A BOVINE REACTION from Jules

So Francis, it has finally happened: the bovine spell is upon you. "It is a
truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a piece of land
in Africa must be in want of a herd of cattle", with apologies to Jane
Austen. You have finally understood what it is that cattle breeders do:
nothing. You may recall that I was once the proud owner of some 50 Red
Angus, a fine, fine animal by the way, and one you should consider. They
have great character, are very resilient, and are good herders. Also very
good to eat. I had to slaughter one of my best breed cows because she got
sick, and although it was not easy to take her life, her flesh was very
tasty, and that helped!

Nguni are fabulous beasts, the original African cow, and part of African
mythology, but they are not so good to eat. They are very handsome of
course, and many cattle owners are content simply to gaze at them all day
long. The Zulus in Shaka's day were able to identify each animal by its
coloration, even in a herd a 1000 strong. If you breed Ngunis, will it be
for pedigree, meat or beauty? Anyhow, best of luck. Don't forget the cold
weather when choosing which race to get.

I have loved cattle since I was a small boy. Growing up in Botswana meant
that you more or less had to shoo them out of your way when taking a piss,
going to school, stealing fruit from your neighbour's garden, etc. Living
next to the abattoir meant I used to watch 1500 animals march to their doom
daily, smelling the blood of their kith and kin as they approached the kill
zone; but there is a bond between humans and cattle which even mass
slaughter cannot erase. On a more peaceful note, I once witnessed three men
slaughter a huge white ox in the driveway of a house in Gaborone. I was
passing by the front gate when I saw a man holding a large basin against the
throat of the beast, which stood silent and calm before them. A second man,
holding an absurdly small pocket knife, felt with his left hand along the
throat, and then, in a conversational sort of way, inserted the knife easily
into the skin. The ox twitched but made no sound: then the knifeman
withdrew the blade, and a stream of blood gushed into the waiting basin.
That was it. A few minutes later the ox went down on its front knees, a
second basin was brought to catch the blood, and then the animal slowly
collapsed on its side and died. A good death, I thought. All the while,
the three men kept up an animated conversation: they slaughtered the animal
almost absent-mindedly. Two hours later I passed the same driveway again.
The ox had been butchered, its meat hung in large sections from the roof of
the carport, and the huge skin was salted and pegged out on the lawn. This
is an ancient story. When Odysseus made sacrifice to the gods, this is how
it would have happened - followed, of course by a serious feast.

Finally, congratulations on your website - it sure looks cool. I see you
have 'The Fall and Rise of Mr Grumpy' posted there too. Fantastic. I spoke
to my niece who is a commissioning editor (educational books) in London, and
she said there is one essential step to being published, and that is, get an
agent. Without an agent your chances are virtually nil. Because it is so
hard to get an agent, when you finally do acquire a decent one, publishers
take you seriously. She says that publishers are flooded with manuscripts
and proposals, and can read only a fraction of them, so they rely on agents
to screen them. Anyhow, good to hear from you, keep well.

