinking is that i got resentful and angry. i wanted to drink and i couldn’t. giving up seemed pointless when i knew that i would only start again. why oh why wasn’t there an easy and magical way?

so let’s be sensible. let’s be realistic. i know you can do this because you are clever and i know that you are clever because all of the funniest, longwordiest, times-crossword-in-under-ten-minutingest, intelligentest people that i think i have ever met have been alcoholics. and also the nastiest, crankiest, self-deluding bastards, that’s true too.

but you are clever so join me on this one, let’s just for a minute be realistic. nothing else, just realistic.

would it be true of me to say the following? that you are somewhat physically and massively, psychologically, addicted to a substance, the ingestion of which gets you in trouble?

be honest and, if you can’t be honest, be REALISTIC.

can you see which way this is going yet?

now forget everyone else. forget anyone who has TOLD you that you have a problem. forget all about them because they know NOTHING about you. there is only one person who counts here and that is YOU. someone has got you sitting here reading this. someone has got you in the shit. that person is YOU. YOU are in the shit. YOU are unhappy. YOU got yourself into this and YOU can get yourself back out again. YOU can. but only you.

i said we have to be realistic. that’s all. be realistic.

let’s have a think about our relationship with alcohol. let’s score our relationship with alcohol. let’s imagine that at one end of the scale is “booze? yuck! i can’t STAND that SHIT!” and at the other end is “i love booze. i want to marry booze, have it’s deformed children and die in screaming agony of liver cancer".

when i was drinking, in the last few years, i was at various times homeless, a tent dweller, a drinker of white cider on park benches, a wild-eyed and dirty nutcase who never washed, a sacked employee…. oh, all this and worse. but i was also, at times, polite and well behaved, mortgage paying, lower-middle-management blah blah blah. and if i had to rate my own relationship with drink i would have placed myself roughly in the middle of the ratings and looked mildly surprised when the occasional disaster befell me. i’d have placed myself in the middle, just like i bet YOU would place yourself.

i bet i’m right. i bet you would want your relationship with alcohol to be like this:
“I WANT TO KEEP DRINKING AS MUCH AS I CAN BUT WITHOUT ANY OF THE DRAWBACKS. I LOVE DRINKING BUT I DON’T WANT MY HEALTH, WALLET, RELATIONSHIPS OR WORK TO SUFFER”

that’s what YOU want. YOU want to keep getting away with it. but woah there, remember what we said? REALISTIC? we have to be realistic and, being realistic, that just ain’t going to happen.

and you know that, don’t you?

if i were in your shoes right now i’d be thinking along the lines of ‘hey you, booze boy, i don’t much care for your hectoring tone. i thought you mentioned the word EASILY up there in the title of your show-off essay?’

yes i did. i said EASILY. and i meant it. here’s where i give you a great escape clause and if you promise to read to the bottom of this page you may go to the pub.

i went to an AA meeting once, in weybridge, on an early-dark evening. i hadn’t had a drink for nearly six months that time round and all i could think about was drinking and how unfair it was that i couldn’t. i was going nuts. i was early for the meeting and the building hadn’t been unlocked. there was a man named John waiting outside and he asked me how i was feeling. so i told him. i told him how unfair it all was and how twisted up with anger i was and how much i wanted to go and have a drink.

“well go and have one” he said.

i can’t tell you how wise those words were. i wasn’t ready and he knew it. he was realistic where i wasn’t. so, let’s be realistic; if you want to have a drink, you go and have one. have the twenty drinks you want. be realistic. but it’s all a package and you can’t pick the pieces of the package deal. you can’t not have the consequences.

so promise me that you will drink as much booze as you want. tonight and every night. drink as much as you want until the amount you want is zero.

it’s obvious but it’s true, YOU have to decide. this is all about YOU. whether you like it or whether you don’t

IT’S IN YOU.

you can’t not have the consequences. understand that and then you’ll be ready for part two.

yup. that’s what it’s going to be called and this is where i’m going to hang it up for all to see.

i’m not going to write it tonight, oh no. what d’you think i am? mad?

