St. Paddy's Day.

A day in which the popular press has gone totally apeshit over a "new killer drug" which may have been implicated in the deaths of two teenagers somewhere obscure on the east coast of England, and then fills the rest of its pages with stories and adverts glorifying what has become the annual festival of copious consumption of the chemical which causes more death, disease, addiction, violence and vomit than all illegal substances put together.

Add to that, I'm not glorifying any bloke who drives snakes out of anywhere. Snakes are good things and I like them, even if I wouldn't actually go near them myself.

*picture of beautiful snake excised for the phobic*

I'm not a fan, as you can tell.

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One of the things that make being a "recovering alcoholic" so much fun is how it's seriously weird not to drink.

In "Bad Science", the worshipfully amazing Ben Goldacre hammers the point home that although popular reporting of health statistics on drinking always triumph "a little alcohol is good for you" this is actually caused by a statistical anomaly; non-drinkers are a weird bunch, small in number, and they muck up the stats on life expectancy because they often have their own major health reasons for not drinking [either they've had problems with it, or it clashes with some serious medication they're on for something else, or similar].

Not only are we statistically weird, we're also culturally weird. We're excluded from some of the major social events of society -

[- "why can't you  just come to the pub and have a lemonade?", she said. "that'd be kind of like inviting Pete Doherty into the crack den and expecting him just to have a sherbet dip", I replied. -]

- we're bombarded with propaganda from all sides, both commercial and cultural, that tells us what a bitchenly amazing time is waiting for us should we give in [but it's okay, because they put "Drink Aware" in a four-point font at the bottom, apparently that magic phrase will clear up all the social problems associated with]

- [at least Pete Doherty doesn't  have to pass ten "CRACK MAKES YOU SEXY" billboards on his way to Tesco's] -

- and even the most well-meaning of people are prone to telling you what "fun" you're missing out on ["ooh, got hammered last night, hung over this morning"] in lieu of polite conversation.

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None of the above will make me have a drink, although it helps ensure that every so often the idea enters my head and floats around for two seconds before being violently ejected as soon as I remember exactly why it's not a good idea.

It's just on days like this that the burden of "recovering" weighs heavier than others. Some days it is perfectly possible to go in and "just have a lemonade", whilst there are also days where I shouldn't be within four frogging miles of a pub.

Because at some point someone will say the magic words "Smirnoff Ice", and then…

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*picture of underwater baby hippo to reduce above moan*

I must apologize for my radio silence; a few times I've clicked "New Post" to blog here, found myself not only grouchy but far too grouchy even by the standards I've set myself on this site over the years, and decided in the interests of propriety that the one thing the  Interwebz doesn't need is even more strongly-worded grouchy invective – even if I hope mine would at least be gramatically above Speak You're Branes level.

The upshot, it seems, will be that to save my job I will accept a 20% reduction in both hours and salary, though this is not finalized yet.

Of course this will have ramifications upon my lifestyle – it's certainly not undo-able, but it will mean some modifications. It's not as if I'll be on starvation level, so there's no need to worry here; just that "lifestyle change" is something I know I have a blobfish-on-a-seesaw-type inertia with.

Change generally is not something I look forward to – I'm fine with it actually happening, I'm just crap at anticipating it, with a huge propensity to pessimism that even Charlie Brooker might regard as slightly deviant and self-defeating.

So again I'll apologize for grouching and if, in whatever medium, I'm not as entertaining, communicating or as verbose as I should be. This too will pass.

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In the meantime, to give you something else to do, may I direct you to this link, in which you can waste an hour and a bit of your time watching the "classic" Santa Claus Conquers The Martians?

You're welcome.

Sometime on Friday night, the ice broke and I surfaced.

It's not predictable as such, but it's about twice a year that suddenly I find my mood dropping faster than a Gillette sponsorship of a prominent golfer*.

Last Tuesday lunchtime I was, as is my wont, on my little town's market sinking coffee and enjoying my friends there, happy as Larry** – and then, six hours later, I was panicky, shivering, wanting to vomit, paranoid, filled with obsessive catastrophic thinking, and generally utterly unable to look after myself.

This Saturday lunchtime found me back on the market and just about back to normal – well, not quite, but certainly running at 90% rather than about 0.0001%.

The causes, such as they are, are unknown, although there are factors; a bad meal and a bad sleep on Monday, a December lack of sunlight and encroachment of "Ve Haff Vays Of Making You Haff Fun" season, and – I'm told – I should have expected something of a "rebound" from the food poisoning of a couple of weeks ago, an aftershock as my system finally returns to normal, a lurch back to average following the slight high one gets from not being stuck on the bog all night.