Yours in the big smoke
Jules

COWS ON MY MIND

COWS ON MY MIND

I have been persuaded by my friends and neighbors that cows are the thing, the deep desire and lust I have sene in the eyes of various country folk when gazing over my rolling hills has convinced me that growing meat is what the farm needs to go forward into the future.
Being an urban rat by upbringing and inclination I had never really mulled over the value of grass, it was something that kept the soil off my shoes, was a pain to cut and maintain and was quite attractive when trimmed, but I did not really appreciate that it was of some value when passed through a herbivore and converted into edible flesh, this has now been brought to my attention by the fact that a neighbor, who is as mean as cats piss and is renowned for the shortness of his arms and the depth of his pockets, who was nonetheless willing to hand over your actual folding money to have his beasts wander over the afore mentioned rolling hills munching the grass and pooping.
Furthermore I noticed that contrary to the observation I had made of farmers that grow stuff in the soil such as corn or beans, steak farmers do remarkably little in the way of actual toil, such as struggling in the rain and mud with great lumps of broken steel, or trundling endlessly over endless rows of dying plants with expensive chemicals with nasty looking kit and sprayers on the back of large and temperamental tractors. No sir, they tend, to spend a great deal of time leaning on fences looking at their beasts and waiting for some underpaid hireling to gather them from the fields to be sprayed and or injected or inspected and little else other than chatting with their fellow meat growers about the latest beef price at the market, it always goes up!
So the decision having been made to invest in bovines as an alternative to building for-ni-catoriums for bright young things, the next big decision is what cow to choose, there are lots of different types of cow, blue, rare, medium rare, Beef Wellington and on a bun all sorts and those are just the ones I know about, Mickey he of the short arms etc. had been running the ‘most popular’ breed when considering kilo’s as ones main prerogative, called Bosmarra cows which are accepted at all your feedlots and other brutal purveyors of flesh to the suburbs and are without doubt the most dreary and dull creatures to ever grace a plate, grass converters born and bred to be consumed by bi-pedaled monkeys and tedious beyond tolerance.
I suspect that if ones sole purpose in life is to either breed more of your kind or to be eaten at an early stage in life it pays to not think too deeply about the universe and everything. These beasts of burden have been bred to think not at all and to be as efficient as possible at one task in life, that being to turn pasture into edible protein. Not what I want to have around the place at all.
However there is a cow that is a wise and ancient breed, a bovine of mystical status among Africans a cow that has lived and thrived here on the African plains for thousands of years living among the wild beasts of Africa and is adapted to life here unlike their fat lazy cousins that the Umlungu has brought from the soggy north, Nguni cattle, sneered at and ignored by the soulless brutes that feed the masses but a beast in my eyes of noble grace and wonderful colors.
So the first task is to fix the kraal to contain these ladies and fit selfsame with running water and all the mod coms that a bovine of a discerning disposition requires, having done this and consulted with my chums I then entered into the murky waters of bovine acquisitions, a world filled with hard eyed chaps who know what’s what and can see a wet eared idiot like myself from the other side of a 10 acre field. To mitigate I hoped the inevitable costs of learning the ropes I donated one of my paintings to Cheryl down the road who though not an expert in all things Nguni is a nice lady and has been growing these beasts for a few years so is fairly well advanced in cow circles and most importantly is now behoven to me to protect me from at least the most blatant of rip offs that cow merchants are wont to do unto the innocent and uninformed.
So the first thing was to get in touch with these hard men and enter into negotiations, I had hoped that my entry into the world of cows would be as simple as my friend Tim’s in as much that he called a fellow who sent him cows and a bull and there he was set up, however when I called this selfsame purveyor of the African Bovine I was told that as usual when I want something the price has just rocketed and why had I not called say a day before because now he had nothing to offer me as the government is suddenly keen to set up emerging farmers with this particular type of cow! Bummer WITH A COMMESERATE RISE IN THEIR COST, double bummer and even more distressing he had none to sell me. I went into a deep depression.
However us country boys are made of stern stuff and I soon ascertained that indeed all was not lost and further more the fellow called me a little later to inform me that in fact after all there were cows to had from his admirable herd and that furthermore if I was so inclined he was keen that I should visit him on his newly acquired estate and peruse what he had on offer.
With Cheryl and Rudie in tow we trundled of into the bush to the far side of Ermelo where I encountered one of the strangest interviews I have had. We arrived at the designated estate, which was tired, but magnificent and extensive in buildings and acreage where Mr. Hill and his family were in the process of transferring their herds and home to. We were introduced to all, shown the house and finally taken to see the cows that I was under the impression were there for me to purchase, and a wonderful gathering of fine Nguni’s they were indeed, I have been looking at these cows for some time and can at this stage understand some of the qualities that the lover of these cows appreciate, fine athletic build and thin legs, we will not go into the subtleties of scrotums, which are vital, not mention the sheaths but enough said this was a tremendous collection of cows and I wanted some, however every time I tried to broach the subject of exactly which beasts he had in mind to sell me the man got all coy and distant. My first inkling that all was not as it should be was when he described me as an executive, due to my mistake of dressing up a bit in my finest new denims and a clean shirt for the occasion in the hope that he would understand that I was solvent and able to pay and it was only when he realized that I was not a city boy playing at farmer and that I live on my farm that the atmosphere changed and suddenly we were kindred spirits in the long road of life and the coffee and cookies were spread before us, he still would not talk turkey about the cows and I eventually gathered up my chums to go home none the wiser as to whether I was getting some of his ladies and how much he intended to ask, such is the way of cow sellers, they love their beasts and need to know that they are going to a nice home, I think I passed the test, Cheryl and Rudie declared me home and dry which was a relief as I was now panting for his animals, there is method to their madness me thinks hmm?