maybe it will be in three parts, that’s what i’m thinking, and it won’t be written for my regular readership because only about half of them are alcoholics.

it will be written for people who have scoured the magical interweb in the hope of finding an easy way out of what can be quite a predicament. i imagine a pair of sad, red-rimmed eyes looking down the pages of google results and i think of a frosty astmosphere where the silence is only broken by the whisper of a piece of paper (with the link to my blog written on it) being pushed across a table and the cold words “i think you’d better have a look at this".

i wonder how the comments will go. i’ll let them show me if i get it right or not.

over the next three nights i’ll try to get it written down and published and that will all fit in with PLAN X.

talking of PLAN X i’ve had a bit of a set-back. ‘ahah!’, i thought, ‘i’ll see if HENRY X dot COM is free because i could sort of feel that making sense (plan X, eX-drinker. geddit?) but somone has beaten me to it! it belongs to an amerikan geetar-twanger who doesn’t seem to have picked up his plectrum since 2001. tchoh! foiled again!

oh yeah, AND i didn’t win 120 million quids on the lottery last night. with set-backs like this my life is becoming a sisyphean nightmare.

i do wish that a fairy godmother would alight on my blog and start making decent proposals towards me. perhaps if i energise my arse something might be more likely to happen.

part one tomorrow.

night!

drip, drip goes the rain
tick tock goes the clock

i’ve only got three whole days of non-plan x left

and they’re running through my fingers like sand

imagine if you had, like, a SURPRISE to do on someone and you were hiding behind a tree
to do the surprise
and then you would jump out, wouldn’t you?
you would jump out and go BOO!
or TADAH!
and do the surprise

well bloody PLAN X is behaving like i’m just going to step out from behind the tree and not do anything

that’s the big surprise
it will just be me
same as it ever was
same as it ever will be

i’d better come up with something
and i’d best be quick about it

have you ever tried to write anything without using full stops?
have a go
it ain’t half difficult.

nuts

believe it or not, i have been called ‘manipulative’ in the past.

to the best of my memory the person who was responsible for the great unpleasantness of about two years ago (and who i believe i have now correctly identified - how thick i didn’t get it at the time. duhhhhh me) called me ‘manipulative’.

if i was an osteopath it might be to my credit to be manipulative but i think the word was meant unkindlily when it was aimed at me. is it true though? is it correct that i am manipulative? i sometimes wonder as i take on board things that are said to me, about me, and i mull them over, sometimes for years.

it’s not my fault if sometimes i know what people are thinking. after all, that’s what communication is about, isn’t it? we want people to know what we are thinking, we talk to and at each other and we use lots and lots of different words so that we can nail down the minutest details of specifically how we are feeling and why. and then we get all upset when i know what we’re thinking. perhaps it’s down to what i do with what i know?

here’s a trick that is not really a trick. trouty caught me doing the trick over the weekend and she sussed me completely and, anyway, it’s no big secret. it’s what i DO with the trick that might be a teeny bit dodgy? a bit manipulative? well, maybe it is but you decide when i tell you about it….

people fascinate me, they really do. i would like it if i could be a bit more withdrawn, a bit more insular, a bit more isolated and a bit more dispassionate in my dealings with my fellows even though i’m told by people with letters after their names that this would be A BAD THING. the reason for my wishing like this is that i really dislike an awful lot of people. i don’t just NOT like them, i DISlike them. but i have to rub up against people, every day, a good few i do like and a lot i do not.

it started at work, me doing this, and i’m not sure how it started. maybe i read something like it in ‘cosmopolitan’ magazine while diligently applying myself on an evening shift at american express. i worked with A LOT of women and so although i never got invited into the innerest of the sanctums, a girly conversation, i did get the odd fag end here and there, little bits and pieces to put together in the great jigsaw of life.

TRICK DETAIL ALERT
what you do is notice when an XX chromosomer has done something to its hair and then you comment on it.
END OF TRICK

this ‘trick’ (which i don’t think is really a trick) works on any XX chromosomer from teeny tiny girl to lesbotic wrestler.

the reason i don’t think it’s a trick is that you have to notice when the hair has been DONE. if you don’t know then you weren’t paying attention so maybe the trick is to PAY ATTENTION.

