Jason Cook: grit, determination, a cracker of a story and a new movie…

Jason Cook on his phone in Borehamwood

Jason Cook has turned up occasionally in this blog.

The last time was in December 2021 when my opening sentence was “You need grit and determination – and nowadays, ideally, the potential for sequels – to get movies made…”

Jason Cook has grit and determination, is indefatigable, has a staggeringly fertile creative mind and he has sequels and now a prequel. 

He also has dyslexia but has so far published four linked semi-autobiographical gangster novels, a children’s book called Rats in Space (the title explains it all) and a novel about the Rave scene, set in the 1980s and 1990s – Euphoria – Pirates of the South.

He has long had plans to film the first of his four semi-autobiographical gangster books There’s No Room For Jugglers in My Circus.

But now his first film is being released and it is a prequel to that, a set-up, for the planned four main semi-autobiographical gangster movies based on his novels.

Cookster: The Darkest Days is being screened this Saturday at the adventurous Genesis Cinema in Mile End Road as part of the London Independent Film Festival.

The plotline? 

“A dyslexic teen misunderstood by his family, abandoned by the system and desperate for respect, becomes a drug dealer struggling to balance his addiction and debt to a local gangster while a rival threatens to destroy his world, driving him apart from the woman he loves and a daughter he’s never known.”

---

JASON: So, after 20 years, we managed to get the budget together from various investors and a film production company called Silent D Pictures.

Indefatigable Djonny Chen of Silent D Pictures

JOHN: That’s Djonny Chen’s company.

He is almost as indefatigable as you…

JASON: Yes. Djonny has made 27 films since Covid – directed and/or produced/executive produced.

And he’s lined up to do another two films with me – Pirates of the South and Rats in Space. as well as Cookster: There’s No Room For Jugglers in My Circus, the follow-up to Cookster: The Darkest Days.

JOHN: And now you’ve written a fifth Cookster book to go with the film.

JASON: Yes. That’ll come out this year.

JOHN: So Cookster: The Darkest Days is about you growing up in Borehamwood, where we both live.

JASON: Yes. We shot it over 18 days in Borehamwood and Radlett – all on location.

Craige Middleburg plays the slightly older, dodgy Jason

In this film, I’m played from ages 12 to 18. Two actors play me: one younger, one older. Samuel Staite plays young Jason. Craige Middleburg is the older me.

Then there’s Nick Moran from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels who plays my dad and Tracy Shaw from Coronation Street plays my mum.

JOHN: You shot part of the film at the school you actually attended as a kid.

JASON: Yes. Parkside School in Borehamwood. It doesn’t have the same head as when I was there.

JOHN: Had they heard of you by repute at the school?

JASON: Yes. They’d heard I had been a naughty young lad and that I suffered from ADHD and dyslexia. Back then, they thought I was no use: I lacked confidence and lacked focus and they reckoned I would never amount to anything and I would end up in prison.

JOHN: Well, you did end up in prison, but now you’ve written all these books and co-produced this film.

JASON: I couldn’t read or write at the time when they reckoned I would never amount to anything. I spent most of my younger years standing outside the headmaster’s office: well, it was a headmistress back then.

JOHN: Did she ever amount to anything?

JASON: No. Not that I know of.

JOHN: Did the school welcome you back with open arms?

JASON: They were very helpful. We got the design team to come in and put the classrooms back to the early 1980s. We had the school uniforms, the chalkboards instead of the digital whiteboards they’ve got on the wall now. 

Cookster – The Darkest Days is coming

All the locations had to be re-dressed for the era. We’re talking about me from 12 to 18. So 1975 to early 1980s. We re-dressed my mum’s house.

JOHN: Do you appear in the film?

JASON: You’ll miss me if you blink.

JOHN: Djonny has links to Indonesia.

JASON: Yes, he has links to distribution over there.

JOHN: Any changes to appeal to the Indonesian market?

JASON: We changed one character in the script from British to Indonesian and it worked really well. The actress playing her is Elvira Devinamira. She’s Indonesian.

We leave the film on a cliffhanger, ready to go into the next film Cookster: There’s No Room for Jugglers in My Circus. The government has now given us more tax credits, so we can now claim up to about 70% on the production. 

JOHN: And other film projects?

JASON: I’m working on Rats in Space. We’ve got American producers involved now. It’s an animation, based on a true-life story that I wrote.

Jason has plans for Rats In Space – based on a true story ??

JOHN: Yer what? A true life story??

JASON: A French rat was put in a rocket and shot to the Moon. He never made it to the Moon, but he managed to get back alive. So I wrote a story about how he became an astronaut.

JOHN: Will the rat do any promotional interviews to publicise the movie when it comes out?

JASON: That’s difficult to say.

Hirsute Jason is a man of many hats and movie ideas but he has no dandruff…

This live Porno stage show will try to do justice to the REAL Trainspotting sequel

Irvine Welsh‘s Trainspotting was published exactly 30 years ago. It was longlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize, but was apparently rejected for the shortlist after “offending the sensibilities of two judges”. The film version came out in 1996 with the movie T2: Trainspotting emerging in 2007 as a sort-of sequel. But the actual novel sequel to Trainspotting – Porno – was published in 2002.

This Sunday, the new stage version of Porno will open at London’s Arts Theatre, running for seven consecutive Sundays.

It was adapted by Scots writer/producer Davie Carswell…

---

The original novel

JOHN: This is a stage production of the T2: Trainspotting movie sequel…

DAVIE: No. Trainspotting 2 was a standalone film. 