DOWN THE SLIPPY SLOAP

I have my 25 new ladies and am enchanted with them, I have even got over my buyers remorse and am looking forward to a long and tender relationship with these wonderful cows. I spent a morning with their father a grand fellow who has had an unnatural relationship with this particular breed of animal for yea 15 years or more and is thus an expert.
He was very gentle with me as he bust my cherry re all things bovine, though he did enjoy scaring my knickers off with all the different injections, dips, sprays and other chores that come hand in hand with these particular animals, one would think that they are all just conspiring together to find ever more evocatively named diseases to die off, from lumpy skin to stiff sickness, it all sounds quite disgusting.
I was then taken to be introduced to my new charges that took one look and tried to flee the country. They charged around in a very disconcerting manner doing their best to avoid all contact with the bi-pedal monkeys that we had sent to round them up. They knew already in their young lives that this sort of attention usually ended up with something sharp being stuck in their backsides and they were not wrong.
They were all forced into a narrow wooden passage know appropriatly as a crush where I was initiated into the art of sticking it to female grass-eating quadrupeds. Dave has this cunning trick where he holds the needle (large one) just so, then smacks the cow on the rump and quick as a snake in the grass thrusts it into the animal, the first time he showed me it was like a magic trick but I was soon smacking and sticking with the best of them and we injected the entire herd, it was a thrill really I was leaping up and down in excitement at the whole thing and got so macho and worked up about the whole idea that for the first time in my life I went to a pub on the way home to have a beer!

On a different note the estate is finding it more and more difficult to justify the staff levels that we are carrying as the wattle tree problem and tourism trade are not really keeping my sweating classes busy and productive, an anathema to a lazy bloke like me, so I have gorn into the soap biz.
My sainted sister has been flogging soap in England for quite a while with her loony friends at their local market, and they have like a coven of witches come up with very snappy recipes. Which if any of you have ever looked at the many books available on soap making is the key to the whole thing, which she has after some thumb screw work and nail pulling graceful condescended to let us, under license, use here in darkest Africa.
We (Poppy, Norah and I) have been cooking and mixing it up in the studio for last few weeks, and after some considerable investment in essential oils, palm and other oils, mixers, pots and a great deal of other expensive stuff have finally perfected, sort of, the fine art of samponification, or soap making and the studio now smells like the inside of a tarts handbag, not unpleasant.
The knity gritty however was whether we could unload this product on an unsuspecting public, all my forays into the swamp of retail product sales in the past have not been nice at all and the initial attempts were not heartening, all the ladies loved the stuff but my little helpers and I were less than sure that we could get the price required to make a profit as soap is quite cheap really and we needed to sell our’s at 3 times the price of the most expensive stuff at the local supermarket, not promising, but a call came through from the local market mafia who were throwing a fest at Tonteldoes a village on the other side of Dullstroom to us, and the opportunity to test the waters was to strong to resist, and we went into full production mode producing vast quantities of sweet smelling slabs of soap and even inventing a few new ones ourselves, having labeled and wrapped the bars in sexy raffia and with Norah in tow I liaised with Cheryl and her cow skins at the venue.
Tonteldoes which for the curious means ‘Flint box’ in Afrikaans is a tiny little village that throws an annual peach festival, and as the village is in the very heart of trout syndicate country is really quite well attended and is cute as hell with a pub and a village green where we set up among the peach brandy and dry peach merchants with our little stall of soap.
At first the pace was a little slow and the only trade being done was between the stallholders selling to each other but soon the punters started to roll in and the soap fairly flew of the shelf, most gratifying. The ladies loved it and did not blink at the price so it looks like we are in business, which it turns out is in fact an old family concern as my great granddad on the Jewish side financed his bank which I should have inherited but for the attentions of the Nazi swine, but then if not for them I would not have been selling soap under an African sun at flint box village so all things considered perhaps it has worked out for the best.

