You Must Be From Away

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Kreuznach has a wonderful park called the Roseninsel (Rose Island) which used to be an island before they filled in part of the river in 1900 and which gets its name from the Rose Growers’ Exhibition held there in 1905.

Sprinkled among the usual sculptures of Bismarck and Kaiser Bill, they’ve got a really cool Planet Way, with a sculpture of the sun and discs representing the planets set up at the correct relative distances along the river.

So if you’re strolling along at a normal pace between Earth and Venus, you’re actually (relatively) flogging along at three times the speed of light.

(That’s wot it sez ‘ere, Brian..)

Unless you’re a quadruped, of course.

Then you’re lucky to do half that…..

>I imagine that life without painkillers during the first couple of weeks after they fitted the Bionic Leg would have been decidedly unpleasant.

(When they halved the dosage on Day 8, it cut my time on the racetrack from 34 seconds to 46 seconds.)

So I’ve been on Oxygesic 10mg twice a day for the last 5 weeks almost.

It appears that I have developed a dependency.

In other words, I’m a drug addict.

Fuck this.

FUCK THIS

(Sorry, Ruth, but nothing else really expresses my feelings at this moment…)

If you do a bit of research, you”ll find that the manufacturer in the States was fined one third of a billion dollars for making false claims about addiction potential and reduced withdrawal symptoms, among other transgressions.

And that people grind it up, mix it with water and mainline it into their veins.

And that you get a life sentence in Canada for possession for the purpose of trafficking.

And how did I find out I’m addicted?

I decided to find out what the pain threshold was like.

I mean, I’m walking 6 -10km a day, doing physiotherapy at the clinic and then an hour by myself each day, so I figured I’m probably over the worst.

Muscle pain, for sure, but that’s what you get when you’re stretching muscles and tendons that you haven’t used for 3 years.

So I cut the dosage to zero.

My skin felt like things were crawling all over it.

The shakes.

Freezing.

I was pretty happy when the medication cut back in again, but it was a nasty couple of hours.

I have absolutely NO idea what it’s like for someone on heroin, although this stuff’s supposedly got more grunt than morphine.

I don’t WANT to know.

When I described the symptoms, the doctor said “Oh. We should have reduced the dosage at LEAST a week ago”

So now it’s half dosage for a week and then another third reduction for another week and so on until I’m clean.

Fuck them.

FUCK THEM

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Given the nature of the asylum, it's festooned with grab-handles, emergency bell-pulls and panic buttons for those 'Oooooops' moments.

Something you DON'T want to do,though, is to bump this button with your head (or elbow or whatever) in the middle of the night.

They had the defibrillator pads on me within seconds amd it was only through my energetic protests that I was able to avoid immediate cardio-vascular surgery…..

>One of the nurses on 5B got reminiscing about working nightshift on Rosenmontag, the culmination of the Karneval season.

‘What really pissed me off’ she said ‘was the way the parents would turn up and mollycoddle these semi-comatose kids who were covered with vomit and whose lives we’d just saving by pumping out their stomachs’

‘It’d be like ” Oh you poor little thing! You just sleep it off and Mumsy will bring you some clean clothes and take you home to bedsywedsy” ‘

‘If I’d gotten into that state’ she said ‘my Dad would have made me walk home through the village so that everyone could see just what sort of a tramp I was.’

‘And if it were up to me, I’d film them having their stomach pumped and give them the DVD to remind them just how demeaning the whole thing is’

‘In fact’ she said in a conspiratorial whisper ‘ I used to take a couple of pictures with their cellphone and put it back in their pocket.’

‘Just something to show their mates….’

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In she charged, syringe at the ready at FIVE O'CLOCK IN THE BLOODY MORNING!

Sod this for a game of soldiers.

This is the rat poison that's supposed to stop you from getting DVT and it's whacked into the body subcutaneously daily.

Basically an anticoagulent. Kills rats, not supposed to kill humans.

Back at the Vincenz Hospital, I was allowed to inject it myself (which is no big deal) – it was either that or bloody Tim painting a dartboard on your stomach and shooting for a bulls-eye from the door.

So I toddled along to the warders and said I'd like to inject my rat poison myself, thank you very much

Shock! Horror! You can't do that! What if everyone wanted to do that? And it's not rat poison either

I said it was either that or I'm barricading my cell door.

So you don't really know about this and you''ll now have to eat your monitor to destroy the evidence.

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Here at the Asylum, they have novel ways of keeping the inmates occupied.

Making lanterns out of paper and cellophane.

Decorating candles with bambis, angels and glittery stuff

Make your very own teddy bear in 3 easy lessons.

Probably basket-weaving, too, if you ask nicely.

Not really my tasse de thé, as they say, but this evening I wavered.

A concert!

Some Johnny in tails tinkling away on the ivories of the grand piano that graces the main lobby and a flossie in an outfit that Ms jb classified as "elegant", but which was somewhat too Bosnian Hillcountry Traditional for my liking, was warbling her way through some light classical stuff, to the obvious enjoyment of the gathered blue-rinsed quadrupeds

As I said – on the verge of stopping a bit to listen when the bloody Metrognomes started swaying in time to the music and clapping rhythmically.

And then they all started singing along……

I'm off to bed to watch "The Stones in the Park"……….

>Escaped from the Asylum for the weekend (it’s Whitsun over here and tomorrow being a holiday, the sadists also get a couple of days off. Not that they deserve it, of course) and the first person who came charging down the road was Sophie, with a very concerned look on her face.

As soon as she’d determined that Leg 2.0 was in no danger of falling off, inspected the X-rays and the incision, she shot back up the road to return with a big homemade red rose.

“It’s for you” she said.

I think the bright bit hovering over her head is a halo……

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My mate, Frank the Potter, descended on his mountain bike from the depths of the Hünsruck hinterlands the other day to inspect the Bionic Leg and incent me in joining him in sampling the delights of the fleshpots of Bad Kreuznach.

Pretty tame evening, actually – leisurely stroll (constrained by the speed of the resident quadruped) around the Parc Fermë of the Tulpen Rally and then on to a bar next to the river for a couple of beers and a pizza for Frank and a couple of apple juice spritzers for me.

Good guy is Frank, that’s for sure.