My head hit the pillow like Steinway & Sons on a baked alaska last night. I have been starved of late afternoon naps that in return disrupt my sleep paterns and result in really late nights. Those afternoon sleeps permeated by endorphins and pungent in lucidity, where one skates the thin ice between everywhere and nowhere - the journey to happiness, the ultimate Zen.

Realities fork and thread, portal through time and space, skimming consciousness and mixing it with color - the most fragile and brittle state of existence that is too easily disturbed. Once disturbed, as we all know, it cannot be replicated.

I was looking through a filter of grease, my vision pasted over by a film of vaseline. I was prepared to get up and get ready to leave the house. I stared at the red fuzz that slowly became the LED display of my alarm clock it read 02:30 - christ, I still had 4.5 hours of pure happiness left. A real gift from the universe.

It's Thursday, already - I started the week feeling as though I had been put a day back, as though an eighth day had been added to the week, to the working week. With Friday looming, I almost feel I have won back the day I lost to daylight saving. Jonathan and Tara came over for dinner last night - it wasn't planned so nothing lavish ended up on the table. In my retirement from the crazy world that is cheffing, and combined with being a good batchelor - I have perfected the 'one-pot-wonder'. One-pot-wonder is comprised of the most reliable base, it's a chunky tomato/chilli number with napoli sausages, potatoes and chickpeas. Last night I substituted the Napoli sausages for chicken livers. A nice big bowl of one-pot-wonder and some crispy ciabatta to soak up the juices cannot be easily beaten in the comfort food department.

A gorging of truffles and the finest chocolates known to man followed. Phil brough back the most amazing chocolates from Belgium. I love delicious things!

It's strange to think that people eat purely for fuel - the shit some, most people eat is distressing. I am not necessarily talking about rubbish or junk food - I have a sister who more or less survives on pasta rice and cucumber. This could easily be mistaken for 'clean', 'simple' food - it's neither, it is bland schluck. Having grown up in South Africa, where there is no food culture at all (there is, since we have all the Greeks, Portuguese and Italians), I feel cheated - there was until recently a serious lack in the ingredients market. I don't think many South Africans know what a shallot is, or have any idea of seasonal ingredients, or fresh ingredients. Even on the coast, where South Africa's oceans are being pillaged of all fish for markets other than South Africa's, one would expect a fresh fish culture, still to this day it is substandard, underdeveloped and just as good as non-existent. For most South Africans, the closest they get to eating fish, is in the form of a fish finger which consists of nothing more than fish bone-meal and the rest of the shit that got scraped off the floor of the monger's.

Summer is here. I am wearing a short-sleaved shirt, sans jacket and it feels good. On Saturday however I got a taste of what London is going to be like in summer - grimey, blackened and disgustingly hot. Winter will be sorely missed, but I shall endeavour to enjoy summer anyway. I bought new sunglasses on Friday, they are big, blind-person's welding glasses. Nothing can get in, only my sight can get out - I feel supremely invisible and comfortable behind my blind-person's sunglasses, I can oggle and stare, walk around in public admiring healthy breasts without any shame.

I cleaned the flat yesterday. That involves taking the recycling downstairs, that means moving bottle city. I had two boxes of bottles to take down. A ceremonious wake for the last week's beverage bonanaza. I deposited my two cardboard caskets, piled high and overloaded just inside the front door of the building. I was sifting through the post on the mantle when the lady from downstairs came in, she startled me and I fell backwards and stumbled over my own two boxes of bottles. I managed a confused 'Hi there' - but she took one scathing look at me and made off as quickly as possible, leaving me to pull myself up from the small mountain of bottles I had fallen over in the first place.

Dollar's Mickey Mouse balloon has been removed, and received an appropriate burial, namely the rubbish bin - after I had sucked out the remaining helium for my David Beckham impression.

Phil came back from his weekend in Brussels. The flat was showered with fitting gifts of proper Leffe beer goblets, the finest truffles and chocolates I can remember eating, maybe ever, and beers that we have not been able to find in the UK (very few people actually know what a real box of chocolates is like - the world has been misinformed by oversized vegetable fat and boiled hoof dispensing corporations like Cadburies, sadly we think of Quality Streets as a box of chocolates)

Saturday morning, well, afternoon if you want to take it literally. A satisfying late sleep and a breakfast of bacon and eggs smothered in brown sauce brings me to my senses. It's a fine day outside, for once the good people at the weather service got it right - t-shirt weather is not far off.