DOWN THE SLIPPY SLOAP

DOWN THE SLIPPY SLOAP

I have my 25 new ladies and am enchanted with them, I have even got over my buyers remorse and am looking forward to a long and tender relationship with these wonderful cows. I spent a morning with their father a grand fellow who has had an unnatural relationship with this particular breed of animal for yea 15 years or more and is thus an expert.
He was very gentle with me as he bust my cherry re all things bovine, though he did enjoy scaring my knickers off with all the different injections, dips, sprays and other chores that come hand in hand with these particular animals, one would think that they are all just conspiring together to find ever more evocatively named diseases to die off, from lumpy skin to stiff sickness, it all sounds quite disgusting.
I was then taken to be introduced to my new charges, that took one look and tried to flee the country. They charged around in a very disconcerting manner doing their best to avoid all contact with the bi-pedal monkeys that we had sent to round them up. They knew already in their young lives that this sort of attention usually ended up with something sharp being stuck in their backsides and they were not wrong.
They were all forced into a narrow wooden passage know appropriatly as a crush where I was initiated into the art of sticking it to female grass-eating quadrupeds. Dave has this cunning trick where he holds the needle (large one) just so, then smacks the cow on the rump and quick as a snake in the grass thrusts it into the animal, the first time he showed me it was like a magic trick but I was soon smacking and sticking with the best of them and we injected the entire herd, it was a thrill really I was leaping up and down in excitement at the whole thing and got so macho and worked up about the whole idea that for the first time in my life I went to a pub on the way home to have a beer!

On a different note the estate is finding it more and more difficult to justify the staff levels that we are carrying as the wattle tree problem and tourism trade are not really keeping my sweating classes busy and productive, an anathema to a lazy bloke like me, so I have gorn into the soap biz.
My sainted sister has been flogging soap in England for quite a while with her loony friends at their local market, and they have like a coven of witches come up with very snappy recipes. Which if any of you have ever looked at the many books available on soap making is the key to the whole thing, which she has after some thumb screw work and nail pulling graceful condescended to let us, under license, use here in darkest Africa.
We (Poppy, Norah and I) have been cooking and mixing it up in the studio for last few weeks, and after some considerable investment in essential oils, palm and other oils, mixers, pots and a great deal of other expensive stuff have finally perfected, sort of, the fine art of samponification, or soap making and the studio now smells like the inside of a tarts handbag, not unpleasant.
The knity gritty however was whether we could unload this product on an unsuspecting public, all my forays into the swamp of retail product sales in the past have not been nice at all and the initial attempts were not heartening, all the ladies loved the stuff but my little helpers and I were less than sure that we could get the price required to make a profit as soap is quite cheap really and we needed to sell our’s at 3 times the price of the most expensive stuff at the local supermarket, not promising, but a call came through from the local market mafia who were throwing a fest at Tonteldoes a village on the other side of Dullstroom to us, and the opportunity to test the waters was to strong to resist, and we went into full production mode producing vast quantities of sweet smelling slabs of soap and even inventing a few new ones ourselves, having labeled and wrapped the bars in sexy raffia and with Norah in tow I liaised with Cheryl and her cow skins at the venue.
Tonteldoes which for the curious means ‘Flint box’ in Afrikaans is a tiny little village that throws an annual peach festival, and as the village is in the very heart of trout syndicate country is really quite well attended and is cute as hell with a pub and a village green where we set up among the peach brandy and dry peach merchants with our little stall of soap.
At first the pace was a little slow and the only trade being done was between the stallholders selling to each other but soon the punters started to roll in and the soap fairly flew of the shelf, most gratifying. The ladies loved it and did not blink at the price so it looks like we are in business, which it turns out is in fact an old family concern as my great granddad on the Jewish side financed his bank which I should have inherited but for the attentions of the Nazi swine, but then if not for them I would not have been selling soap under an African sun at flint box village so all things considered perhaps it has worked out for the best.

