The thing with dogs is you have to get up everyday. That's evryday, even if your Friday night entailed staying up carving out new plans for the world. I could so do with a lie in. But this is why work protects against depression. It's not because of the days when you're raring to get at it, it's those grey rainy days when you don't realy want to go in but you drag yourself there. That's where works anti depressant qualities come in.

From the centre of AL-LADins cave

I hear the syrens swirling sounds wrapping round the house with autumn sunshine flooding through the window they fade. A window I made of mahogany and £160 worth of double glazing, supposedly In loo of rent though it seems I pay both ways. You do when you're skint, though. Everything costs double and the rabbid and dirty work here like injury lawyers and payday loan companies are the real bottom feeders. The real low life.
I split this trip by a night, picking up where I left off last night. Yesterday was our horror hour of poverty where what little comes in can't match the needs to go out. Furniture making, even if you are in the fortunate position I am, is no way to make a living. I was warned of this at the interviews for both colleges I studied at but in those young romantic times money never mattered. Still, at nearly fifty, money isn't of interest to me. Not if it is at the cost of your soul. Not if you sacrifice autonomy.
After not so much as smoking a cigarette for three years I find a fresh desire for psychedelics. Recent studies on the long term depressed have shown positive results. You could argue, and many close to me have, that with a fluctuating disposition regarding my mental health, that psychedelics are the last thing I should be doing. But if your thinking has fallen in to a rut, through depression or drugs or alcoholism, nothing reshuffles your hand of cards better than a trip. And this window of legality surely won't be open long. Quite why psychedelics, and other central parts to some peoples religions should be deemed such a threat when tobacco and alcohol are openly on sale is a question that ought to be addressed. The quality of the two remaining lysergoids AL-LAD and LSZ are very different but particularly good. The first is difficult to seperate from acid where as LSZ creeps up slowly and delivers a far milder experience. Ideal for both the novice and social occasions.
Gaining the confidence to abandon furniture and return to achedemia is hard. Such life changes always are. But there are some things I need to say before my mind goes the way of all old hippies. Well, I guess they are only just discovering what the damage, long term, if any was done by those pioneers of psychedelics. They'll be sitting in our old people's homes right now. Perhaps the opening of the third eye has protected them from the sadness of dementia.
It is, in fact, another area where psychedelic research has been done. The terminally ill report coming to terms with their demise after taking a trip. The pineal gland, the one associated with the bodies own natural DMT apparently floods the brain with the stuff at the point of death. Reports from near death experiences describe these trips, one that awaits us all. Which is perhaps the strongest argument against DMT. That it ought to be reserved for the big one we all one day face.
I've never really regarded psychedelics as drugs as such. The quantities of dosage are usually so minute as to be clearly a trigger rather than something that itself affects you. The worry now is the horrible chemicals being cooked up by chemists in China to order from Europe with subtle molecular alterations to get through loopholes in the law. Some of these are quite damaging and barbaric, as I can personally report. Clearly parallels with the dodgy hooch of the prohibition years that ruined so many lives.
A traveller girl said to me earlier this year, "we had all we needed, acid, mushrooms, cannabis, heroin for those unable to face their lives. Why bring in all these new and untested substances?". The answer is of course some kind of legalisation. It's what we do with alcohol and tobacco, so standards are set and people know what they are getting.
Drug policy has become like climate change. Something desperately in need of address yet caught up in the medians fashion system. They're no longer news. Beheading and the imagined threats of islamification have replaced them on the telly. In the good news, my generation, the trainspotting generation seem to be ageing, dieing off without a younger generation replacing them. Most junkies are are in their four ties and fifties now and the gear being sold of such poor quality it seems unlikely that the youth will follow that great folly. They face follies of their own in this wave of designer drugs. A new one a week some reports say though most must be crap as few catch on. At least they have the Internet, to compare notes and develope a working platform to weed out the real nasty stuff. I have a personal fear of the new wave of dissociative anaesthetics that are coming in to replace the ketamine they can't get. Methoxphenidine, dyphenadine. These sort of freakish substances.
The world moves on and our miss spent youth ceases to have any relevance to kids coming of age now.

