3000 Days in The Lost

It's been years now; so many years. If I think of just how many and what I've missed I'll become sadder than the word was ever meant to mean. I miss my home, my city – the dust of where I'm from.

I never knew London was so much a part of me until I became estranged from her. Up until then I mostly only ever cursed the city. I saw a rottenness within her of which I wanted no part. Only once in 30years did she ever really seem beautiful, and that didn't last long before the river turned back to the brown sludge of before and the streets and parks reclaimed their former hopelessness only then with an added air of cruelty. Though how things change through longing. How you can miss even the most terrible lover if they are suddenly no longer there; how you can see only the beauty then, when the world revolves ugly with their loss. Now, I'm exiled from my great prison, outside trying to sneak a peek back in via films, news reports and You Tube clips. I'm becoming crazy with it. Not insane crazy; rather profoundly sad nostalgic crazy. My heart is turning black, like a flower rooted in the wrong soil, I'm rotting from the inside out.

It started innocently enough, looking at Google maps and visiting the areas where I used to live and had grown up. I'd take virtual walks around, zoom into certain windows in the hope of catching a glimpse of someone I knew or a familiar ornament I had once touched. I enjoyed those virtual strolls, but they left me desperate and profoundly miserable. Finally I had to stop. It was too hard visiting those places, being almost able to suck in the diesel fumes and yet aware that not even ten metres from my door was the modern, driverless, Lyon metro system, and then thousands of miles of alien and foreign land. I could walk for months, years, and still never get to the place I needed to be. That's when I started to create something of a fantasy world within my apartment – setting up an atmosphere designed to fool myself into believing I was back home.

Mostly I do this with audio and visual tricks. I'll go online and download an entire day of British television programmes, loosely following the daily schedule. I'll set them up on an automatic playlist and run them through my TV. Anything laying around the apartment obviously French I arrange out of sight. The round two-pinned electrical plugs and sockets are an instant giveaway and so I take great care to cover them. Cigarettes are removed from the packet and left loose in the ashtray. On my bed I'll litter about a selection of old, ash filled books – always the ones which travelled with me from London and have the Pound sign on the back. With the scene all set I'll swallow a triple dose of methadone and lay myself down. Sleep is crucial. Nothing works without sleep. And it need not be long. London is a place you have to wake up to. And it's on waking, to Kilroy Silk's morning call to prayer, that the illusion really begins, and for a moment I feel that it's only six inches of brick wall which separates me from home.

Sedated, subdued, something, I'll lay on my bed and let the morning and afternoon move across the sky, distant sounds filtering in like those dull and unremarkable afternoons of the past. I'll smoke, get a coffee, and lay back down leafing through yesterday’s paper, circling TV programs to watch -- which is just about as surreal as it gets and probably as far away from sanity as I've ever been at any stage in my life. Sometimes I'll pause inbetween what I'm doing to watch a piece of the crap on the box: watch some fat guy break down and admit he's addicted to whores, or learn that cane toads in Australia are regarded as amphibious rats and some farmers blow their bellies out with shotguns. Once again the hours of my day are defined by the familiar jingles of TV programmes, buzzers going off, and comfortable voices drifting around the room and telling me to tune back in tomorrow. And I'd love to; and I will; and I'd really fucking love to.

In the evening, between Cash in the Attic and Eastenders, I phone mum. As we speak I imagine I'm just the other side of town.

“Is that the TV playing in the background?” she'll always ask.

“Yeah,” I'll reply, though I don't tell her that the news she can hear is from 1998 and Frank Sinatra has just died. For the remainder of the evening I'll lounge around, France blocked out in every direction, conjuring up images of what it must be like outside in my imaginary London. I think of the dusk and how the evenings fall with a distant tincture of tragedy this time of year; of how the street lights must just be flickering on and how the last of the days news is being scavenged from the vendors outside the stations or picked like strips of flesh from the upturned milk crates on the newsagents' floors. I imagine lit up buses with rain speckled windows, pulling out of their stops and rejoining the evening traffic, smoke drifting out the back vents as they crawl slowly into nowhere. I toy with the idea of hooding up and going out – maybe to score, or running down to the chippy to pick up a Jamaican Pattie and a Galaxy Caramel. I imagine the grime of High Street, the pavement a slippery mush of dead leaves, sodden cardboard and tramped rotten fruit. I'll let my disembodied consciousness, my Minds-Eye-Googlemap-Street-View, wander down dark back-streets that once led home. It's eerily quiet. Life is confined behind brick walls and Chubb-locked doors. The only hint of the problems housed inside is the occasional hallway light and a glimpse of the top few stairs. The church is an ominous dark projection parked on the corner; I hurry by. I can see everything. As I lay in bed alone, 560 miles from home, not a soul for a friend, not a number to phone, my head a time capsule full of my past. – I close my eyes and imagine it all.