Up in smoke 2006

2006

Hello again gentle readers, long time since last I sent out my ruminations and contemplations of the world and everything, due to my attempt to get a blog off the ground (which is still going) and where I have back published all previous episodes so you can have access to all these great and profound thoughts and ideas, if you wish and which you can guide your friends and relatives to, who might enjoy my brand of wit and wisdom, however due to the sad state of Telkom’s clunky Flintstone service I have been effectively cut off from the web for most of this year. There has been some gremlin in their wiring that despite the best efforts of their technicians and other flunkies they have not been able to sort out reducing me to such a slow download speed that there was no chance of doing any web stuff at all in fact it is faster at the moment to run the documents by hand down town, thus the blog and this letter has been absent from your consiousness, did you miss me?
However the other day I caught one of the bright young things that I entertain here in my lodge playing on his computer downloading his mail in the sitting room with no connection to the wire on the wall so I am hoping that this very week I will be connected via GPRS and thus be able to send out this letter to you all without incurring a telephone bill that would bankrupt me and my family for generations to come. AND THIS IS MY LATEST ADVENTURE I am now 10 weeks smoke free!!!







GOING UP IN SMOKE

It was 45 years ago that I first encountered smoke; in a tree house with a neighbor, we invested in 30 Rothmans cigarettes each and smoked them all! In one go, we did not feel well, an inauspicious start to a long career.

I did not smoke again till I left school when I got a job at a pottery and again discovered ‘the smoke’ and slid into a life of constant puffing with wild enthusiasm, going from zero to 30 in one leap, and from that point on I pretty much had something burning in my mouth for all my waking hours!

Cigarettes have no real perceivable high but seem to make existence nicer nonetheless, a convenient and handy way to avoid life itself. When I got to university I progressed to marijuana which was a lot better and I continued to puff both from then on. Thus did a life of slavery to breathing muck start.

What is a smoker? Why do we do it? That is the mystery. For the smoker it seems inconceivable that some people go their entire lives without ever seeing their breath except in the cold.

