Art Copying Life? Hrant Dink Murdered

Let it not be said that this blog has forgotten its roots in Turkey and things Turkish...
Hrant Dink Murdered
The story of the murder of Hrant Dink is strangely reminiscent of the end of Celal Salik in Orhan Pamuk's incomparable 'The Black Book', even up to the promise from the Prime Minister to hunt down the perpetrators.

Returning by bike at lunchtime to my normal workplace after a lesson at our other campus, I found myself not only blown to a standstill, but actually going backwards into the path of a taxi that clearly had no intention of stopping. Fortunately, I managed to get out of the way in time. Mad bloody weather. In another sign of madness, I saw a bloody enormous wasp flying groggily around the classroom.
The satellite was installed yesterday, and I can now get crystal clear TV pictures for the first time in about four years. Watched 'The Green Mile' on Film 4.
I also had three single shots of raki and three cigs.

waiting for the cable guy.

I'm not exactly feeling inspired at the moment. It's one of those times where I'm engulfed in a static cloud of ennui, making little movement forward or backward, like a fish in a still pocket of water. Still feeling ill and tired doesn't make it any easier of course. Right now, I'm working at home, waiting for the sattelite guy to come and set up a receiver for us.
Monday night saw the consumption of two pints of Abbot ale, and most of a bottle of red, plus six cigs, while yesterday was three glasses of red and two cigs. I hadn't originally intended to drink at all on monday, but as I was cycling home I wrenched the muscles in my back, which then started to spasm, and I had to sit down. A pub seemed much the best place to do this in, and of course beer is the best muscle relaxant. Well, that's what I told myself, anyway.

totting up.

Feel rather rough this morning, mainly because of a not exactly soothing night of sleep. Also, fun & games getting no. 1 son up and ready for school this a.m.
Last week, I had roughly 30 fags, and consumed 63.19 units of alcohol (conservative estimate, although I've tried to make an absolutely honest assessment of the size of the whiskies I had) - better, but still not good enough. The aim this week is to reduce this figure to between 30 - 40 units max, then drive the figure down until it is regularly below 30. As for the cigarettes - well, apart from one day last week, I have only smoked in the evenings, and cerainly over the past couple of days it's been more from force of habit than from any real desire.

processes.

I was doing process descriptions with my Academic English class, and these two images appeared out of things they said. The first is a commentary on the carbon cycle. It's meant to be that animals exhale CO2, which is taken up by plants; One student's description was 'rabbits breathe on the plants to help them live'. the second picture depicts a pair of students who work in the Purple Turtle, collecting glasses, and shows how they feel about halfway through the process of collecting glasses and taking them to be washed while negotiating a heaving, sticky, sweaty bar full of drunks.

Lets give this a try....

some students doing an ad for dog food, apparently...

Friday.

Always a good day, especially considering that I have no lessons and I get the opportunity to burn,er, deal with the great drifts of paperwork cluttering my desk. Also, my cold is subsiding.
Booze news: Last night was a bottle of Magners Cider on the way home, a bottle of Argentinian red (at 13.5% abv) and a large G&T, because I didn't feel tired. Also, six cigs.

I'm feeling rougher than a porcupine's bum at the moment. I'm also still simmering away with inchoate, frustrated anger, caused by stress and illness. And the fact that it's the middle of January.
Last night, turfed myself out of the house, as the wife had friends round, clucking over the baby and chit-chatting. Went up to my local. What excitement.
Had three pints of London Pride, six cigs and, on returning home, a shot of raki.

Don't you hate it when...

...you feel like crap, with all the symptoms of a bad cold; You have too much work to do, and someone is trying to lay more on; You do a professional job for amateur wages; You need to do further qualifications, but you can't get on with it because of previously mentioned workload; You hope to be able to work from home, but you can't, because of the demands of family chaos; And you never, ever, have time to be yourself, because someone or other is demanding to have a slice of your time, your life, your personality, save for the last few exhausted minutes before you close your eyes?
Welcome to how I'm feeling right now.
Last night, I had 1 cig (and felt horrible about it), and half a bottle of Mirool Creek cabernet.

waking.

How do you feel, as life ebbs back into your body as light filters through the edges of your closed curtains? Do you feel energised, ready to leap forth into the day? Or do you slowly become aware of the necessity of arising, aware of the aches here and there that did not exist before, but have gradually crept upon you as age has? Or perhaps you just feel grateful for having survived another night, or even the slow malaise of dread that yes, here is another day, with the same drudgery, the same quotidian of frustration? Or perhaps you wake, but not fully, not even truly aware that you are still actually tired, but long custom has made you inured to it.
I miss the days where I would literally leap out of bed, fully aware of who and where I was, full of impatient kinesis, with not an idea of how I would spend it. I miss the days where I did not wake with a dull sense of something aching, an almost imperceptible hurt. I miss the days where, if I woke up tired, I would know that I was tired, rather than shrug it off and accept it as one of those things.
Yet still, there are those rare mornings where I wake, blissfully relaxed and with a delicious sense of my body fully reposed, fully aware, then I coil into action and stretch every last muscle and sinew towards the ceiling, and I open the curtains and face the day, full of every possibility, and then I miss the days when this would be every morning.

edit: monday night saw me smoke 5 cigs, and have six single measures of Glenmorangie, 3 of which were in the shape of hot toddies, as my throat was aching like buggery. The other 3 just sent along to join the party.