I want to go home. I miss home. I'm sick from longing. Not always but it's always there. The days television schedule has run through and I'm sane and back in France. I don't want to die here. I want to die in the place that killed me. I want my history. The whole disgusting beautiful ugly abused and rotten lot of it. I want the London rain. I want the summer evening walks along the mansions by the river. I want my memories. I want my old invisible footsteps. I want to revisit the places where mum tried to kill herself or where we found her shacked up and bruised with her latest no-good fuck. I want to pass the registry office where I got married. I want to pass my fathers old house and pretend he's still inside mulling over past hustles and planning new ones. I want to read the local papers. England: I WANT YOUR JUNK MAIL! I want to know what deals the pizza place is offering. I want to have the numbers of all the local mini-cabs firms in a tin box by the telephone. I want to understand every word and be involved in social activity again, even if it's only being the local junkie. In France I'm not even that. Here I'm just a silent shape; a blank canvass of human form that comes and goes and sometimes buys a kebab and checks the mail. I am unexpressed. No one knows me. Here I have to offer away all my cigarettes to express something that would normally be free in words. I must hug and kiss tramps to show my politics. I have to activate 'fake call' on my phone, and stand talking to a dead line for five minutes so as people can see my natural body movements and expressions. Really, it's the only way. “No, Georges Bataille wrote that,” I'll say. “Yes, GEORGE BATAILLE!” And now they know I enjoy literature, because I cannot tell them in another way. And clothes, clothes suddenly become important. TOO important. They help to speak my words, a wealth of words no-one would ever listen to anyway, but hears never-the-less – hears and forms an intuitive picture of who you are. I have to find other ways to be discovered here, desperate ways to bring myself out of The Lost. France, listen to me: I'M SAD AND I'M DOWN AND I'M LONELY... NOT EVEN THE DOGS UNDERSTAND ME! Your cafés are killing me, and it's not the passive smoke (that's been banned!) I can't even kill myself comfortably in public any more. You're doing your best to drive me out, and I WANT to go, I NEED to go, but I CAN'T go. France, I am on my knees...

And that's how it goes. Some days are not as bad as others and some weeks pass by more sedated than the last. Apart from maybe the first few days of summer where light tranquil winds waft the smell of the river and life over town, there is no beauty here. It's all cafés and bars and cigarettes, square ordinary people with 20/20 vision wearing glasses and lounging around with intellectual haircuts. These days of love and life are nothing more than a cinematic fantasy. Even the guy with the harmonica is a fraud, and the scandalous news is he's not even French but Romanian!. The Bohemians are bulimic... vomiting up their excess culture just to 'get it out'. Bulimia in Bohemia – a sophisticated Hollywood or a depressed heroin ravaged Bollywood, I don't know. Oh France! Oh France! Shoot me in the head and Vive La France... Just send my body home.

La Fin.


yas said...

just read this before off to the pub. I'm gonna raise my suffolk cider to you.

like you've said before, you know you'd miss it as soon as your back here!

I have to say though, with the weather getting nicer, it did make me smile just waking up here and i usually hate it and want to get out!

all my love x

Anonymous said...

So beautiful and so desperate. There is nothing quite as consuming and maddening as the desire for home when return is not possible or probable. I'm sorry for your hardship-but luckily for your readers, your sense of confinement and loss has helped you arrange some truly gorgeous words and mental pictures.

Best as always-

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey yas, I think it's more about not having the choice. Staying away because you want to and staying away because you have to are very different things. So I think I miss home so much because I'm kinda exiled. But it's hard. It'shard to be exiled while your parents get ill and die and your history is slowly being closed down while you receive the news via text messages.

"Johnnys dead!Did you here?"


Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey Chef, again not the post I intended but a spontaneous thing which wasn't planned. I get sad and down, but not in a depressed way. The post focusses on those times but it's mostly not like that, although there's a shade of thought of home every day. In truth, I wouldn't swap anything for the words I've been writingovr the last couple of years... and I know that in London I would never be well enough to write them and probably they wouldn't feel urgent enough to be written with any passion or haste. There's a lot of longing in what I write... it's a recurrent theme and so that's the gain...for me, as well as those who enjoy the words.

