dog art

I have been persuaded to start giving away all my possessions. To begin with I have donated a picture of the dog to the Art Gallery of New South Caledonia.

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I was off work yesterday with a mega-cold. What a waste of a sickie! But it's my first cold since I went on the bliss pill programme, and I've quite enjoyed observing myself having the cold. It's what we in the pharmaceutical bliss community call detachment.

Another benefit of being off work sick is I've managed to kick the tea habit completely. Of course that means that on my first day back, I'll overdose on a single cup, and be gibbering. Everything balances up.

st. onan's day

Yesterday was onan's birthday, so we broke out a double ration of bliss pills. He got a couple of books from his partner and then she took him out for lunch.




The mother outlaw sent him a CD called The Sounds Of Scotland. Artists include Jimmy Shand, Moira Anderson, and the pipes and drums of the 1st battalion black watch. Onan says it's no worse than the current Australian radio, TV, and newspaper assault on his musical sensibilities. I think he's referring to the Susan Boyle phenomenon. For a generation brought up to believe that musicianship is about having a fit body and a video where your bits hang out, who would have thought that a middle-aged frump with a moustache would be able to hold a tune! What next?

Next thing they'll be trying to tell us that young people can cope with disappointment, without the services of a trauma counsellor! That wouldn't help Doctor Trish (she who got me to write for 20 minutes at a time without censoring). She works nights as the studio shrink on the set of Grand Frère (the New South Cal version of Big Brother). It's her job to counsel people when they get expelled from the house. I wonder if they get to wear the electrodes on their heads, just like me.

I gave Onan a bottle of Weihenstephaner, which neither of us have ever tried before. I hope it turns out less disappointing than the last weissbier I bought him (I've forgotten the name of it but you can be sure it wasn't Erdinger or Lidl's own brand).

His mother marked the day in time-honoured fashion, by opening an old greeting-card on the phone, and letting the tinny synthesiser play several verses of Happy Birthday down the line. It was mildly amusing on the first occasion some decades ago.

The PPP marked the occasion by getting him to phone the hospital room on the day, so she could provide a live update on the fund's losses.

It's a consolation to everyone that Onan has a wonderful bliss partner to make a fuss of him once a year, otherwise what would he have to live for?

The partner's lunch.

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PS - the trousers are open again.

international pension fund takes a dive

As if the global disaster wasn't enough, the Piddledorf Pension Plan has now had an accident, falling down and breaking several major bones. I'm not sure if it really fell, or was it pushed by a passing blissheid on a contract? I'd rather not know. 10% off the top of nothing isn't worth arguing about.

It's in hospital now on morphine, and very sorry for itself, contemplating the long road to recovery at that age. I used to be cursed with feelings of empathy for fellow humans, but the bliss pills fixed that. Of course everything balances up, and the pills seem to have caused an increased sensitivity to animal suffering. On Australian satellite TV last night, there was extended footage of two guys in a Jordanian abbatoir mistreating a cow. I looked away, but then every time I looked back the b*st*rds were still at it. It was pitiful - the poor cow kept trying to run away, but it was in a small pen, and there was nowhere to run to.

To the credit of the TV company, they were trying to shock viewers into supporting the campaign against shipping live animals from Australia to the Middle East. Even if they survive the crossing, they have a halal slaughterhouse to look forward to. Fortunately, the only Australian meat in my diet is shipped here after being humanely shot in the outback.

But back to the pension fund. The depressing thing is, the PPP will never get the bliss pills. It once tried them, but gave up on the second day: "It was horrible, I couldn't get anything done." The whole point! Some people are just too dumb to medicate.

albert's bats

Albert's fascinating wildlife pictures of a bat and two birds reveal that the skies are not always blue in his life, but there's always bliss pills.

5 weeks off

I've got 5 weeks off work, and already I've spent some time usefully fixing up the computer so I can blog again. Due to the self-destructing PCs at home, and the excessive IT workload at work, I had developed a hatred of all things computery, but that is how some people feel all the time.

On the list for the next couple of weeks:

• Massacre the weeds in the garden, chop down a dying tree, transplant a sick azalea to nearer where the happy azalea lives.