Monday morning ramblings

There was a honeymoon period of six months where I enjoyed the addiction . It is difficult to remember those times. I remember I was using whilst painting a house we were moving out of in order to regain the deposit when a text from my brother told me to get to a tv. I did, in time to see the second of the aircraft hit the twin towers. I fairly quickly realised I had done something really stupid. How could someone as savvy as myself end up on heroin? Well, curiosity. A wish to understand what all those horror stories were about. A hunger for knowledge and experience had landed me in this foreign country, penniless, no map. Stranded.
First rattle I did with the aid of 60 codeine tablets that barely touched the surface. After seven days I flew out to Africa. In The Gambia everything was different and my addiction symptoms were lost amongst the chaos of emotions the new environment brought out. The wildlife fascinated me as it does everywhere I go. Whilst withdrawing from heroin all the protective neurotransmitters that keep you confident, free of pain and form a barrier to protect you from the harsh corners are gone and in some ways it resembles a trip. You can see the raw beauty in a way you have been unable to since you were a baby. Of course this leaves you incredibly vulnerable and you tend to remember hidden horrors as well as beautiful ones that are generally lost. You won't sleep at all for three weeks which you would have previously thought impossible. Once you are able to find brief windows of unconsciousness these are filled with horrific nightmares where you face the worst, dirtiest aspects of your being. The things you hide from yourself to survive explode upon you till you wake relieved only to face the continued pain of withdrawal. Distraction is your sole ally and a conversation to take your focus off yourself, just like in any pain situation like a broken leg but the distraction can never last for long. Of course sympathy is zero.
This brought a twelve year relationship to an end. I lost my house. I kept my van and. My workshop and lived in these for a year as I recovered. It takes a good year to relevel your endorphins. Some find they never fully return. Few ex heroin addicts have much of a sense of humour. Some turn to religion. The change you have to make in yourself is more deep and profound than most ever have to go through. Perhaps the anorexic or the extreme over eater may have to make similar transformations but few, very few have to reassess themselves in quite such a fundamental way.

further Sunday morning ramblings

I moved to Shropshire and renovated a house my girlfriend had bought. Come the spring the whole garden erupted in opium poppies which I systematically harvested. Cutting them and leaving them to bleed, collecting the opium that comes out white and milky but sets to a soft brown substance by morning. There must have been a quater of an ounce. This was just about clean enough to smoke but breaking off a small pea size lump and eating it would ensure a days dequincy experience. Warm and dream like. If you have ever been on a really long hike, twenty miles or more, once your back home, feet up by the fire, all cozy, well that's the feeling of opium.
This was around the time of lady Diane Spencer's' death. Up in Leeds and I guess all over the country britains cities had been flooded with high quality brown afghany heroin. My best freind up there. The person I would always stay with, along with several other freinds became addicted to heroin around this time. People you would never have imagined touching the stuff fell for the charms of morphia. Richard began selling the stuff which landed him in jail. The drug ultimately killed him as it did most of my boyhood freinds. But during this period I would go visit on two week smack holidays. The first day or two I would be sick as a dog until my body adjusted. The following fortnight would be pure bliss. No worries, no niggles, just a really beautiful state of being.
I would return home and sleep for a couple of days. I had no contacts down in Shropshire and living alone in a cottage in the middle of nowhere formed no habits.
I did begin to drink though. Never having taught before I was plunged in to lecturing at Shrewsbury, Wolverhampton and Birmingham. The stress was too much. The doctor prescribed ssris and sleeping pills whilst I prescribed myself a bottle of whisky a night. To get through the day I would split off the codeine from neurofen plus. In those days the pills were half pink, half white so disposing of the unwanted ibuprofen and collecting the codeine was easy. I have since learnt how to cold wash codeine from over the counter paracetamol and codeine tablets but I don't take codeine anymore.
After undergoing some kind of a breakdown, I moved to somerset.
The next couple of years were very positive. I worked for Fred Baier and hung out with the Pewsey crowd, Gareth and rachel, but also had Alice, my girlfriend of the times network, most of whom were connected in one way or another to the glass studio where she worked for neil Wilkin. It was at this late point in life I discovered what richard refered to as the Middle class drugs, cocaine and ecstasy. To be honest I never liked the coke much, that was more my partners thing but I did like the pills and dancing to music I had previously thought was rubbish. House, drum and bass, garage, with MDMa it all suddenly made sense. And dancing. I'd never danced before. Only thrown myself around at punk rock gigs. I'd still go visit richard every now and again for heroin holidays but still remained unhooked.
I remember looking for heroin people, big issue sellers, homeless without any success on a couple of occasions so maybe I was already beginning to catch the bug. You have no idea how much this drug is going to change your life. You maybe experienced in the whole other pharmacopeia but heroin changes you forever. Once you have had a habit you are never the same again. Changes take place at a cellular level meaning you can never dabble again. You're either on or off from then on.
I met an old freind from leeds who was living in Frome and that was that. I'd buy small bags from bath, Radstock or the traveller site and before too long you know that it's only going to get more difficult to stop, yet you abandon yourself to your fate and one morning you wake up I'll.