So here I am all these years later struggling with my addictions, I stopped smoking the weed after Christmas actually I stopped at the end of November but weakened under peer pressure and smoked over the festive season and that took me back to square one and I was left in a strange state of self recrimination and distress.
Chucking the marijuana habit is a lot more tiresome than I like to admit after all the years of justifying the habit to friends, family and the authorities.
For all these years of constant puffing I have always considered it to be no more powerful than tea and weaker than coffee and certainly preferable to booze, but the withdrawal that I am going through at the moment has given me pause. I try to analyze what is going on but it is like trying to herd cats, frustrating and difficult, my mind is frankly numb and I cannot approach much with any enthusiasm, and I feel incapable of painting at all. My heart feels empty and hollow and though I don’t feel bad as such, the sensation of emptiness is hard to bear and the days stretch as a great void with no motivation or desire to do anything be anything and the smallest task seems impossible and a terrible imposition.
Not nice, one would almost prefer a physical withdrawal, as that would have a face and a presence that one could fight.
However there are some strange compensations, the first being the wonderful dreams that start about 10 days into the deprivation, wild Technicolor Bollywood fantasies that leave one exhausted and sweating in the darkness with the Willie in a state not encountered since the days of puberty, very nice indeed but disturbing none the less and a waste when the number one girl friend is not in attendance, but in fact stopping the weed is not so hard and is hardly missed except when standing before the easel trying to dismiss the random thoughts that distract from the specifics of painting.
So having rid myself of this source of smoke the next and altogether more scary task is to get rid of the fags, ohh deary me just the thought sends shivers up my spine, so I have signed up and paid for Smokenders to aid me through this withdrawal.
I am a man who thinks that rehab is for quitters and for those who are too slup-dicked to know when the party is over. I have chucked, in my time, any number of powerful narcotics that I had abused with wild abandon and got seriously addicted to, but even the dreaded crack cocaine never scared the booties off me like trying to stop tobacco, so I sought help, which has come in the shape of a small round ex colonial from a Zambian tobacco farm. She is lady that had smoked almost from birth and admitted that she could actually not remember ever not smoking. Mercia runs the only anti smoking clinic in the whole of Africa and is the only competition to the formidable forces of the tobacco lobby, from a house in the suburbs of Johannesburg where she operates her saintly cause in fear and trepidation of her neighbors, who object to her tiny operation and give her a great deal of grief about the poor suffering addicts that attend her clinic and cause them some minor inconvenience starting up their posh vehicles coming and departing her sessions. Tobacco addicts are in a different league to most other victims of substance abuse and are all very civilized and wealthy.
So every week I climb into my pick-up and wend my way down to Johannesburg to be weaned of this foul and nasty habit. Our small group of sufferers, about 20-30 of us, gathered in a stuffy room at the back of her house where she conducts her course.
We are disparate lot ranging from a small coterie of homo’s to some slick executive ladies, all 30 something’s and a couple of older farts such as yours truly. We assembled for our first weekly meeting a bit self consciously even though we are not actually required to stand and declare our addiction as is the way with alcoholics anonymous we were none the less we are all a bit dubious about being there. There was a discernable sense that all there have contemplated their habit with despair, often, and have all been faced with the enormity of the task that they have set themselves and are hoping without much confidence that this course is the answer to a HUGE problem that we have all to a man realized is too big to face alone.
Mercia our guide and mentor is a lady of indeterminate age but I put her down at about 60 behind her tinted hair but she later admitted to 70 years, and believe me she is a formidable chick who I suspect has seen a lot of strange buggers walk through her doors, and seen every trick the despartae addict will do.
We were all issued with yellow clip files which we despiatly clutched as we surreptitiously checked each other out and sneaked a peak at the blurb in the brown envelope to see what was in store.
Mercia soon settled us down and launched us into our task with a very gentle intro into the nature of our problem chatting away about water and what makes us want to smoke trying to get us all to cease our nervous chatter so that she could be heard and sending us off with the delightful thought that the next week and in fact through out the whole course we could smoke as much as we liked which took a lot of the worry out of the idea, very clever, she did ask us to not smoke for 15 minutes after meals and before we went to sleep but hey 15 minutes seemed like nothing and I certainly went off with my fears tempered, puffing away with the confidence that I would soon no longer smoke and meantime I could smoke as much as I liked, magic!