• Put on another brew, since I'm now down to the last 30 bottles.



• Plan Albert's relaunch as an HNT star.



• Read. I have just finished a couple of books by a super writer called Rachel Seiffert. Before that, I gave up early on a Danish novel which ticked all the postmodern boxes - unrelated chapters, confusing flashbacks, cardboard characters, but it was impossible to care about a single outcome. I learned long ago how to (pre)judge a book by its cover, or at least by its first few pages.

Some movies are like that, and you can save yourself a lot of time by learning how to bale out of a film early, ideally during the opening credits. My first bale-out was watching Top Gun or The Right Stuff in Leicester Square. Poor Angie had been enjoying Tom Cruise and was annoyed at having to walk out with me. She should have read it as a sign of things to come, but then she might not have moved in with me and I might not be alive now. That just goes to prove something or other.

Went to a concert last night, an Australian orchestra playing Mozart and Mendelssohn. The ringing in the ears has not let up since the duneditin atrocity, so I took along a selection of earplugs of varying strengths. In the long run, if I can't cure it with bliss pills, I may be forced to consider meditation.

everything you do has consequences

Mary Hopkin’s dad used to say “everything you do has consequences”. At the time I thought he meant “don’t get my daughter pregnant” but now I think his advice was intended more generally.

Since I effed the hip joint a couple of weeks ago, the pain seems to have got steadily worse rather than better, and I feared it was the start of a long slippery slope towards an artificial hip. Because neither the original injury nor the further exacerbations caused immediate pain, I had little insight into what was helping and what was making things worse.

But thanks to the bliss pills, I have been able to apply rational thinking, unhampered by emotional distress. If I asked a doctor, at best they'd suggest a single diagnosis and a single cause. But I can do better than that: knowing that everything has consequences, I have been able to work my way through the events of the last fortnight, and tease out the facts (in italics) of what was going wrong.

During the month of working full-time, I was always too busy or too tired to swim, walk, or do yoga. At the time, I thought to myself “this is unhealthy, but I’m fortunate that I’m getting away with it, with no impact on me”. And then at the end of the month, I did my hip joint.

A couple of days later it got a lot worse, and I now know why. Encouraged by ra juju guru, I decided to try out the elephant sexual position from The Hotel New Hampshire. Well as you know, that pose requires some very extreme hip work, and that must have been what was making my pain worse. Naturally one wouldn't notice the pain during the actual activity itself.

So I gave up tantrism, and things got better for a day or two, before getting worse again. Now I know why.

Because of the chronic tropical ball rash, I always use a hair dryer after showering, prophylactically against the fungus. To do this, I hang off the edge of the bed, with my legs wide open, and direct the hot air to and fro over my pubes. As you do. There were no problems until I got a new bed just after the whole hip thing started. The new bed is much lower than the old one, so when I hang off it with the hairdryer, the legs open slightly wider than usual, and I'm now pretty sure that's been making the injury worse each day.

So all I have to do is find a new way of using the hair dryer, and the hip can start to repair itself. Imagine expecting a doctor to work all that out! It's no wonder they can only reach for the prescription pad.

I'm fortunate: I have no distractions like children or a social life; I'm on the no-worries pills, and I have the Narcissistic Personality Disorder to help me, so I can work this stuff out, but most people don't have these advantages.

pills and laughter

The first visit this year by the deifheids was a useful reminder of why the weekly walks with them had to stop. Enough said. In contrast, last weekend we went to visit Kerry and Ray (to hell with protecting people's anonymity, nobody reads this stuff anyway), and what a pleasure that was! Ray is taciturn but if you ask him about something, he knows a lot that's useful. Kerry talks a lot, but it's all good practical stuff, she doesn't whinge, and she knows how to listen too.

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Recently, the bliss pills have lost their effectiveness, in fact they've been making me quite cranky. It's probably a fault at the factory - they're manufactured in Australia, where quality control is not quite up to the standard of the rest of the third world. Over there, the bliss pills are so unreliable, people are turning instead to low-tech solutions like laughter workshops. Spud's brother is building a career there, as a certified laughter facilitator. This is one of the videos filmed at his workshops, and you can see the results for yourself.