bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

I’m sure we all know how difficult it is to sell kitchenware when you have blood pouring from your mouth like an ebola victim. This was, however, my predicament last Sunday at Greenwich Market after I cut my tongue quite badly while licking soy sauce from a pair of scissors I had been using to eat sushi with. I was going to just carry on and not mention it, or say that yeah I do spit blood when I talk, it’s traditional, or I just like doing it, and see if anyone took offence. Or I dunno offering a light bulb and saying you really should try one of these, they’re delicious, or something.

It would in any case hardly have deterred my favourite visitor of the weekend, a bloke from Saudi Arabia who stops by for a natter whenever he is in the area. I like him a lot as he is a good giggle and always offers me peanuts, as if I am an elephant, chimpanzee, or other personable zoo animal. He was particularly taken with an apron of ours which has I Only Cook When I Drink on it – one of Tony’s designs – which he got for his wife. ‘The funny thing is’, he said between peals of delighted laughter, ‘that if she ever did actually drink she would be taken outside and stoned to death!’ which demonstrated the lighthearted side of Sharia Law which is always there, twinkling away beneath the surface.

[Hitting read more will reveal apparant heroin addiction and inattentive biographers]

It could be a delayed result of the scissor misfortune that I had a peculiar vomiting episode yesterday afternoon. This occured during an IM conversation with a friend who was telling me about this bloke she’s met and how wonderful everything now was, which gave me a golden opportunity to say, sorry you’ll have to excuse me, I think I’m going to be sick, and then actually was. I was sweating a lot too, so looked adorable. I subsequently looked up what sweating and vomiting could be symptomatic of, and learned that I am coming off heroin. Later, I looked up what fairly pretty chipper again meant, but it didn’t help with that much either, which surprised me as I thought it might say yeah this is because you’ve decided to go back onto heroin. (For the benefit of my old dear, who reads this from time to time, I am not on heroin.)

I spent that lovely post vomiting feeling-weak-but-relieved spell clearing out Twitter spam. I get quite a lot of this, including a recurring one offering me pictures of Britney Spears generously performing an act of oral unspeakability on a fan, which as it turned out, do not exist. I was quite disappointed, because however you may feel about this sort of thing there is no denying that it isn’t something you see everyday, and would therefore have been something to tell my future grandchildren, or use as an anecdote to break the ice at a job interview or on a date. I also decided to follow Tony Fletcher, the bloke who wrote the excellent Keith Moon biography I am currently reading, and tweeted him saying how enjoyable his book was. Despite only having fifty followers and tweeting all the time, he didn’t bother to reply, so fuck him*.

Photos – Top: View up Camden High Street taken by leaning out of a window in the Upper Market Hall at twenty eight minutes past ten on a quiet weekday morning last summer.

Middle: Martin pushing rainwater from the roof of our pitch, East Yard, last summer.

Bottom: The actual Camden Lock. I miss discussing the wildfowl at Little Venice with a lady jogger called Jenny here in the mornings while eating my breakfast doughnuts.

Facebook.

Twitter.

*(While putting the photards in I decided to do the decent thing and give the Fletcher a second chance by following and tweeting at him again. I hope he’s not just sitting at home in the Catskills saying yeah, I get that you like my book but could you also just fuck off. I bet he is. I wish I hadn’t bothered now.)