Hope you're well Chef... Love & Thoughts as Ever, Shane. XXX

bugerlugs63 said...

I didn't know you weren't there out of choice. I've not read all your past posts yet.
It made me smile as I was up until 3am the other night "Google-Satelite-walking" through le vieux Nice . . . So real. Out through the arches onto the Promenade des Anglais, as near to the beach as it would allow. Then up and down the narrow medieval streets of the village where I lived. I'd see someone from behind who I thought I recognised, I'd catch them up, overtake and look back . . . To find them gone. Looking to see who was sat outside "Le bar des sports" . . . It was early morning and I could smell the heat, the coffee and cigarettes. Eh bien.
I used to love the anonimity of living in foreign cities with no friends or family . . . But as you say it's about having the choice. A desperation kicks in when we're forced to go without a place, a person . . . a substance.
Beautiful words and images as always . . . I get right excited when I see you've posted. I know, I live a quiet life.
Much love Buggerlugs

Big Mark 243 said...

I honestly think you need to write a book... short novel will do... I think that I actually experienced this with you, lurking around in the shadows of your apartment...

Good luck, dear sir...

dirtycowgirl said...

Homesickness is horrible.

I spent a month in India over xmas/new year and as much as I loved it, by the time I left I wanted to come home. It must be so hard to not have the choice, especially when it is so close. Just a short trip on the ferry and you'd be here. . .

I love the idea of you making your place as English as you can though, except nowadays Jeremy Kyle has replaced Kilroy. And believe me you are NOT missing anything by not seeing that show.

How about I send you a bar of cadbury dairy milk, some PG tips and all the junk mail I get ?

Anonymous said...

You're writings are a piece of shit you sad,lonely junky waste of space. i hope you o.d an die. you're mother was a whore. i hope she dies too an you suffer. you make me sick.

Anonymous said...

You're writings are earnest, striking and beautiful. I hope you find happiness and mend your broken heart and fish your little soul out of that mucky beautiful river Thames. I am a Whore; I work my ass off and I'm damn good at it. I hope you live and you die content. Your writing makes me cry, love and inherently wet.
-anonymous. (but you have a feeling who this might be)

Stacy said...

absolutely exquisite...thank you! xxx

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey Bugs,

It's a kind of self-exile, I suppose... I can go back only I'm not so sure I'll get such a nice welcome passing through airport security. LOL

It's all life, Bugs... never anything more serious than that.

Being away from home, especially in a foreign country (for a long period) becomes something more than home sickness... it becomes a loss of oneself. Because in our own country we understand every word, and every action and all street slang and mannerisms. Just from someone's way of talking, combined with clothes, facial expression we inherently understand who that person may be. And we all use these things, to understand fully our enviroment and to fully express ourselves and let the world and our neighbours know who we are. Here, I begin to understand others, but my language and choice of words is solely decided upon to be understood as clearly as possible... not to express who I am. I use no street slang here and as I've lived mostly alone my french is still not at a level where I can really explain or speak about complex things... my interests... be ME in the place I live. I'm an 'Anglais' here, because hat is all they can see... that is all I can show with my heavily accented survival-guide french. Of course, people who get a little bit closer, or who are unfortunate enough to ever be invited over, they start to see someone else...but even thats limited as it's then based solely on what I surround myself with. This loss of Self is something that happens over years, living in a place where you've no memories and no history, no old schools or secret places from youth. It's complicated. It's not home sickness... it's isolation, frustration. I really begin to understand those historic wails from slave days where the people sang for home... for Africa. I feel the same.


Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey Big Mark, I've got enough material for a book and I've also an almost finished book and two others in the work. The problem is I've almost totally decided I will not follow the herd and send off manuscripts and synopsis and pitch my writing to any publisher that will have me. I've decided I'll just do nothing and wait and let them come to me.We've had some interest already and some exciting things have happened, but unfortunately they've just not finally worked out. But something will come along, or I'll pop off... there's two ways this could end... X

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey DCG,

Yeah Kilroy Silk was disgraced and shown up as a fascist even before I left and I was unlucky enough to be around for the beginnings of Kyles nonsense and watch him send lifelong addicts of to behind-the-scenes rehab and 20 minutes later they'd return cured! But that's half the insanity of the TV schedules I put together, the news is from 1998, the docs from 1976, Eastenders from christmas 2009, chat shows from whenever... it's a time capule of stuff,but stuiff that reminds ME of England then, not of England now.