Anyway. No serious damage done. And hopefully having the dip now means that I'll stay stable for the rest of the cold, dark season.

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An early Xmas present from the gorgeously-employed Max always helps;

The man with the most-misspelt name in British comedy [just ahead of David Bladdiebub***]

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The other event of the past week, slightly before I hit into my low, was that after months of wavering inbetween active participation and blatantly ignoring it, I finally closed my account on [websitebeginswithO].

The final straw, in this case, was being told I was both "fascist" and "communist" [surely some mishtake?] because I agree with our Government testing all cars here over a certain age to make sure they're not a deadly-dangerous high-speed bullet likely to run over your kid thereby saving several thousand lives per year.

The subject itself is stupid. But for some time now I've not wanted to post much on there because anything at all "controversial" [ie anything not pictures of fluffy bunnies] attracts the attention not only of my friends on there, but also of idiots, nutcases and Libertarians****.

Frog that shit. I'm not interested in what they say, and not interested in any site which allows them to say it at me in any way they like. If I wanted to spend my life arguing with Interwebz tosspots, I'd set up a climate change, evolution or multiculturalism blog.

Coincidentally, I'm told that the only open message boards / forums that don't suffer from Shitcock Syndrome are the ones that contain lots of links to free naughty photography and video materials. Presumably the visitors there are too distracted to spend time in crappy arguments…

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* I apologize for this reference, but it's the best one which came to mind right now.
** If anyone knows who Larry actually is, please send him my regards.
*** This is an ancient Mary Whitehouse Experience reference which nobody else will remember, but wtf.
**** I leave it as a reader exercise to decide how much the Venn diagram of these three groups overlaps.

Warning: Post contains description of gastric distress.

When it comes to our bodies [as opposed to our brains] we all have our strong points and our weak spots. The perfect specimen doesn't actually exist [and if he/she does, he/she's probably too froggin' arrogant about it to actually be likeable]. Regular readers will know that my particular weak spot is my digestive system; although there's nothing seriously wrong with it, it's what's known in the trade as irritable, and it has the tendency to make me sodding irritable whenever it's irritated.

So, when on late afternoon Monday my bowels felt like they were going to explode, it wasn't a complete shock to me, even though it was sodding annoying.

Several hours later, after an attack which could best be described as on the sodding extremely heavy side, I phoned NHS Direct. They advised me that given the amount of red in what I had just passed, I needed to go down to A&E.

Ipswich Hospital's changed since last time I was in there in a hurry – there's a new Emergency Unit wing, and it's rather swish. After checking in, I gingerly sat in the waiting area – not too many people, and ostensibly all "walking wounded" physical injuries – on the seat nearest the toilets. By then everything, including liquids, had passed out of me, but my insides were still cramping as if there was more to come.

It's common to hear horror stories about eight-hour waits in Casualty: I guess it has its peak periods, but a quiet Monday evening, before the pubs close, isn't one of its busiest times, I guess. It was an hour's wait for the initial assessment [hey, you're not going to die on us, are you] and an hour and a bit to then see a proper doctor [let me just do a quick physical up there; yes, you've got food poisoning and a small external fissure, but we don't need to keep you in if you've got someone to look after you].

Given the advice that I needed looking after, I decamped to my mother's with a box of sachets of rehydration powder – which say on the box they're "blackcurrant flavour"; which I guess they are, if you took a blackcurrant, dipped it in salt, dissolved it in hydrochloric acid then paid an insane Albanian to sit on it for six months.

So actually the A&E was one of the least worst bits of the whole evening, and the only really sickening aspect of it was that the TV in the waiting area was tuned to Channel 4 all evening – so my companions whilst I waited were a documentary on African kids being slaughtered for being witches, followed by How To Look Good Naked – The Over-60's Edition. Not exactly the most reassuring – or digestive-system-settling – of distractions. Should've brought a little radio.

Anyway; most of yesterday was spent asleep at Ma's, and I managed to eat and keep in me a baked potato and a cheese sandwich later on in the evening, so it's almost back to normal – a day or two's resting up should see me right.

I have radio, I have good books, I now have my laptop with me – I'm definitely all right

Thanks to those of you who saw my pained FB updates and sent good wishes. Sorry I've not kept up with everyone for the last couple of days – I'll catch up later on today.

In the meantime, here's a big question for you:

What is your physical weak spot? What is your physical strong spot?