And the results are in...

Over the past week, I smoked 21 cigarettes, and drank 1 large G&T, 2 double rums and coke, 1 double Jack Daniels, one and half glasses of Bordeaux, and two glasses of Spanish Cava, nearly two bottles of St. Emilion, most of a bottle of a decent chilled chardonnay, a small measure of raki, one pint of cider, and most of a bottle of chardonnay, one bottle of white generic at 11.5% abv, plus a glass and a half of something else white, and roughly a bottle and a half of wine. In total, I have consumed, at a conservative estimate and assuming that the wine was 13% abv, 77 units of alcohol. Holy Fuckeroo. And I've been doing this to myself for years. It's not even as if I'm a wino; It's just something that I do, come home, make dinner, pour myself a wine, then another, and another.
Anyway, the aim of recording what I've been imbibing is to drive that figure down, and to do so publicly. I'm not ashamed - I rarely get raging drunk, and please don't think I'm permanently staggering round with a bright red nose. I suspect that in fact I'm fairly typical of my generation. Nor do I feel particularly unwell - far from it; Thanks to regularly exercising and cycling to and from work, I'm actually fitter than when I was in my twenties. It's just that it's time to break habits that will, iof left unchecked, potentially become health-threatening later in life.

Peas.

Last night, the wife was ferreting around on Ebay, eyes wide with excitement. She'd found a company that sold on goods at wholesale prices to her, which she could then sell on on Ebay. She seemed to think that she'd hit a gold mine, and that she would soon be making tons of profit. After all, that's what the publicity on the company's website said.
Advertising is a wonderful thing; In adland, everyone's smiling with perfect teeth, the weather's always just so, no one has grey hair, and there are large, luxurious houses with perfect kitchens and bathrooms, and broad, empty roads along which one can swish, wearing perfect sunglasses on perfect noses, going to perfect places where one will have completely fulfilling, perfect sex with one's perfect partner. A vertitable Tir-nan-Og. And it's all perfect bollocks, but it still makes us drool and wander off to the shops to stock up on this or that frippery in the hope that it will make our lives just a little less imperfect, a little more controlled.
I have hated and distrusted advertising since the age of five. I despise its promises, its lure and the ways in which it makes us complicit as consumers. I can date my loathing almost precisely. Picture then, a day in April. It is one of those days where the sky above the chalklands of my home is a silvered blue, and a lively breeze sends tattered sails of clouds rushing across from southwest to northeast; And in my house, the gas fire in the living room is on full, because it is cold, despite the promise of warmer days to come written in the burgeoning hawthorn and the first flowers of spring. Lying on the beige and white fabric sofa (This was the 1970's) is me, under a blanket, recovering from another bout of the bronchitis that plagued me when young. In the corner next to the large front window, the TV, a new Sony Trinitron colour television with a large black and silver dial with which one tuned into the channel you wanted to watch, is tuned to ITV, and it's adverts time. There is one for a powdered orange drink, featuring a couple playing tennis; another for some washing-up detergent, where a girl complains of greasy dishes; Then the next one. It is this that engages my attention. A boy, of around my own age, is sat at a dinner table, similar to ours. He looks like the sort of boy who does not like his greens. His mother is preparing his meal in the kitchen. She turns to a cupboard, and pulls out a tin.
A tin of peas.
'He'll never eat them', I think, as she opens it with a gleaming wall mounted tin opener, and tips the contents into a pan to heat up. By the magic of the ad, the peas are instantly ready, placed on the boy's plate, complete with a livid yellow knob of butter, and brought through. The boy looks at the peas dubiously at first, then tries one, then a forkful, and suddenly, the whole plate of peas is gone. Next, the boy is in the kitchen, tugging mum's apron.
'Mum!' he says, 'Have we got any more?'
And cut to the name of the tinned pea product.
I was staggered. I hated peas; This boy, my own age, and in a room similar to mine, hated them; His mother had bought these special tinned peas, had put said peas on his plate, topped by mustard-coloured butter; He'd eaten them and now wanted more!
Those must be damn fine peas, I think, or words to that effect.
Half an hour later, I ask my mum.
'Can we have those peas, mummy? I think they're tasty.'
And so, after the next weekly shop, there is the tin of peas. My mother makes dinner - fish fingers and mash, and opens the tin, warms the peas, puts them on my plate, and brings it through to the dining table. And I tuck in, making sure I get a forkful of these juicy, juicy peas. I take a mouthful, and begin to chew.
They taste like fucking shit. I spit them out, which of course makes mum angry, and she stands over me to make sure I eat up every last one of the fucking peas I'd specifically badgered her for.
And that is why I never will trust advertising.

