I blame Stoke City.

The last two days saw a bit of a slip in the Cardiff Drunk world, but not as bad as they have been and nothing to send me into the black of my black and white thinking.

I went out on Friday to see D and give him some books; he's a real enthusiast for Welsh history (being a Welsh speaker from the far west) and I had an Owain Glyn Dwr book and a history of Druids for his reading list. Naturally, we met in The C. I stayed longer than I needed and drank more than I should have - five-and-a-half pints I think.

Yesterday was work and then I headed out again to watch Stoke V Liverpool in The C. Again, I overdid rather and drank six pints. Encouragingly though, I came home and stopped.

My skin remains a problem. The doctor prescribed an antihistamine and a new moisturiser but it remains very dry and painful - stinging whenever I apply any cream. The most probable cause is still, to my mind, the Trazodone, but to go without it seems too much at the moment. My lovely guaranteed sleep, through all the itchiness and the worrying.

But, if it is to be dealt with then I'm going to have to try going without the Trazodone to see if that has any effect. Maybe tonight. We shall see.

Tomorrow's a big day. Work in the evening and before that the first day of my Therapeutic Day Programme alcohol counselling. I feel a bit of a fraud already - I'm drinking and most of the others on the course will be abstinent and fresh out of what could be a life-saving detox. Will they want to hear from someone who's in a relatively controlled drinking phase.

There's the temptation of another big game this afternoon - Manchester United V Chelsea but I haven't yet decided what to do about that and to drink three days in a row would be a bad thing I think; I'll feel much better tomorrow if I don't.

What I know does me good and what I do though aren't always the same things.

All the best,

CD.

The Daily Happy, is mellow today.

This one makes me really, really happy.

Four Tet, My Angel Rocks Back and Forth.

A much better day.

There that's better. Today was a lovely, sharp, fresh out of the box chalk to yesterday's hard, back of the sofa fluff-covered lump of cheddar.

And, it hasn't worn off yet. I still feel damn fine thank you very much, I might even call it an up.

Why's that then. Simple really. Better behaviour, more self regard. Wednesday was a mess. I was down because I feared my skin was running away from me - not literally you understand. Because I didn't eat properly, because I had a bath not a shower - bad for the skin that - and just let myself go a bit.

Today, I kept myself busy, and even stayed off the computer for a decent long time - oh, and despite this being one of the days my 'rules' allow me to drink on, I haven't touched a drop, although there's a bottle of sherry and some cans of Guinness loose aboot this hoose.

I started my volunteer work today as well, which is another little step back towards the life I once had before I ripped it up in a soggy mess of booze and misery.

I only stayed for two hours at Journeys (the depression charity, there's a link on the sidebar if you'd like to look at their work, which is really all about self-help, diet, exercise and the like), but it's great to feel useful.

I wrote some stuff for their newsletter - searching the internet for news about depression and chopping it up into bite-sized chunks. It's the sort of stuff I used to do like falling of a log (is that really that easy? To be perfectly honest I've never tried it) and I'm certainly not as proficient as I used to be, lacking the confidence of continued practice and knowing their house style.

I won't be able to go in next week, which is a shame, but for today that was very valuable for me - I hope it had some use for those on the receiving end.

I kept myself out of the slough of despond for the rest of the day with housework and food shopping and going to the library to make one of my regular donations to Cardiff City Council. Despite being a qualified librarian I am appalling at returning books on time - perhaps it's because of it, perhaps there's some terrible psychological scar.

I'm due at the doctor's tomorrow morning. I'm going to feel a bit foolish I think - the main reason for making the appointment was the skin problem, and, by stopping using Doublebase and going back to aqueous cream it seems to have sorted itself out. Still, I might, if I can pipe up the courage to break out of my 'yes doctor, no doctor, thank you doctor' persona, ask for a referral to a skin specialist as the Community Addictions Unit doctor suggested I should.

Well, it's a reason to get up anyway.

If you spent it, thank you for your time.

CD.

The Daily Happy.

I don't know why but almost everything I'm posting seems to be Scottish - and old. This is really old, ie from my childhood, when I loved it dearly and I love it now. I believe one of the KLF might have been the manager of Strawberry Switchblade - and no doubt if you're more inclined than me you can find out.

What I do know is one of the singers went on to a band called Death In June, who were fantastically gloomy.

Unlike this which is bittersweet, or sweetbitter, take yer pick.