A lot of the stuff she wants us to do is a bit embarrassing like saying out loud our promise, “ I will stop smoking on Monday the 13th February 2006, I will win!” but if that is what it takes to get rid of the fag so be it, we were exhorted to obey without question and put our trust in the program, well if you are going to do it, do it, is my thought, do the breathing, do the water guzzling and brushing of teeth, it was all about just doing it and I was determined to be the teachers pet, anything to rid myself of this monkey on my back.
So the first week went past and I felt like a champ the 15 minutes was a doddle.
Week two came and the delay time was extended to half an hour, and more restrictions were placed like not smoking in the car, but as I had already made the decision not to blemish my new Toyota this was not to bad either but I did find myself clock watching, and the restriction of no smokes after coffee made me cut down on that habit big time, the decision to smoke or drink coffee was an easy one, the smoke won hands down every time.
We have to record all our fags and drinks, breath from the belly, make lists of all the reasons why one smoke’s all of which seem very trite when put to paper and say our promise.
The delay time when we are not allowed to smoke became a lot more odious and I did find myself watching the clock, especially in the mornings when I was used to smoking like mad every day to get the drug in after sleeping, my neighbors found me wandering around the estate at dawn which they have never encountered before, so my life is changing already, Mercia pointed out with some force that we were sucking up no less that 4700 different poisons in every fag which gave me a nasty turn to think about and set more tasks for the following week.
No smoking pretty much anywhere in the house, car etc no smoking now for 45 minutes after meals, drinks etc making it a real challenge to find a gap when one is allowed to smoke at all, the clock became a really painfully slow instrument so that I was forced to stop watching it meaning that sometimes I missed a few minutes of precious smoking time. I am becoming ashamed of myself for the desperation I have for this smoking thing and stand outside with my fag thinking about what a twit I am to be so dependant that I still stand in the rain like idiot to kill myself, the course is working.
Week 4 arrives and Mercia puts on a show about the alien in our heads that makes us smoke that demands we feed it smoke, killing and degrading us, making our teeth yellow and long and coughing our way through life good only to smoke, living our whole existence from one fag to the next, she really showed us in mime what we were doing to ourselves and what our activity would do to us and how ugly we were and would become if we did not stop. More than anything to date, in the course, this little performance truly brought home to me how foul and nasty this habit is.
Our homework became more odious we have to hide our fags far away and even after all the lessons learned I am still going out to suck on the cig the second that I can, the humiliation of this dependency and weakness is profound and I am starting to truly long to be shot of this habit.
Week 5 is the big one NO MORE SMOKING AT ALL but by this time we are hardly smoking at all and only cabbage leaves standing on one leg at the bottom of the garden, so it is a relief not to be waiting for when we are allowed to smoke and sure enough the week goes past with nary a single smoke passing my lips for the first time in 38 years I am so proud and thrilled with this Smokenders program which has got me here. Money well spent.
I spend my time drinking water by the gallon and peeing it out at the same rate how the others on the course do it in town I know not, if I am farther than 10 paces from a bog I am lost, thankfully here in the bush the world is my toilet!
Week 6 and we all gather again this time with a week behind us with no smoking, some have weakened but not I though I have encountered some very unexpected side effects which were clarified as being normal when we met and Mercia issued us with a list of them, such as farting like a hunter, dippy thought processes, depression and sleepiness which was a consolation, we were exhorted to go and get our last week done before we went into the world alone without our old enemy for that is how my old friend cigarettes now look to me, such is the power of this program, that my best friend of 38 years has been conclusively revealed as my enemy!
What can I say, if I did not smoke during this last week of the course I MUST BE CURED, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, lightning took out my TV so there was no distraction from the cravings there and I ran over my old dog and killed her and yet I refrained from having a single puff, I must be cured or at least have the demon under control. I can still feel the bugger trying to make me fail, I still think a lot about having a fag but I will NOT as I believe in myself like I have not for a long time I know that I am no longer a slave to Mr. Van Ryan and his friend Peter Stuyvesant and that they can go forth and multiply without me.
So we met for the last time and this is actually my homework which is the first project that I did not do in time, what with poor old Crossbow dieing and my printer exploding but will be a good reminder to me now and in the future to never ever weaken and have a puff as in the words of Mercia my teacher and guide through this difficult time “ You are a puff away from a packet a day forever”
Yours smokelessly
Francis