Well, it’s been a while since I posted something as I once did in ye days of olde. I know I’ve posted some things recently but what I mean is posted a blog of an almost human nature where all I had to entertain you was a few thoughts and crackpot ideas; when I occasionally read some of the old stuff my eyes automatically activate their rose tinted filters where everything seemed so much nicer.

I’m not quite sure if that was partly because I was high on ecstasy at the time I wrote or just mellow on marijuana; contrary to popular belief I seldom posted whilst drunk as alcohol usually left me too incoherent of thought (yes, I know, not much difference there!) but it was quite nice to just let the random thoughts inside out for a while, you know, let them gambol over green fields to frolic for a few hours before they were herded back inside.

I was rummaging around on my hard drive and came across some files that I used to have on the site way back before it was a blog. Back then it was just a site where I posted links and downloads of things I found funny both as a means of sharing with friends but also as a means of remembering for myself, back then I spent a lot of my time off my face so it was good to be able to access everything from one place.

One of those things I found was this flash animation which is a humorous look at the word Fuck a.k.a. the F Word. Having just watched it again after several years it still makes me laugh out loud. Before you press play, make sure there are no young ears around as the narrator uses the F Word more than Gordon Ramsey, which is only to be expected when it’s the F Word that’s being discussed.

For those not familiar with the works of  Shel Silverstein who amongst other things was a children’s author, artist and song writer, the fact that Dr Hook and the Medicine Show had a hit with with his song I was stoned and I missed it will, until now, have been a mystery.  It may also have escaped your knowledge that the title of this piece is also the first line from said song.  Shel wrote quite a lot of Dr Hook’s songs and was also responsible for writing Johnny Cash’s hit A boy named Sue. You should explore Shel’s work more closely, you’ll be surprised what he got up to.

You may now be scratching your head and wondering, “OK, what’s your point?” so without boring you completely I’ll try and steer my thoughts into a general direction.  To clear things up, I should explain I have not been getting stoned, some might have thought that the lack of blog posts were as a result of me sitting around unable to reach the keyboard, in actual fact when I was getting stoned I was a much more prolific blogger as the thoughts just kept churning out.  Alas, this is not the excuse I have for the tumble weed that has been blowing around lately.

The reality is much more mundane; I’ve either been working, out being social after work or just kicking back once I get home.  Having bought a Kindle from Amazon I’m enjoying the novelty of reading again.  I stopped buying paperbacks in a bid to curtail my book shopping habit, deciding that I didn’t want to have hundreds of paperbacks that were falling apart to hand on to future generations so instead I started emptying my wallet in the general direction of The Folio Society.  The hardback books they produce are exquisite but sadly not convenient for lugging around on the bus or tube but with the kindle I can carry a veritable library in something not much bigger than a diary.

The problem with having an over active, yet lazy, imagination and self is the issue of starting lots of things and finishing none of them due to some almost unachievable attention to detail on how things should be.  OK, that’s quite a long winded way of saying I started lots of blog posts but they’ve all got stuck in Draft limbo because I had a great idea part-way through each blog and started a new blog and then…you can see where this is going can’t you?

So, the end result is I’ve deleted all the drafts as can’t seem to find as much enthusiasm to finish them off as I obviously had when I started them.  This means of course that some topics I really wanted to mention I won’t because I’ve forgotten them.  That’s not to say the topics were not worth remembering, it’s because I naturally have a bad memory I sometimes rely on my blog to remind myself of things I like!

One campaign that I should mention is one being run by Aviva, it’s their Tell Us Your Story campaign.  They are looking for people who’ve gone out of their way to help others, caring souls (their words not mine!) who have answered the needs of an individual, family or local community.  You nominate them online and could win a £1,000 prize for Story of the Week.   Stories are also voted for by the public, with the overall favourite receiving a specially tailored grand prize worth £10,000. And it doesn’t stop there!  For every nomination made Aviva will be donating £1 to the Street to School programme.

If you live in the UK you will be well aware of the recent controversy a legal high known as Mephedrone which has a rather bizarre street name of meow meow or M-Cat.  The reason it’s such a topical discussion is due to the untimely demise of 2 teenagers from Scunthorpe who had taken it.

The first I heard of the deaths was via a news broadcast on the radio on Tuesday evening but by Wednesday morning the media was in a frenzy on how this legal high was killing people, very much like they whipped up a storm when ecstasy first started doing the rounds.  One thing puzzled me and now slightly annoys me.  On Tuesday night the news reports I listened to all stated that the boys had taken mephedrone, gone out to a club and consumed copious quantities of alcohol and also take Methadone.

Now, you don’t need to be a genius to know that mixing any drug is never a good idea but those three? For crying out loud, methadone is a heroin substitute, hardly the sort of thing you would expect a couple of teenagers to want to take to finish off, quite literally, their Monday night rave?  However by Wednesday morning I found very little mention of the methadone use, just that the mephedrone was considered a contributing factor in their deaths and their parents are widely quoted as saying they only took the mephedrone because it was sold as a legal high… So why did these good boys take methadone, a controlled prescription drug?

Following the subject on the news I listened carefully to the words used by police relating to arrests made in connection with the deaths.  The suspects who had been arrested were arrested for supplying a controlled drug.  That’s not mephedrone which is widely available online (tho it is illegal to sell it for human consumption), methadone however IS a controlled drug.  Could it be that the methadone had more of an impact on the death of the boys?  If I were a betting man, which I am, I’d say it was more a contributing factor than the mephedrone.