I need to go and do some shopping, for cables and a new headset. The cables are for my speakers and the headset, well, so that I can indulge in VoIP conversations to South Africa, undermining Telkom's attempt at regulating and having ownership of of any bandwidth used to transport VoIP data. It's such a fine day I'm not sure I could be bothered. I opened the skylight, in summer it acts as a pressure valve - this being the loft aparment means that we take all the heat. I'm considering constructing an alter on the roof where we can bring sacrificial offerings of dead animals to rooftop BBQ festivities. Last summer we bought a case of diposable BBQs, they do the job well enough and they rather suit the urban rooftop outdoor experience. Jonathan has given us his garden furniture, which will of course find its way to the roof. We'll have to chain the furniture down and make sure locals aren't killed by falling plastic chairs. I have a burning desire to hurl things off the roof, big things like the TV, or the oven. We have more or less convinced ourselves that trying to drive golf balls from the rooftop into the opposing commons is not at all perilous for anyone, and should in fact be considered an essencial summer night activity.

It's Friday, the sun is out and they say we'll have a fine weekend with the temperature being somewhere round the 20 mark. I have just teased a crusty brown bacon roll down my throat, and a good strong coffee makes me feel complete. It's all gone mildly pear-shaped here - the systems are misbehaving, they have a mind of their own, and with my newly adopted Seasonal Affectedness Disorder, which, according to the experts only descends upon us in the winter months (I prefer winter, so as much as I enjoy the sun, I dread a summer heatwave), I lack the energy to delve deep inside the workings of all the scripts and schedules, pieces of code and hundreds of threads of dependencies to find the problem. These machines have a mind of their own - as the acronym PFM (as pertaining to Microsoft Products that often fail to reproduce a consistent error) - Pure Fucking Magic; problems that solve themselves, as if created by the same entity in the first place.

Specialist Pugilists was if anything entertaining. It was live, minimal, low budget, surface fringe that was short and fast with no message, which was comforting - feeling perplexed after so-called cultural events often disturbs me when I lean towards 'I'm not the only one who that was crap, am I?'

The weekend is upon us.

I am off to see a production at the the Riverside Studios this evening called Pugilist Specialist. I'll report on it later.

In today's Metro I found not only useless news such as 'Celebrating 30 years of streaking' (as only the english can do) and news of the proposed referendum (the pictures of Gordon Brown and Michael Howard had the words 'Free' and 'Sin' respectively, made up of letters printed on a wall behind them, I wonder if it was intentional).

But on page 9, there is an advertisement for Canary Wharf and the tallest building in the UK. It reads as follows:

'Easily visible from the Thames, the 50-storey tower at 1 Canada Square in Canary Wharf is the UK's tallest building at 244 metres. Built in 1991, it houses 27 firms employing 7500 people.'

It then goes on to say:

'The aircraft warning light at the very top of the tower flashes 40 times a minute.'

The add is sponsored by British Airways and offers to see the tower and the Thames by flight. This is great advertising for mad people who'd fancy flying a plane into the building.

I am back - I've been out of action for a couple of weeks, I spent two weeks in painkiller heaven after my hernia repair, then I spent a few days dealing with blogger's block. I almost binned the whole idea of blogging in exchange for going straight for a book. It would be a good idea to keep the blog, that way I can let ideas and recorded occurences accumulate and season themselves with time for the day I drudge them out of the archives and weave them into something else.

I need to branch out though, there is only so much hatred I can display for cheffie, so much frustration I can relay about the Underground, and for my own sanity there is a limit to how much I can rant about the perils of chewing gum before everyone tires of the blog. I have been thinking about inserting short stories and precision blogging. I got thinking after chatting to Tassos - he mentioned that there is an entire chapter on the Golf Sale guy, and I think he is right. What I should do is plan an interview, a journey into the dark side of the Golf Sale Guy.

My mickey mouse balloon has half deflated, he floats though, at half mast mourning the loss of Dollar. I shall leave him there for as long as it takes,even when he lays limp and lifeless, draped over the stairwell bannister. There is a dusty patch on the skirting of the bannister where Dollar wrote the words 'clean me' in the dust, I shall leave that there as a tribute.

I'm feeling better all the time, watching my little orange Diclonefac Sodium tablets dissappear one by one every eight hours, I have 64 hours of bliss remaining. It worries me that I can feel so good and can block things like the outside world out of my mind, and I can sleep as much as I want - I lied, I'm not worried, not at all. I've been paid and I've been shopping, online. I bought a return trip to Venice for some time in May, I've never been, and it'll be spring time, hopefully it won't be too smelly, aparently Venice smells bad, what with all the sewage water that transports them about.