And this is Since Yesterday by Strawberry Switchblade:

Down Kafka's korridors with a beetroot face.

I'm all of a tizzy now, panicking, fetid and feverish and fearing disaster and the lock-in and the hideaway.

I should be on an up.

I've just got back from assessment for the therapeutic day programme (TDP) I was referred to by the Community Addictions Unit doctor. A drive out to the leafy suburbs to a great rambling pile of a place that acts as Cardiff's psychiatric hospital - corridors straight out of Kafka. But my skin is rebelling and revolting and squats over any positives.

It's on my face and I can't face that. I keep applying the moisturising cream but it makes no difference and a beetroot red is starting to spread across my forehead and like a mask around my eyes; the cream stings horribly when I apply it and the skin on my forehead is starting to get puffy with what I fear will be bursting pustules underneath the surface.

I've been here before you see. When I was a student I was out of control. Completely out of control with both drinking and drug abuse. I drank a bottle of spirits and more a day and took enormous amounts of dope, speed and acid. I didn't give a flying faeces for myself, rarely washed or changed my clothes and eventually horrible things happened to my skin. My face became one big scab - I was Elephant Man repulsive and people stared in the street if I ever got the temptation to go outside, which I didn't. That was impetigo in the end, it started as eczema and just got infected, and it feels like that now.

It feels unfair (life is unfair they say, but I don't care I want it to be gentle to me even if just for a while while I look for some strength). I won't be able to cope with that coming on again and I'm so far from where I was then. I'm coming out of addictive drinking and indeed haven't drunk since Sunday, I smoke dope occasionally and I eat healthily and regularly. I haven't changed anything that might inspire an allergic reaction as far as I can tell and I live more cleanly and healthily than I have done for a long time.

The weather isn't helping I suppose. It's bitterly cold and windy and everywhere you go inside the heating is on full blast and that makes it flare more. God I hope this passes. I've just rung the doctor's to make an appointment for Friday and I'm feeling pretty desperate now. Perhaps I don't drink enough water? I'm drinking water.

I'm self-conscious enough as it is, please don't let this go where I fear it might.

On the slightly sunnier side of the street though, I did, as I say make it my TDP appointment. Just an introductory chat with the nice fella who runs it.

I told him where I was with my drinking and he told me what the programme consisted of. Ten days of talking in groups and I'm due to start on Monday - another reason to get up and out the house for a 10am start. There's also the chance of referrals to outside agencies for help with work and the like and that's something I'm going to have to really try and pick up on.

I told him of my previous negative experiences with group therapy but as I said to him I'm happy to have an open mind and take help wherever I can get it at the moment. The first rule of the programme is confidentiality so I won't be writing too much about what goes on in the group, but I will tell you how it goes, if I'm not cowering in misery under a green skin by then. Another rule is abstinence, monitored by breathalyzer - I just have a zero reading this morning. I had kind of planned to have a drink on Sunday - there's Manchester United (the Red Scum to Leeds fans) v Chelsea (the Chelsea Scum to Leeds fans; we're a lovely bunch) to watch. So I have another spur towards abstinence and control.

God, I want this to go away - if it means coming off the Trazodone that's what I'll do, in fact, I'm not going to take it tonight: I don't need to be up early tomorrow and I've read Trazodone has no withdrawal symptoms and the redness is how it started on my hands before escalating all the way to cracked and bleeding skin and infected patches - I want to crawl into bed and die. I've just looked up Campral and that too has skin rash as a possibly serious side-effect; why can't I just be fucking happy and healthy?

If you spent it thank you for your time.

CD.

The Daily Happy.

Today's Daily Happy continues to show my age and the fact that I really don't try very hard to keep up with what's new, exiting and simply too magical in today's music.

Well, sod 'em, they're young they'll survive.

Despite being an extremely melancholy song this makes me happy in the shock of recognition way - the lyrics that is, I'm not a dark and interesting looking Scottish girl with good taste in lipstick; would that I were dear reader, would that I were.

"For the self-assured I have no cure, I only wish I was." Do google Pull The Wires from the Wall, you'll love them.

I hope you enjoy it.

Me and you and the search for my courage

I'm trying to waste less time - time is precious for us earth crawlers it is finite and ever-dwindling. Yet, I tend to spew it out on my shoes or strew it in my footsteps, unloved and unused.

So, how does one waste less time? (I'm open to suggestions here).

A lot of the time I waste is wasted here in the wooden chair in front of the yellow door Mrs CD rescued to make into a desk - she wastes far less time than I.