Sunday morning ramblings

Of the one or two hundred heroin addicts I have met, all but about ten were self medicating some form of mental illness. After all, who would endure such suffering if the alternative were not much worse. For many it is a kind of suicide. I believe many are suicidal but make do with suicide of the emotions. Of the ten or so I've known who weren't mentally ill it may well prove to be that, just as some are born diabetic, so some are born with insufficient endorphins. They are correcting an imbalance and trying to be normal, just like you guys.
For me it began more as experimentation. I have always had a deep interest in altered states of consciousness. Long before I first tried mushrooms and acid around age 14, I had been looking for them. Reading about them. Listening to music from the Beatles who's material from 66 to 68 is, if not heavily influenced by psychedelics then directly tried to express the psychedelic experience. Their influence meant my whole album collection, that covered a diverse spectrum of musical types, was basically the accompaniment to the drug experience. I mean what point would there be to listen to pink floyds interstellar overdrive or astromini dominai unless you were heavily stoned or on acid.
From 13 to 19 I must have done a good 500 mushroom trips and, I once worked out it was 72 acid trips. At 19 I had had enough and moved on to working. I have always been an artist, always made things, painted things but practicality and wanting more money than the dole provided, I turned my back on my hippy ways. I continued to smoke dope but I began to enjoy alcohol, pubs, clubs, socialising more.
Furniture seemed a good balance between creativity and practicality so I drifted from trade joinery to furniture. On a holiday in Ireland i met a lad who had been to Shrewsbury college and he told me of how they married fine craftsmanship to design at a college under john price who had created a kind of Parnham accessible to the poor. This was right up my street and I spent a great two years training there.
Back in leeds the drug scene had shifted from the consciousness expansion and the exploration of inner space to amphetamine injections and dark, heavy music. I dived straight in for a year or two while making my first attempt at creating a business. The governments enterprise allowance scheme was Thatcherite genius. You could still collect a subsistence wage but you were allowed to try out making money through your creative endeavour.
But I had neither the financial backing, the broad spread of skills nor the nose for business to make it work. I had it in my head that if I could teach two days a week then this could support an experimental furniture business. I knew of the main characters in the scene, Rupert Williamson, Fred Baier, richard la Trobe bateson, Ashley Cartwright, and they all to a man, taught part time.
I had no degree to qualify me for this, I had no o levels never mind a degree. I had left school early to go to Stonehenge festival. My mothers death and fathers resultant alcoholism meant I could do pretty much what I wanted so I had left school and home on the same day in a haze of acid.
Fortunately at Buckinghamshire college the course leader was a man of high intelligence who could see that given a chance I would excel. Grateful for his benevolence I did too. I gave up tobacco but took to smoking a brass hash pipe i made from when I woke till when I slept. This canna is barrier allowed me to keep a distance from the other students who were getting drunk for the first time and doing stuff I had ten years back. I was probably the best student of the year. Some were better craftsmen but none had the originality that got my a first with commendations in making and design. This was my highest point because I didn't have a clue what to do next.