For most of the day I've been far too cross to even contemplate a coherent blog entry, but it's starting to wear off. The urge to take up arms and fight hate with violence is strong, even for us Buddhists who are supposed [ha] to be even tempered and not prone to bursts of wanting to punch someone's face in.

I'm angry with the stupid fuckers who voted for the twunt, but to a slightly lesser extent since most of them won't have had much of a opportunity to know any better. I'm more angry with the fuckers intelligent and well-informed enough to know better, who were warned what would happen if turnout was really low, and still chose to sit at home on their arses. An extra 1,000 UKIP or 5,000 Green votes out of a millions-strong North-West electorate, and Griffin wouldn't be jetting off to Strasbourg.

The lesson to be taken from Sunday: Not all politicians are the same, and although saying so is attractively cynical, it helps feed the vacuum in which extremism thrives.

I strongly disagree with the Tories, and I think part of the problem here is that we're only just starting to reap some of what they sowed during the eighties and early nineties, but with a few exceptions I concede that they, to a very large degree, at least aren't violent, fascist anyone-different-bashers. [Even Eric Pickles, one of the lead anti-gays in the Tories, now says he wouldn't reverse any of the LGBT rights gained under Labour].

I strongly disagree with UKIP – scratch the surface of "Out of EU" and you find some fairly tough-right-wing bollocks – but I support their right to exist. [There was a show on not so long ago about Nigel Farage which actually made me feel slightly less contemptuous about him; he makes it his job to blow a raspberry at every Euro Parliament meeting or convention. Every organization needs at least one.]

But I wish UKIP had picked up that extra seat. If it'd've been that close a knife-edge here in the East, I might even have ticked their box.

A lesson in democracy, folks: Sometimes, people, it's not about choosing who you strongly support – but about choosing the least worst.

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To cheer me up after all that:

source

Adventures In Early Mornings, Part 736:

Lately, 5:45am is the moment of the day at which my circadian rhythms have decided that it's time to wake my brain up as surely as if I'd had three gallons of cold olive oil thrown at me.

Which is fine if I wanted to be awake in time to watch Tikkabilla, the 21st-Century equivalent of Play School only with a dragon puppet, but I can't say that looms large in my list of cultural priorities that often.

When I have managed to get back to sleep, but have need to awaken between eight and nine, the death metal CD on the alarm clock has continually failed to wake me.

I therefore last night replaced it with this.

I'm pleased to report that it took me about five seconds to get from hearing the first note to banging the off switch.

You can, if you wish, recreate the experience by doing some breathing exercises, getting yourself all relaxed, letting your thoughts drift away, perhaps visualizing something beautiful, perhaps even meditating…

…then clicking here.

If you do, I should let you know that I am available for one-to-one therapy sessions for a low, low introductory fee….

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BTW, "therapist" is not a protected term in the UK; you can't get away with calling yourself a social worker, counsellor or doctor unless you have the relevant bits of paper, but you can have any weird idea you like, set yourself up as a "therapist", and charge people for it without having to give any evidence of efficacy.

There's a so-called "best practice" register of CAM practitioners, but that's safeguarding things like patient confidentiality rather than whether it's any good.

Remember Carl Rogers: so long as you've got the "enabling therapeutic relationship", a therapy will work to some degree – at least on the psychological / mental health level even if it physically does nothing – no matter what you do or how strange your method is.

Therefore: I would like to float the following ideas for my new business;

- Custard Therapy. Clients are put into a relaxed state, then taken through a ritual "return to the womb" process; custard takes the place of the warm amniotic fluid. [Note to self: write to Birds' to get bulk purchase prices.]

- Hitting You Round The Head With A Cricket Bat Therapy. Positive behaviour is rewarded; negative is punished. Already in use in many psychiatric institutions, except they use 10,000 volts of electricity instead of a kilogram and a bit of finest willow.

- Waving A Bit Of Toast In A "Cosmic" Way Therapy. Since so many people already believe that bits of dead rock have mystic healing powers, why not extend the same to toast? It at least has the advantage that you can spread Marmite on it and eat it afterwards if you're not feeling any better.

- Fish Nicks All Your Shoes Therapy. For those stressed by their attachment to material goods, consumerism and gender expectations. Best of all is that you don't actually need to do anything for this therapy; just leave your keys along with the cheque. Note: therapy not suitable for Ugg or Crocs wearers [they block the relevant energy channels, dontchaknow].

Feedback? Any other ideas?

[And if you think these are weird, a quick trip round badscience.net should convince you that charlatans have been getting away with worse for decades...]