Some bits of the time are not as badly wasted as others. This, for example, I don't consider to be completely wasted - I think of this as work in a way; at least I'm doing what I'd like to do for a living, writing. This time I blithely classify as practice.

However, bits of the time land unused on the chronological crap heap having served no purpose whatsoever.

These bits of time have been spent thinking, brooding and fearing.

"What are you doing Cardiff Drunk?" You might ask if you was an asking sort of person.

"I'm thinking," I might reply (I'm an answering sort of person).

Really though I'm probably brooding or fearing.

"What do you brood upon Cardiff Drunk?" We've established now that the character 'you' - a faceless internet reader - is indeed an asking sort of person, curious even.

"Fecking everything," I would reply, with a sigh.

Sadly that's true, and I'd love to stop it - again, 'you', the faceless internet reader is invited to supply suggestions at this point, I, Cardiff Drunk believing that a question-asking sort of person might, in their curiosity, have uncovered things we like to call 'answers' and 'solutions'.

Principally I brood over perceived wrongs, slurs, slights and betrayals. Over and over in ever recycling circles of thought in terrible technicolour perfect recall. I make myself do it. We have control over our thoughts to a degree do we not? (An idea that's well put in the self-help book, Stop Thinking Start Living - a book I started to read, got on well with and stopped reading to get on with some more important thinking, brooding and fearing.)

The fearing is less based in the time paste of the past and more in the big blank of the future. It encompasses everything - my parents will die and I will not be able to cope, people will mock me in the streets and I will not be able to cope, I will die of a heart attack and I will not be able to cope, the heating is on so surely the boiler will explode AND! I! WILL! NOT! BE! ABLE! TO! COPE!.

It's great stuff isn't it? (Do you need a question mark after a rhetorical question? That one gets one because it's not rhetorical; the character of you, now playing something of a Greek chorus role is being called upon again.) Some of it's even quite imaginative.

Still, I'd like to do less of both. This, as that book suggests, means more 'doing'.

For me, beyond the household chores and making sure I get through the basics of personal hygiene and care of appearance and not doing bad things that will make me hate myself, doing ought to mean writing properly and contacting publications and writing for free sites in order to build a published portfolio of some kind.

But one of the key fears is, I Am No Good At Anything And If I Try I Will Fail and I Will Not Be Able To Cope. In fact that's the founding father of the fears.

Let's call this fear one that should, as Stop Thinking Start Living suggests, be dismissed. It may be true (and here the character of you - now suspended well above the stage to take a much more metaphorical role as a divine presence or all-seeing-eye of some type - is being cravenly invited too offer up: "No, CD, you're ace, don't dislike yourself so!")

But even if it is true it shouldn't matter really should it, people can only say no to your submissions and, despite your fears, they probably will do so quite pleasantly and without the recourse to mocking, laughter and character assassination you have conjured and with which you believe YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO COPE.

Back to the time and its wasting. Some of it is spent quite harmlessly and pleasantly but not particularly usefully. Reading the blogs you might see on the sidebar and stuff. I try and leave comments too and consider that in some way useful as I gather that's the way to build a following on the internet, but, there are plenty of other things I should be doing.

What are you getting at here? (It's you again! Now dressed in a purple velveteen smoking jacket and affecting a louche and slouching air - you're mocking me aren't you, I warn you I WON'T BE ABLE TO COPE.)

Well, I'm just trying to explore drink and depression as usual.

Because there is one sure-fire cure for thinking, brooding and fearing, and it starts with d, continues with rinking and ends in disaster.

I always find courage in a cup, sometimes things even get done in a galumphing and clumsy sort of way that does me or the things no justice.

Now, I need to start finding it somewhere else. I've looked everywhere, I've looked in bottles and glasses and in little paper wraps full of powder and inside rolled up cigarette papers and I've looked in books about meditation and yoga (but rarely to the point of going beyond looking and actually doing, for reasons that have been explored in tedious detail above) and the like and I've looked in education and reading and work. I've even looked in my memory because I must have had some courage once, surely.

(I have just stopped myself from writing But I've Never Been To Me.)

And now I'm letting myself type it because that's where I know where I should be looking, but, it's a long search and I'm not sure which tools to use, CBT, will power (such as it is, which is as that of a moth in a lighthouse), what?

Well, the search continues, any suggestions on the location of courage and ways of finding it are very gratefully accepted and I've got no-one to ask but you.