I told the wife this tale, and she completely ignored the moral of it.

Last night saw me smoke 6 cigs and imbibe one bottle of white generic at 11.5% abv, plus a glass and a half of something else white.

12th night

..yep, the night Herne the Hunter is supposed to ride the skies with his hounds, picking up any souls that happen to be straggling around late. Also, the fun and games of getting all the xmas decorations down, packed away, and shoved back in the attic for another year. And now the dead grey days of January begin.

Last night saw the consumption of six cigarettes, one pint of cider, and most of a bottle of chardonnay.

futile.

That's just how today feels; A dead beat of time, no matter how much I might actually do during it. I can't even work up the energy for a decent rant.
Sean grows apace -he's begun the process of vocalisation, separating sounds into compartments of meaning. I can distinguish between sounds that mean 'I'm hungry', or 'hold me', or 'I'm bored', and there are the other sounds he makes as he stares intensely at me, where he's trying to convey something else I haven't learnt to fathom yet. And it is all interspersed with smiles, broad, gummy cheeky smiles, making his whole face radiant.


Last night, I had 3 cigs, most of a bottle of a decent chilled chardonnay, and a small measure of raki.

Booze.

I enjoy a drink or five, as anyone who knows me may have noticed. While I'm not an alcoholic, I still tend to knock back far more than is good for me. On average, a bottle of wine a night. I did a few calculations, and worked out this:
75cl wine x 7 days = 525cl of wine per week;
525 x 13% abv (typical alcohol content of the wine I drink) = 6865, divided by 100, = 68.65 units of alcohol per week, nearly two and a half times the recommended weekly limit. In terms of a standard beer, that's 34.32 pints over a week, or 1784.64 pints of beer a year, or 223.08 gallons of beer a year.
That's a bit scary.
That's why I want to write down what I drink on this blog - a public testament, and a way to cut down on the booze.
It's time I showed some mercy to my liver.

edit: I smoked 2 cigs and drank a bottle of St. Emilion.

Well, I paid for the mixed bag of drinks I had last night, accompanied by a lot of snacking and some late night cheese - I've had about an hour of sleep, so I'm knackered. Sean was saintly - hardly a peep from him all night. This has not made teaching all that easy today, though fortunately I had only a handful to contend with.

no cigs today and I had three and a bit glasses of St. Emilion.

New Year

It's on beautiful mornings such as this was that one has to praise God - mostly for Ibuprofen, vitamin pills and an English Breakfast. I woke with one of those sneaky bastard hangovers: That's the ones where you wake up, think 'Ha! I got away with it!', leap out of bed full of the joys of waking up without a hangover after having had lashings and lashings of booze the previous night, then sudden crumple up in a grey ashen heap as a screaming bastard behind the eyes suddenly assails you and tries to rip your stomach out via your oesophagus. One of those, anyway.

Today, I smoked 0 cigarettes, and drank 1 large G&T, 2 double rums and coke, 1 double Jack Daniels, one and half glasses of Bordeaux, and two glasses of Spanish Cava. I am, should I be able to keep this up to an entry per day, going to record my consumption, with the aim of driving it down.

Bland.

I've just re-read the last post and realised how sodding anodyne it is. It's all somehows. Where's a bit of fucking passion, a bit more clear-eyed intent? Let me think...

New Year!

A happy New Year (and Eid)to one and all. I haven't, as you might just have noticed, been blogging to much recently; This is due to a combination of too much work, too much booze and too much baby. However, I intend to rectify this. Since it's the time for good intentions, I'm going to share a few of mine with you. One part of writing on this more is to keep abreast of what I'm doing with them.
1. Stop smoking - yeah, yeah, cliche and all, but I need to do it for me. I stopped before, I can do it again.
2. Cut down on the booze intake: I will try not to drink unless in company. Then I'll get ratarsed.
3. Write more - not just on this blog, but in general. I have some serious editing of work to do, then I will find a publisher.
4. Climb some more mountains - and make my wife and sons climb some too.
5. Make more money somehow - not so much an intention as a need. With only my income coming in at present, we're only just keeping our heads afloat, and I am UTTERLY sick of having to count every bloody penny.
Next is to work out each step involved in making these intentions reality.

And what about this past year? Two highlights - the birth of Sean and completing the 3 peaks. At work, successfully negotiating and organising the exams for the entire department, and posting the best exam results I've had yet.

knackered.

ye gods, it's tiring looking after a mini-munchkin. On top of which, I'm snowed under at work, preparing exams for the final week of term. And generally feeling rather crap. Also, having a bottle of wine on a tuesday night and not going to bed till 2 a.m. due to 'Amistad' being on telly didn't help. My brain feels like mush at the moment. However, I'm going to try and keep this updated as much as possible. But not right now. Bluh.