Hope you're well... Love and Thoughts, Shane. XXX

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey Anonymous (who I make sick)

To know my mother's a whore you must have read pretty thoroughly my words, and to say 'writings' mean you've read and refer to other pieces... so thanks for expending your vomit on me and coming back for more.

I will suffer if my mother dies, and I'm proud of it. And in that pride and that bind of loyalty I know I have something you'll never be able to understand or hold a flame to. By the sounds of it you don't need me to make you sick, life and bitterness have done a pretty good job... but if I do, I'm glad of it...

You take care and while I'm suffering I'll take comfort that at least I'm not You. X

ladybird said...

beautiful,i spent 7 yrs exiled in europe, i understand.x

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Anonymous (who I make wet)

Yeah, for me 'whore' isn't an insult... some of the greatest, most intelligent and influential women that have passed through my life have been whores. I used to help whores put there business cards in phone boxes then wait back at theirs preparing the crack pipes and hanging on their return. They never were ever any longer than an hour...You can only respect that.

I make you inherently wet! God, You can't say things like that and remain anonymous... not even your panties in the post! You'll have to give me a little clue.. even a cryptic one... X

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Thanks Stacy... It wasn't too bad that one. The last three paragraphs are some of the nicest stuff I've written here, though I'm not totally happy with the opening. XXX

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey Ladybird, seven years in exile... sounds like a bad marriage. XXX

My bad marriage is in a small poem here:

Fuck it... I DO!


darren said...

hi shane, i think you are being way too harsh on yourself if you're not happy with the start of this piece, other writers would kill to be able to write like that. i.e

"I'll become sadder than the word was ever meant to mean"

"how you can see only the beauty then, when the world revolves ugly with their loss"

"like a flower rooted in the wrong soil, I'm rotting from the inside out."

i'll stop there but could go on. most writers don't have one memorable phrase in an entire book but you seem to reel them off without even trying (or realising). i agree the back three sections are as another commentator says 'exquisite' but honestly, i was hypnotized from the start.

- Daz

JoeM said...

This was great, elegiac. A great visual picture - you could do a little one act play based on this, beginning with waking in the Fake English Room, through the false TV, Fake Britannia - ending with the reveal that you're actually in Another Country.

So many great lines.

Sedated, subdued, something

You should do a song around that – could be your Bewitched bothered and bewildered.

I want to die in the place that killed me.

I can imagine Morrissey howling that.

Do you know what the jail term (if any) there would be if you were stopped at customs?

Or is the self-exile more about being afraid of getting on heroin full time – and not getting off?

I think you could easily do Memoirs or Waiting for John as an ebook or Print On Demand. Then send them out to publishers and get them bidding!

karl said...

Hi Shane,
I got stuck in France for 3-4 weeks just outside of a town called Dax. 5 of us in transit van looking for work, we'd just spent 3months in Holland staying at Cloggy's campsite. We ended up staying with French Gypsies on a site next to a railway track, the night trains used to vibrate us awake. All I could think about was being back home in Bristol, though looking back it wasn't so bad, the gypsies looked after us quite well.
I'll never forget a peice of graffiti we used to see on the way into town 'DAX IS DEAD' in bright red letters.
It's not where you are that counts, it's where you're AT !
Great post... Karl

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey darren,

I think it's part of my job to be a little hard and critical on myself, and as I've kinda become more accomplished it's more in registering what i don't feel I do too well which helps me. Those things are private, but just little aspects of the text which I feel don't work or fflow well. Though what I often find is that some little criticisms I have of my writing cannot be undone without a complete overhaul of my style and writing from a completely new thought structure (which of course isn't feasible). I also use the criticisms to create little exercises, often stylistic, to work on improving them.

All of that is in contrast to when I was just beginning to write and only saw the poetry and read right past the terrible, fragmented or corny sentences without even seeing them. It was actually my friend above Mr Joe M who was responsible for opening my eyes to what was inbetween the sections of poetry and allowing me to read my own words with different eyes. It was a revelation and I think my writing has never stopped improving from that point.

Anyway, enough of all that bollocks... and thanks for your continued passion and support,Shane.X

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey Joe...

Funny you mention songs as I've been writing a new batch over these past few months and must finish them and get them recorded and put on here. You'll see many lines from these texts turn up in songs, and vice versa. I'm forever stealing and rehashing my own stuff and even still nick lines from WFJ and work them into posts here.