ME (noticing that XX chromosomer has had hairdo): “Oh, you’ve had your hair done".
XXC (touching hair) “Yeah!”

at this point you must very rapidly divine whether the DO is a success or not. if XXC looks as if she has been playing with a flamethrower or domestos than say nothing more at this time. if the adjustment is tolerable quickly say “Yeah, it looks good". you will probably be kind of invited to talk about it. what do you think? (WELL? what DO you bloody well think?)

then you watch the wheels go round.

never underestimate the potency of the trick. XXCers and their hair are interchangeable; the one is the other yet they are one in a totally cosmic way that a normal (term used in mathematical sense, ish) XYer will never understand.

yup. watch the wheels go round.

you NOTICED! and that means everything. it means you are a friend. it means that you are different to the people who never notice, like the bloody husband who never notices anything (HUSBANDS and similar, you MUST learn the trick or you are lost, you will lose your sweet wife to a raggle-taggle gypsy-oh who noticed your wife’s hair-do), and it means that you are interested in HER. it might mean that you FANCY her. it certainly means that she will rate you above everybody who did NOT notice. for heaven’s sake! it’s ON HER HEAD! it’s there for you to read, like a t-shirt, and everybody wants to be liked, even by people that they don’t like and if you bothered about her hair that means YOU LIKE HER.

bingo.

when i write this down it looks unkind and rather harsh. i’ve tried to write it in a funny way. i’m trying to make you read what i have written. i want you to like what i have written. i want you to like me. that’s why i do it. this blog is MY hairdo (for obvious reasons). but it DOES look unkind and as if it is all an insincere trick but i really don’t believe that it is. i don’t think that i am manipulative.

what i do is that i watch other people. i watch what they do and how they do it. i listen to what they say and how they say it. i decide whether they mean what they say.

i don’t do this all the time and i don’t look like i’m doing it when i am doing it. up there ^^^ i said i wished i were more dispassionate (do YOU remember that i said that?) and i do because then my emotions wouldn’t cloud things and i would be able to remember conversations better.

oh well, that’s me letting the cat out of the bag again, giving away all my secrets. sometimes i wonder if i’m too open here, in this blog which is read, i’m pleased to say, all around the world.

in other news i have got over my little flat spell, i’m having a flu jab tomorrow, i’ve got a little bit more of PLAN X formulated and up my sleeve and only a week or so to go until i have been sober for one whole year.

have you had your hair done? it looks a little different today.

no, it’s nice like that, really.

one of those days.

nothing much achieved. i posted a postal packet, a ‘large letter’, to YOUNGBLOOD.

i talked to a man with a great big caterpillar-tracked knocker-downer about knocking down a house.

i talked to a man who owns h.m.s. gypsy rover which has been chartered to one of the hireboat companies for the last three seasons and now the owner has come from new zealand to sail away in her up the grand onion.

i’ve often seen gypsy rover and can identify it from a long way off. usually a hireboat is viewed in profile as it makes its way towards you. sideways.

even when hireboats are coming head on i can confidently tell that they are a hireboat and which of the two fleets they are from. i can do this before the name on the bow is discernible.

hireboats generally go about making nuisances of themselves in ‘all hands on deck’ mode:-
hold your hand out. go on. hold your hand out, palm away, straighten your arm… as if you were making a stop sign in front of your face. now splay your fingers out.

that is the profile of a hire boat if you are quick enough to catch it coming at you head-on. people ALL OVER IT. people in the bow on camping chairs drinking white wine and trying to stop the pages of a magazine flapping in the stiff breeze. people on the roof of the boat in spite of the signs saying not to be.

aaaaaaah, i dunno.

it’s just one of them days, isn’t it? one of them days for walking along the towpath with hands in pockets (which is what i did) and kicking a stone so that it skitters along and then, rather than falling with a satisfying plop into the canal, just stops. it’s one of them days. bit cold. bit nothing really.

did i tell you about the boy who jumped off a hire boat on a summer’s day this year and when the boat came past he swam behind and caught hold of the deckwork and pulled himself up and back aboard? he did well. thrashing about with your bare legs near the back of a moving boat is risky to say the least, what with the 14 inch propeller chewing through the water just where you might want to rest your feet.

but never mind. he survived and the water didn’t turn red.

one of them days when i feel guilty about not going to art thingy tomorrow even though it’s well within my rights and i’ve written a nice letter and everything.