I've got the feeling that I should be doing something. I'd love a bath, but they told me not to, not until tomorrow, I can't get my wound wet. This is where gaffer tape and a shower would come in handy, maybe I can find some of that horrible brown tape about and seal myself up good before I bathe.

I can't write too much, I forget 5 seconds down the sentence path - and I'll just look at it later and think 'What the Fuck'

Let's get some Creative Input on the go...

Critic was good enough to leave an observation and comment on The Weather Project, the last in a quartet commisioned by Unilever.

Just a comment on the photographs of the Weather installation at the Tate Modern - is this where we're going? Tight-arsed symmetry? Geometric obsession? This is disturbingly more Zen then Now.

Critic

The Mad Scot has been kind enough to reply

Whit does he mean? Mair Zen than Now? Oabviously Critic cannie spell - cannie see either. Must be some auld dirgruntled shite wi' bad vision. Yer foaties are great. Whit the world needs is a wee bit mair Geometry. Roon things an' square things an' wee triangles. Random shapes are nae guid - they gie me an awfy feelin' o' disorder. The world should be a' packed away in wee boaxes. Get neat an' ye'll never be unhappy - that's whit ma Granny never telt me - ah hid tae discover that yin through prayer. When ah realised the truth o' it, it wis like relief fae constipation. Now ah kin face the world.

I had my hernia repaired yesterday morning. I don't feel too bad. There's not much of the air-bus crash in me that Tor warned me about. Either I'm made of steel or the painkillers are grand, I suspect the latter. The chemicals used for anaesthetics these days have evolved, minimising the hangover. The opiates are as good as they get, I was given sedatives, morphine and synthetic heroin, by IV and anally. It sounds a bit much, I don't mind since it's a controlled environment, they can administer whatever they want, it's controlled, free and legal.

I had to wait for four hours before the op. Why they needed me there at 7:45 am I'll never know. The first thing they did was make me change into the skimpiest little hospital robe ever. The robe had wee poppers on the shoulders that didn't work, so I felt a bit exposed, never mind the non-existent back of the robe that displayed my sweet bottom to the rest of the world. They should offer hotpants.

From the time they started dosing me, the sense of being under-dressed and over-exposed lessened, the day slipped by. I woke in recovery feeling great, really great - I had 4 cups of tea, a sandwich, biscuits and 3 glasses of water. I did this because what I actually wanted was to get out of there - a pre-requisite for day care patients to leave is eat, drink and urinate. I managed all three pretty quickly.

Tor and Dolly came to pick me up, I was spoiled for choice - i've got the cat in the hat and a professional recovery nurse to look after me, it's the caring clown all-in-wonder.

Dolly had a massive Mickey Mouse which made laugh. I had to ask her very nicely to stop making me laugh, because it hurt, I don't need my sides split any more.
She carried the balloon for me, even though it was full of helium, it looked better on Dollar than on me.There were all the miserable NHS patients, ashen and morose, with the cat in the hat bounding around with a Mickey Mouse balloon for her 31 year old brother.

My painkillers demand that I lie down and sleep, we can't all be so lucky. I'll try again later.

I'm up... the sleep is so good, so lucid, I can't remember the last time I had sleep of this kind, a vibrant coma - the dreams so vivid, the memories stay with me and I'm not sure if I really jumped from a plane, watched as the chords from my chute snapped one by one, providing me with close-ups of the shredding nylon strings, plunging... fade out, fade in some other satisfying scenario.

When Dolly first came over, she found what I called Evil Bunny - a faded pink felt plastic bunny with orange bloodshot eyes. It looks like it has escaped from a lab, shorn and needled, it's eyes burned from the chemicals, the night of the living test bunnies. Dolly thinks it's cute, chubby and tired, just woken from a sweet woodland creature sleep. I was so taken with Evil Bunny that she bought me one, I have them both, in my room, and they torment me.



Phil came in one night and caught a glimpse of Evil Bunny, he nearly had an anxiety attack, I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds the Evil Bunny horrendous.

The mad scot has been in contact again...

Ah canny thole Chewing Gum - though ah admit ah yist te hey a go at it masel' when ah wis a wean, but then God sent me a message in the form o' false teeth. Did ye ken that gum sticks tae yer fawsers - an' ye canny get rid o'it - except fur takin' them oot an gie-in' them a guid scrub? Ye canny do this in polite places. Ye hiv te dae it in secret - in toilets an' that kind a' place. It's horrible. So - when ah got ma first set ah said "Thank you God fur the Wake up Call" Since that day ah've been a believer. Is it no wonderful the way He works his wonders?