I bought them two weeks ago and I’m frankly appalled: the huge tub is half gone. Maybe I should lock my drawer at work? Or maybe I should seek professional help for an addiction which I cannot admit to.

In this society where people gamble habitually, spend all of their money on drugs to shoot themselves into oblivion and smoke until their fingers turn brown, I’m not sure that I could ever bear the public shame of being exposed as an addict. That is why I turn to you, my faithful Blog. My one true friend in adversity.

No one who slipped down this dark and murky path ever came to anything other than a sticky end. And quite frankly that thought scares me. I lie awake at night, shivering in a cold sweat, thinking about what happened to poor Jack getting his brains beaten out of him by the Beanstalk giant while in search of his next fix.

Several weeks ago, I remember when I first bit into one of those juicy beans I was catapulted hapilly back to my childhood by the flavour of ripe pears and remember thinking – “These are brilliant!”

But that’s how everyone starts. Before you know it, you’ve moved onto the hard stuff. Spicy cinnamon and cappuccino, down and down. Before you know it, you’ve gone too far….

The people who make these things are sick.

It’s not easy to rile me. I’m one of the nicest people I know.

For someone to make me feel angry, stressed or annoyed - and feeling powerless and frustrated into the bargain – takes something special.

Although this is a quasi-private space where I should feel free to let off steam should I so choose, I also realise that it is a public forum. Experience has taught me to keep my opinions to myself, sometimes.

Suffice to say that I’ve made a decision: I’m moving house.

When you live as a paying lodger with someone, as a friend, it can be difficult. If your name isn’t down on any tenancy agreement then you’re on dodgy ground as it is. But when your friend’s circumstances change, and they want you to move out so that they can have the room you’re in for something else, you don’t have a leg to stand on.

When people get into relationships, they change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for worse. But change they do. They are no longer their own person and their priorities will be their own. The friend I now live with is a world apart from the person I met years ago. His priorities are understandably with his fiancee and his new business. And when the whip is cracked, he knows to fall in line.

At present, I work very long days and study late into the night. My weekends are taken up with my sound engineering, leaving me precious little time to do the other things I enjoy, like parkour or socialising. This has been tolerable for as long as I’ve had my own pleasant and private space at home into which I can retreat. This space has now become claustrophobic and little more than four walls between which I can sometimes sleep.

Enough. No more! I’ve been round this loop too many times to allow it to happen again.

I may have to be even tighter with my money but fuck me if I’m gonna live in another battlefield at the mercy of someone else’s whims. I’m going to get my own place, however much it costs. And I’m going to live there. And I don’t just mean dwell: it’s gonna be my place with my stamp on it. My pictures on the wall where I want them, not creeping around trying not to annoy people who decide to go to bed early. Not tripping over someone else’s junk or putting up with loud domestics. Not having to pick dirty pans out of the sink to cook or battling to keep my food from being eaten. I no longer have time to stress over petty politics and snide remarks.

I am starting to feel a bit more like my old self once more. Rather than being buffeted around in someone else’s washing-machine of a life, I feel like I’m taking control again.

Life’s going to get more stressful before it gets easier, but I’m looking it square in the face, holding out my upraised, flat palm like good old Bruce, and beckoning to it. 

Bring it on…. )

An extract from the BBC’s News Website (Tue 09 Oct 07):

“Plans to slaughter and dispose of a quarter of a million lambs caught up in the foot-and-mouth crisis have been announced by the Scottish Government.  

“Light lambs are usually roasted whole in Europe and there is little demand in the UK. Some carcasses will be used for BIODIESEL and the remainder will be incinerated.”

I always assumed that biodiesel would be made from rape-seed oil, used chip-fat and other ‘renewable’ sources. Never in my wildest imagination did I think that those little white bleating bundles of fluff would be used to power Manchester’s unreliable bus fleets.

How will they get the little hooves to fit in through those narrow fuel hoses? Come on – has someone really given this some thought?!