AL-LAD

Buy now before it's too late

Phd proposal ideas

Certainly one of the strangest years of my life. Poised with a year to work off followed by a leap in to the unknown. I spend our long walks ruminating over the ideas I've worked on i n the last few years. Issues of self, free will, which still hold water, which relate to making because, much as I'd like to do a PhD on neuroscience I have no history in this. All I've done, all I'm known for on a professional level is furniture making. The last piece of writing I enjoyed on the subject of making was Richard Sennets' The Craftsman'. A brilliant book. Though a lot of my later inspiration came from antonio Damasio, his two great books, 'Descartes myth' particularly placed the body back in to the conversation. The twentieth century saw a drift where cognition was all that was really studied. Emotions were either ignored or deemed too slippery for serious research. Since candace Perts' work and her discoveries regarding opiate receptor sites came the realisation that receptor sites were all over the body. Damasios somatic marker hypothesis revealed a pulse of neurotransmitters marked any new object we encounter enabling our emotional response to our encounters to be far quicker than any cognitive process could ever be. When you step over a venomous snake in the jungle it is your reactions that save you. An over emphasis on the significance of consciousness prevails today. After all, the vast majority of what our brains do is below the surface. Our unconscious processes that keep us breathing and our hearts beating and the countless other bodily processes that keep us alive. Our understanding developes below the surface and the illusion of self that Buddhism has been aware of for centuries has finally found acceptance amongst the neuroscience community. And here I step in to point out that there is no duality. Our consciousness and unconsciousness, our being can not be separated up in to brain, body etc. The commonly heald false dichotomy of working with your hands or working with your head. The crafts councils foolish promotion of objects outside of their sphere and lack of attention to the defence of the maker. Only in the field of sport is pay reflective of the inspiration of out Wayne too eye, the spontaneity of Gascoigne whose brain was developed beyond the rest of humanities for a short time. No where is the balance of physical intellect and intelligence of planning given the respect it is due save for dark corners of our culture from Cheltenham celebration of craftsmanship to displays of customised cars and motor cycles. These areas are considered self involved. Private displays for the initiated.
So from somewhere within this botch pitch of ideas I need to map out some plan of research and submit my proposal to the university for judgement. Try not to slip in to the political as our makers have been so poorly treated. The tradesmen provincial left overs from a by gone age of engineering, subsumed by CNC and cad drawing. The crafts a limp off shoot of the arts.

Taming the Mind : A Conversation with Dan Harris : Sam Harris

Taming the Mind : A Conversation with Dan Harris : Sam Harris

The Final Year

Having spent over 15 years trying to make the furniture business work and despite having constant flow of work, I find myself in a financially neutral position. So, after giving it much thought, I'm going to give up furniture making professionally. I have this last year for my client and a year on the workshop, it seems like a logical place to do something else. I've always promised myself I'd write something of significance. It was before my brother did his doctorate that I first started planning my phd. So all the ideas of the last twenty years can come together to form a whole. There came a point, perhaps five years back when I lost any feeling that what I was doing was of any significance. Since then I have just made more of the same.

The Jogger

I shall write this one up whilst its fresh on the memory. Our usual morning walk takes us through a clover field where a young woman walks two vicious, snarling whipetty things. Today they corner red Dook and he's not a fighter. Seeing an exit route, he slipped through and accidentally knocked over this jogger. What followed was a performance followers of football will be familiar with. "Are you alright?" I asked him, meaning any serious injury. "Of course I'm not bloody alright!" . His self piteous performance brought over the woman with the vicious dogs over. He continued to play to the crowd. I thought it best I remove myself from the situation before I told some truths.
After his audience had left he got up and ran a quater of a mile down the hill. A passerby laughingly informed me he had experience of the jaggers character before. When I reached the road he was again on the ground having found a fresh audience. I suggested he was making mountains out of molehills and left them to it. A pathetic characterit me in a sour mood for the morning.