I agree about the ebook thing though not sure I'll ever be arased to do it. What I will definitely do though is have a limited number of WFJ books, Memoires and Poetry books printed up and give them away to the long term readers and sell the rest at cost price on the site. I'm very wary about these ebooks and ISBN's and where the writer stands legally if the book was discovered and picked upby a big publisher. So I'll have mine printed privately and the kind not officially acknowledged (no ISBN). I can even leave them around some bookstores and libraries.

For the other part of your comment i'll answer via mail and explain everything within...

All My Thoughts, Shane. X

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey ya Karl... Hope you're doing well, man?

I envy you only being stuck for 5 weeks, but I also know french gypsies and five weeks with them would be something many would never recover from. My run ins with the french gitons has not really led to me thinking much of them. Most now are gypsies by blood but live in conventional housing and every one I've met up until now has been on the far right, violent and retarded. My friends girlfriend is from gypsy stock. She was 25 when they met and the first encounter he had with her family was when the father and two brothers kicked his door in and gave him a beating for touching their kin. After that it was a year of threats to break his legs and smash his car up. It seemed it was his initiation into the family as after he stood firm they gradually came to accept him and now don't threaten to disable him anymore and even have him around for dinner now. But he'll never be one of the family, and just because of the threat they impose in the background the relationship with his girl is doomed and unhealthy. Which is a nightmare as she is honestly one of the most ignorant, vulgar, spiteful little cunts I've ever seen. She is so stupid she is ugly. It makes me shiver even writing of her.



Anonymous said...

I love London!

Actually I've thought of you on the rare occassion I've bought fish and chips and wondered what kind of food you crave from old blighty! Sunday Roasts? Yorkshire puds? Steak pies? Baked beans? Builder's Tea?

You said you used to read the Guardian. I love their new advert on the telly combining journalism and the story of the 3 little pigs:

See below:


Gotta dash, too much shite'n'sugarolee to deal with right now.


Anonymous said...

Hello Shane, How Are you?
I must say this is one of those texts so easy to read, so fluid, so poetical. Poetical for the one who reads it, not for the onw who wrote, I'm sure...but such a beautiful piece of writing :)
As usual, I must ask you something: why can u get out of france and get back to london? Fear of what u might find there? lack of money? ...? What is it? and also, as usual I say: If u don't want to tell me, it's okay ;)

what new in your life?
I must share this: in a year or two I plan to move out of my country (PT). London maybe, or Rio de Janeiro. Ireland seems a good place to leave...or maybe it's just me how thinks this way hahahah! I don't know.
Anyway, Hope one day u find peace...in or out of france. It doesn't matter as long as u find happiness and peace on what u do and with who u are!

kiss kiss
V - Portugal

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

hey ya K,

You know I don't really miss any english food and stopped even trying to locate sausages and bacon years ago. You'll not quite believe you cannot get bacon in france, and the equivalent of an english banger just doesn't exist. Sausages here are very meaty, kinda like the difference between coarse and smooth paté (the english banger being smooth, of course). Mostly in England I ate indian or jamaican food... or if cooking at home pasta dishes like I have here.

It's more memories I crave, brick walls and common weeds... the things you know exist behind something else without even having to look. In england I know what the space underneath the dustbins smell like, but here it's different and I never rolled around in that space as a child or crawled through the undergrowth discovering the insects and caterpillars. It's things like that I.. a total awareness of what makes up the enviroment. Those places where you grazed your knee or took a beating, or crawled under cars to retrieve your ball. Those spaces are alien to me here... my memory is blank and I know nothing of them. And if people think brick work and cement are the same the world over, they're not... and certainly the dirt and grime and age which clings to that brickwork is very different because that blackness is modern history and living. It's weird things I miss... but things which conjure up images and feelings and smells.

I kinda read the Guardian not because I ever thought it was a great paper but because it was the best of a rotten bunch and the closest to my own politics and views. But it's still a very central read, and I mostly only ever read the opinions anyway.... and the art and culture pull-outs. But so often when the Guardian could have done something great, when it really mattered, they kinda towed the line and hid any real militancy in the comment/opinion section (where of course it's mostly lost). That paper needs more balls. For news I read the Morning Star, but it wasn't easy to get a copy and came with its own problems. And for TITS and ARSEHOLES I looked at The Sun!

OMG.. I'm starting to remember... I don't miss that fucking place at all!!! Hahaha X

eyelick said...

Hm, a mean comment - thought you wouldn't get any of those these days, being a reputable writer, plus - being male really seems to help that in regards to admittedly using heroin. "Boys will be boys" or something equally idiotic. Could call me sexist but really, looking at male vs female heroin user's blogs - which one gets more nasty anonymous comments?

