Walkies

          It's a bit like when you go on retreat to the Samye Ling. There's always a couple of hours in the day when you don't really know what to do with yourself. This is usually, for me, around three o clock or so. Anyway, I'm sometimes getting it here and this is because I am now on my own here, but mainly because I haven't settled into a routine yet. This will be my writing/training/meditating regime. The regime I'm on at the moment is the meditation/binge drinking/falling over regime.

          You can always go for a walk. This is the beautiful, wonderful city and it wasn't even raining. It is a bit odd to be just walking about on your own, but it is much better than all the open graves your deep, dear friends invite you to fall into.

           None of them are safe any more. The last debacle was the result of a total miscalculation as regards the drinking capacity of my old friend, Georgian Gill. She's drinking the big glasses of the white plonko collapso and I'm sticking to the pints of Guinness. No contest. Then you find yourself falling all over the pavement and it's still broad daylight.

          So that was Poisonous with the bottle of brandy, and Brian Wilson at three in the morning shouting and bawling about the creekit, and falling around in the road with Georgian Gill. What is the matter with the old people these days?? I must say that the common denominator here seems to be me, but I suspect they're practising for these debaucheries on your liver where no one can see them, like the evil bourgeois always did.

          Drinks cabinets were something they had on the telly, in America. Would you like a drink? That must mean something different there. Here, it means would you like to forgo the next day to misery for about five hours of drinking, and you say yes. Yummy even. So it's not a drink. Certainly not if they're offering you whisky. That might be an English thing.

          The first contemporary  who had a drinks cabinet was working as a prostitute at the time, but she didn't drink on her days off. It might be a bourgeois thing then, this drinks cabinet stuff. I told our friend with the drinks cabinet that I could not imagine having something like that since I would want to just drink it all. But that's what you did. You drank the carry out. Thank god I've given that evil poison up now, lordy, lordy.

          I saw a show called Ciara, a one woman show with Blythe Duff. It was quite something. I wanted to tell her how wonderful it was in the bar afterwards, but you're just going to get that all wrong. But it was. Fabuloso!! Brilliant writing. Brilliant, once in a lifetime acting, and it's one of the things that make you feel really great about the festival being here. I sat in the front row and closed my eyes for the first bit since it was a one woman show. A bit like radio. Had me gobsmacked by the end. It was something amazing really. I'd like to go and see it again, so I would!

          I'm going to a Japanese restaurant tomorrow. I went to one on Friday. That was the first Japanese restaurant I can remember being in. I had a slice of green pepper on a stick. There was a bit of half melted cheese stuck onto it. I understood all this. These Japanese people were having a laugh. Uncooked food and some greasy noodle crap. It's satire. Once I understood that it was satire I felt much better. Anyway, now restaurants are free so it really doesn't matter if they're taking the piss. As long as they don't try to poison you because they didn't realise that you weren't really one of the evil bourgeois, but just had to hang around with them since they were the only ones you'd met with any money.

          A restaurant I did like was the one attached to the mosque in Newington. Churches should feed people. Don't the Sikhs feed people? That might be the place to meet my binge drinking chummies. A safe place. Allah Akbar