Endings

All Emotional

We knew it was coming from the start. The land our workshop stands on is valuable building land and the landlord said from the start he would be selling it in a couple of years and our humble rent can't compare so we've got a years warning to find somewhere new. After my breakdown two or three years ago I sold my kit to the guy I share with so really I just own my hand tools.
He's struggling for work. Has a family to provide for. He'd been doing a teaching course but has had to pack it in because teachers don't get paid enough for how he lives.
It struck me when i was 21 that you spend way more time with your work colleagues than you do with your wife and kids. You're on work for eight or nine, with your workmates till 5 or 6, then a quick couple of hours with your family before bed. In many ways you're closer, well, you know each other better.
What I will do I don't know. If this years debt pay offs done perhaps ill do that PHD I've always wanted to do. Or go share space with Fred again. Though I guess he wants passionate youth rather than half mad old woodsy. I spoke to him today, we made an elliptical table together some 15 years back. We made two. One is now in the House of Lords or Houses of Parliament, I forget which. It was a good one and I'd like to bet reference of the elliptical top because a beautiful ellipse and an ok one are far apart. He was breaking down from a festival in north wales but by chance is off to London to the House of Lords tomorrow so hes so he's taking a tape to get me the sizes. We're off to gareth Neals fourtyth birthday party together. 40 eh? Can you believe it? When I met him I was 27 and a full decade older than his 17. Now he's a proper man. It was sad when I left Fred's for to set up my own place nearer frome. Shortly after gareth went to London. Those Pewsey days were fun.
Now this current workshop in frome is running its last year I feel sad.
After leaving Fred's I was going to share with Clive dinmore, may raving partner. But it turned out I shared with Magnus for the next 15 years and a better man you couldn't meet. Sadly it looks like we'll be going off our seperate ways. I've had two periods of serious mental health problems these last two years. I am unreliable. With our current cheap workshop he can sustain a period of my madnlastbut a bigger, better, more expensive unit, well I'd really drop him in it if I had another bad spell. He's had two workshop share offers. These have been a great 15 years and I'll miss him. My best freind, I suppose. But I understand. Just makes me really sad.
Maybe its time to put down the tools. You get slower and weaker as you age and focus on the writing and photography. Surprised he put up with me so long really. Sad day today.

Yeah, Superstition

I spent a lot of time a and effort posting on the dangers of superstition and for sure it is what you fill in the gaps in with. And now, not wanting to put humanity down too much, we must know very little of the whole of what there is to know. So our science, ini its entirety, must be pretty much comparable to one tear of frustration in the ocean. In fact I may be being a tad generous here. If we divide the tear of frustration, place it on a sheet of glass, now smear it until the tiniest visible piece we can detect, then go drop that in the ocean we may be closer to the truth. But we do know something. Now imagine the scale  of stuff we don't know. The stuff that isn't that smear. It makes most people not bother trying to know anything much.
There are also two kinds of knowing. Knowing how and knowing that. This micro moisture smear is what we know that. An example of knowing that is knowing that leeds is in Yorkshire. Knowing how is a never ending practice like knowing how to play the guitar. The leeds Yorkshire thing is done and you need not attend to it again unless you have to sit a geography exam or something. Guitar playing, painting, cabinet making, glass blowing are never complete. You never know it all. It can also fool the arrogant, "yeah, I can play guitar".
There are many who will argue that know how isn't real knowledge. The remnants of the class system still look down on a person who works with their hands as if they can be operated without a brain.
So if our droplet of knowledge is all we truly 'know', then everything else we fill in the gaps with (and remember there's a whole universe of them out there) is superstition, at best educated guess.
A life spent in pursuit of knowledge (know that) is interesting but I am glad that I chose a know how pursuit as my life's work. I am proud to be a maker. I spend a lot of time as a hobby reading to gain knowledge so as I can spout off on my blog but my 'knowing thats' are not in the same realm of confidence I have in my making. I also know that my learning in making can have no conclusion.
Know how is empowering too. Nothing makes me smile more than a money man with some broken utensil essential to their journey, be it a car or a door.