Kind of strange how it turns out - moving somewhere & it's not the ideal your own mind held (think you posted before about how you used to watch French films in London.) Guess for me, moving at the exact right time from one place to another means feeling no real connection to any of them. Maybe that's just me, never even felt connected to own family. Although here, being surrounded by other transplants, who don't plan on being here forever - it seems appropriate.

So, you're living in a time capsule! That sounds like a fabulous environment, pick a time that you most long for, and immerse yourself in it. Almost seems like a good piece of advice to give to people.

Sailor said...


London misses you too i'm sure. Whenever i return after any absense it seems to try even harder than usual to be as charming, weird, horrifying and beautiful as i remembered. I've always said it's an abusive lover though. Kicks the shit out of you on your way out then draws you into it's arms when you crawl back, enchanted again.

S xx

Anonymous said...

Hey, Why did you take post about your (step)Dad down? I did have trouble connecting via your site cos it was blocked at work so had to do a search and get it via your sister's site. I apologise in advance if that may have upset anyone, I just wanted to get the article linked up on twitter (which I hardly use) and facebook (use a tiny bit more) and linkedin (which I use most cos it's most relevant to my career (the only thing worth living for at the moment).

I do hope you get some answers regarding the negligence of your dad. Back problems can also indicate kidney/renal problems so it's ridiculous they didn't run some basic tests eg. urine, scans etc. Even more so at his age.

I'm gonna go now. I've just finished a short design contract but caught the throat infection that was doing the rounds at that job. It happened with the job before that and then it was flu. Story of my life. Even my friends have been shocked at the amount of bad luck I get, seems if something can go wrong it will except with me it seems even if it can't go wrong it somehow does.

Anyway, early night for me. Feel lousy. Have to get up early and sort business with my flat (that I have a mortgage on but it's rented cos I don't have a full-time job to pay the mortgage). The bathroom ceiling is caving in with water. Bulge is 10cm from ceiling height! and there's water dripping near electricals! I have share of freehold with Guinness Trust (leashold) so been paying them ground rent that's meant to cover building insurance and leak is from outside of the building from rusting pipes (they've only been tightening the screws for last 30 odd years rather than replace the pipe and resolve the problem altogether). Anyway, for last 3 weeks been calling them and emailing, keep getting promised contractor to inspect but everyone seems to be on holiday. So going to their offices tomorrow morning, feeling shite but hopefully anger will fuel me enough to make a stand (I can be like that even if on deathbed - tho once it's done I'll probably collapse).

It was horrible going back there a few weeks ago to inspect the damage. Apart from the damage caused by the leak, the place looked tatty. Not that I'm super clean or anything, I'm terrible for gathering clutter. But things like my bedroom which I designed as a lovely aubergine tinted boudouir with a high leather headboard, fluffy deep purple carpets - well now it looks like a student dorm room. Heartbreaking. Can't help it, even as a renter, I can't see the place I live as just somewhere to sleep. I like to nest, for years I've invested in things for it like cow-hide rugs, luxury bedding, rugs that feel lovely when you run your toes through them. Little touches like that. I've also amassed a collection of Living etc magazines and Elle decoration. I ought to get rid of them now and stop buying things for a place I'll never have. All it's meant is I have 3 sheds full of home stuff, cookware; all expensive. Better if I keep the money aside until I do find somewhere to settle. I'm seriously wishing I bought a caravan now though, the way I'm living.

Anyway, enough whinging for tonight. I hope you're ok. I did what I could for your dad but now you've taken down that post, I don't have the email of the person you said the more 'militant' of us could contact. I was going to do it after researching his condition (they don't call me Chemical Kelly for nothing!).

Lots of love and take care

Gina said...

Fantastic post Shane, although I've come to expect nothing less.
How are you keeping, not heard from you in ages.
Take care.
Gina. X

wishbone said...

I found your blog accidentally just thru random googling. And I'm hooked. Although I sometimes must google to get the English vernacular ...what the f is a bin bag???...poor American that I am. You write so beautifully and with such grace....I don't have the words to compliment you with. Suffice to say, you cheered an ugly, air conditioned Las Vegas afternoon. For that I thank you.

Memoirs of a Heroinhead said...

Hey Wishbone,

a bin bag is a trash bag... garbage bag... refuse sack, etc. Here's a picture just for you... X

Bin Bag for Americans