PLAN X is in the doldrums and even though it doesn’t start for nearly a fortnight the couple of little things that i have done, pre-plan x, have come to naught.

PWHWHWHWHWHHHH. might as well go to bed.

there are a lot of complimentary comments on my last blog. a lot of them. comments by trouty don’t count, of course, but there are still a lot.

is it a british thing to sort of have your toes curl and to twiddle your thumb and fingertips together, to give a ’sheeeeeesh’ type noise in a bernie winters way? to avert the gaze and make a guilty, embarrassed smile?

whatever it is, british or not, i don’t think that i’ll be a doin’ any of that. what i’ll be a doin’ of is a takin’ me some notice and payin’ me some attention. for compliments aren’t intended to make me look like bernie winters, they are meant to tell me something.

so thank you for your kind comments, you kindly commenters. i shall keep them in a tin box marked ‘PLAN X’

oh, and while we’re on the subject, i have yet to work out who ‘bunsen’ is. fancy letting me know, bunsen?

great to see YOUNGBLOOD over the weekend. i shan’t say more. i don’t mind being painfully open about myself or being horrible about people such as the owner/operator of h.m.s. coalscuttle behind their backs but there IS such a thing as confidentiality i suppose, you’ll just have to read all about it in youngblood’s blog.

what’s that you say? youngblood has no blog? well then, hard ched.

there’s a bottle digging website that i belong to and on it has been posted a link to sale offered on ebay. it was posted for the purpose of making us laugh. i won’t post the link here but it’s for a rubbish oil painting of bottles. the starting price is for 200€ which is about 133 quids. no bids as yet.

hmmmmm (reaches for tin box marked ‘PLAN X’) hmmmmmmmm indeed.

i am disappointed to see that one aspect of PLAN X that i’ve had to drop into the shredder marked ‘impossible’ is the purchase of PLAN X dot com. look, this is what you get. what’s THAT all about? looks like i won’t be buying that one now. never mind, my plan grinds on…

PLAN X (named after the ten sober months i’d enjoyed when i thought of it) is scheduled to blast off in about 3 weeks, on november the 21st, when i have a sober year under my belt. today i had yet another couple of kicks in a planexerly direction and the first of these is that i have decided to give up art therapy.

the art therapy sessions that i attend are bound by confidentiality and i respect that. i don’t think i have broached confidentiality thus far and i won’t do now. suffice to say i have decided that i will stop going and…yet again…PLAN X agrees. weird.

a good, loose explanation of the plan is that i am going to start to have the life i should have had before thirty years of mental drinking got in the way. i have stopped drinking. good. i have had a year ‘off’ to try to get used to it. good. now we have my future to consider…

i wasn’t convinced, but i am now, that i possess usable talents. other people can see that i have these talents, that i have potential. look at these comments - marvellous! i can write. i can make ‘art’. i can speak. a lot of people would be very envious of me. BUT.

but it’s all going off like a photon-gun blasting away in all directions but that’s it! that’s the very word! DIRECTION!

I HAVE NO DIRECTION! and that’s what PLAN X is, to find my direction, to find out who i am and where i’m going. i’m free from the past and the mistakes i made as much as i ever can be. i’m free now and if it means anything it means i’m free to try things, to make mistakes, to laugh and to learn and to try again.

good luck to the seller of rubbish pictures on ebay, i might try something like that myself on a site which won’t now be called what i had thought but will have to be called something else. and i’ll write to people and i’ll make a nuisance of myself and i’ll say to myself and to everybody else that “i can do that” because god loves a trier and we make our own luck.

and phew, i’m excited and all out of breath.

here endeth the lesson.