Dook and me

I think its called breaking your dog or you broke your dog. Basically knackered it out. Unless you've had a sled dog you will not have a clue. Yesterday dook had had a number of walks,  7 odd miles in spaces throughout the day. No where near enough. As soon as we went to bed he was nestling down for half hour them pacing about for twenty minutes, another snooze then a stomp. He just has far more energy than me on a bad or even average day. When I got him, I'm 49, I was aware it was my last chance to own and enjoy the camaraderie of a semi wild beast which essentially they are. Any older and I wouldn't have strength. Finally at 5 am I gave in, had a quick cup of tea then set off in to the darkness. Few cars are about then so less lead time in the quater mile to Victoria park. Here I let him run loose in the children's (no dogs) zone but no one is there and I clear any mess. He lets rip and tears across the field at any ground sat wildlife. At 5 the gulls, ravens and pigeons aren't up yet so we swing it in to the next field of vic park. No dog walkers are out yet. A bit of ball play gives him his chance to demonstrate his grace.
Lead again for a few more streets, constant instinctual husky pull, handy on the hills, a skateboard would be cool. Must be half hour before we hit the hills proper. Here you can see all across holcombe, chantry, Mells, whatley, small villages dot the rolling green. The earliest dog owners generally are out at about 6 so 5 gives you the virgin world. I find the lost money and cigarettes. It would be me who found the body. I almost expect to see a hanging man where the small shrine left for a 21 year old lad who topped himself . There's a railway line above and I don't know if he threw himself in front of the speeding locomotive ensuring a drivers lifetime of bad dreams, or if he used a noose from the steel structure. There are no great fixing points so he may have chosen the sturdy bough of one of the many oaks, beech, ash or even sycamore though its shorter grain makes it an awkward three for tree surgery. Sycamores short grain means, if you do go for a neck snap hanging, make sure its a decent branch. Most self hangings are lynchings themselves which can take half an hour. Back in the days when lynching was the preferred method of execution The hangman would famously turn a blind eye to the more popular condemned men to allow the women and children to swing on his legs and briefed his misery by a considerable time. Less popular executed men were circled by a tight ring of men to prevent such kindness. Why the average suicide doesn't opt for the long drop and In stant death I can only guess that it seems less gentle. Perhaps the self destructor desires the half hours final contemplation. That would make a kind of sense. Albert Pierepoint, britains most prolific hangman of the twentieth century prided himself on the time of the journey from the holding cell, belting thatms, hood,noose, platform lever at an average of 12 seconds. I believe 7 seconds was his record. A humane kind of pride in a dark corner of our world. Alberts uncle worked out a table to calculate rope length to physique of the man to be executed. Albert  perfected this and a few glances in to the holding cell were sufficient to gauge the perfect length. Prior to this all sorts of horrors took place from decapitation to lynching. Visiting this shrine as I regularly do fills me with shame at what I had considered.
If day is breaking around this point you can have the joy of disturbing roosting buzzards  the lucky walker sand find these vast glories of nature taking off for more open ground. One seldom gets that c lose to these mmagnificent  creatures. My brother found two on seperate occasions buzzards with broken wings. One didnt last more than a few days but the other was about ready to return to the wild. Sadly, two cars of uninvited party guests arrived and the bird freaked out and battered itself beyond repair. Sad story. We were living in Cornwall, I'd left school and home on the same day and after six months sofa surfing grouped up with my closest mates and rented a cottage in central Cornwall, well off the beaten track. This was a wonderful time of awakening for a city boy like me. Cutting firewood with bowsaw and axe which I did each day, was what got me interested in wood as a material. Our kids room was full of buzzard shit.
Me and Dook cut up the other side of the valley. Just starting to get light. Its a fantastic valley, largely invisible due to its green shroud. But I find spots to get a good perch. Once I can get a new laptop I'll post some good photos.
We're briefly back on a minor road, across a stream, then back up the hill to the clover fields. Dook has got his rocks of more or less by now and isn't charging through brambles with no consideration for personal injury chasing young deer, rabbit, squirrel. Once in the clover fields a few If the earlier dog walkers were out. Dog politics is a right confused mess. From what i have seen, in an open field, if both dogs are off leads, there will be play and never a fight. If you both have them on leads you stretch your arms off as they pull to go day hello to each other. Then, finally, one on a lead and one off. General,y in an open space, dogs should be off leads. On streets practicality means leads are necessary. Then there are the places no one is quite, open spaces with tight paths. Here anarchy prevails. The Dip comes to mind.
Back home for eight so I guess that's ten miles or so. I shall test but will be woken shortly.

WAKING UP: Chapter One : Sam Harris

WAKING UP: Chapter One : Sam Harris

Getting socially ostrasized

The swiftest way to find yourself expelled from any social club or community is the revelation, accidental or otherwise of mental illness. Its the new black. The new gay.

Back Yourself

I've spent a long time going on about superstition in the past but its time to abandon rational. It gets me no where. It is clearly there for a reason. Gut feelings are a lot quicker than reason. Intuition. Around age 27 I used to advance its virtues and now,after an atheist stint I find myself returning to the gut instinct. Trust yourself.

Mums Funeral

Just remembered my mums funeral. I didn't know anyone there much. Maybe they were her mates from when they were nineteen but all strangers to me. My gran always hated my mother marrying beneath her. Hated me dad and what it meant. As a kid I never knew about class.
After they'd burnt her body, me, my sister and our kid went back to our house where he'd done his best to tidy up and put on a few sandwiches. No one come. So after a bit my dad says you may as well go down your grams. I presume he went to the pub on his open for a drink with his mates.
I went to the woods. Sat around, popped in my grans but I knew no one there. Our family dispersed at that point.
In a way I see why the Jews seldom intermarry. There was nothing between those people. Nothing. I can't imagine my mums side of the family with their clean walk to wall carpets and ornaments to replace where should be art. Class can not inter marry any more than Jew and Arab.
I still hurt for my dad. They really loved each other, my mum and dad. I never heard them argue. If only cancer hadn't come and destroyed all our lives.
That's not quite true. I liked my uncle Nigel. He helped design The Blackburn buccaneer, a bit like the spitfire. He was my mothers brother. We would have connected later in life. I feel a bit robbed. I've got our kid,I ought to get to know my sister better and I've sort of made up with my dad.i see now his heart got broken and he couldn't handle it alone. He turned to alcohol. I don't blame him. It must have been hell. That's why I've never had kids. Its great if all goes well but life can be bad, and you are stuck with it. I don't know if losing a parent at such a young age,  ( I was12 when she finally died but it was a protracted death of operations, radio therapies and chemo therapies so Shepard left the home and we were fending for ourselves from 9) gives you a downward look on life. A cynical view, that e even if times seem good it is a temporary break before the return of the bad luck and ill fortune.

Monday morning, madman goes to work

My two month off work, as suggested by the doctors ends today. After our eight mile walk me and Dook headed to the shops. All my money in the world 49p in change and a pound on my card. My girlfriend likes mall oaf and there's an offer on for a large loaf for a quid. All I could find for under 49p was a tin of beans so Dook had some warmed up rice from last night with baked beans. He seemed to enjoy it. I'm supposed to get paid today should be the last day of cobbled together food. Plenty of pasta towards the end of a month. The payback scheme is going tobe a brutal year.
Down valis we saw tawny owls taking off or just sat mooching. They become quite easy to spot. Dook gave chase to a young roe deer by the river but the beautiful mocha beast made a valiant escape. I think rabbits and squirrels are about his limit.
The psychiatrists had estimated it would take two months to get over the MXP trip but its proving a bit longer. Still confused and delusional thought patterns. Accusing innocent people of things they are not guilty for. You might ask then why I didn't leave the hallucinogens alone as I have had 12 tabs of LSZ since the NDE. This is a valid point. People with mental illnesses ought to keep clear of all consciousness altering drugs. To be frank, this year ahead is very daunting. The only way to attack it is to steam in, which I am trying to. My windows are still boarded up but the new ones are virtually ready to paint. As soon as I get paid I can buy more materials for the desk, which I am really looking forward to. It will be my finest piece and a good one to sign off on.