JOHN: So this Porno stage show is based on the original Porno novel, which was a sequel to the original Trainspotting novel, not on the T2: Trainspotting film.

DAVIE: 100%. Fans of Irvine Welsh maybe weren’t as keen on the T2 film as… I mean, I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it, but it maybe didn’t do as well as they hoped.

Everyone online is saying to me: This Porno play had better be Porno and not T2...

And it IS Porno. We’ve lifted large chunks of dialogue and monologues right out of the book, to give it that really effective Irvine feeling.

JOHN: Why is it titled Porno? Trainspotting was about drugs, not porn.

DAVIE: The title’s Porno because Simon ‘Sick Boy’ Williamson is trying to make porn to make his fortune and this is his last big Hurrah. He’s at an age – a mid-life crisis – and he sees time running out… By happy coincidence, back comes Mark Renton to make amends. The question is Will Simon be able to get himself out of the bitterness that has enveloped him? 

Because he’s a MASSIVE coke-head. A massive cocaine addict. He’s been doing cocaine every day for the last 15 years, so his mind’s a bit mushy at times.

That’s the story.

JOHN: You first produced this Porno stage show at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe.

DAVIE: Yes. We did it in Edinburgh last year and then we did three sold-out nights at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow this year. And now we’ve done Greenock, Liverpool, Crewe and Manchester. And the one common response we noticed was that the more shocking the line, the more controversial the joke, the bigger the laugh. That’s exactly what it comes down to.

Irvine is not a shock jock, but his humour is shocking; it’s dark. You only have to see something like The Acid House to see some of the darkness. But we love it; we fucking love the darkness and the controversy. You will see people laughing and then going: “Ooh! I shouldn’t be laughing at that!” The comedy instinct is right there to begin with; then the moralistic bit comes in. “Oh! Should I really be laughing at that?” But, by then it’s too late. You’re laughing.

JOHN: When you say ‘we’ enjoy it, you mean Scottish people? Not necessarily English?

DAVIE: That was my worry. That was why we did Liverpool, Crewe and Manchester before London.

JOHN: Ah, well, they’re different Oop North…

DAVIE: (LAUGHS) We would happily take them in an independent Scotland.

JOHN: But how do you manage in England with the Scottish dialect in general?

DAVIE: We are keeping as close to the book as possible. When you read the book, Simon and Mark – Sick Boy and Renton – their language is written in perfect English. Begbie and Spud are proper broad Leith dialogue.

When we asked some of the audiences in Liverpool and Manchester: “Did you understand that?” they said: “Well, we didn’t understand it 100%, but we know what they meant.” 

Irvine Welsh with Davie in Edinburgh last year.

Also, because of the dialect, at the beginning of the play in London, we are going have some slides up and run through a glossary of terms. “Bairn = child” and so on. The last one is “cunt = cunt”.

I mean, a cunt’s a cunt wherever you are and we must have the highest cunt count in any play that’s ever existed. The director has said he’s getting a bit of ‘cunt PTSD’, just hearing it so often.

JOHN: It’s interesting because, in London it’s an insult, but in Glasgow it’s almost a term of affection. Like ‘bastard’ in Australia. 

DAVIE: I’m writing a juke box musical at the moment, set in Glasgow.

JOHN: What’s a juke box musical?

DAVIE: It’s when you use the songs that are already out there.

We are going to use songs by artists with a Glasgow connection. So Simple Minds, Texas, Primal Scream, people like that. One of the lines in it is when somebody comes up from London and they can’t understand when people say: “Oh, you’re a good cunt”… He’s told: “Oh, no, it’s a compliment!” And he also sees close Glasgow friends insulting each other but just laughing it off; and the explanation is: “Look! We only insult him cos we love him!”

The guy from London tries it and he stands up and shouts: “Ya bunch of cunts!” but it doesn’t translate…

When you think about it, it was a minor miracle that Irvine’s first book, Trainspotting, ever got published. But thank God the publisher did. It started off as a book, then a very successful play, then a film. 30 years on and it’s still touring on stage all over the world.

Certain things are timeless. Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac. We are now onto the second and third generation of people loving Trainspotting.

Davie at the Arts Theatre in London

JOHN: You adapted Porno direct from the book and a book is maybe 300 pages; you have maybe a 60 minute play. You have to cut out an enormous amount.

DAVIE: That is THE biggest challenge. Cutting out characters.

In a film, you can have a cast of 40 or 50. But you can’t really have that in a stage play – and you can’t really afford it.

There is a character in the book called ‘Juice’ Terry. Irvine’s fans love him, but I couldn’t fit him in – and also actors cost money – so I took the four main male characters and the female part of Nicky, whose name I’ve change to Lizzie. And I’ve brought in an authority figure – a local policeman – for them all to rebel against.

But I do think ‘Juice’ Terry should have his own play and I’m thinking of doing that.

JOHN: You’re an actor, writer, producer, director, but you decided not to direct this.

DAVIE: No. I think you need to have a bit of distance between a writer and director because otherwise it becomes too headstrong. I would class myself as primarily a writer. Occasionally I will tread the boards. I produce so I can put my writing on. 

Handing a script over to a director makes you a better writer, because the cast can then try things with it, do new things with it. 

JOHN: Did Irvine Welsh interfere with you writing the play from his book?

DAVIE: He just lets you get on with it. On you go: just run with it and see what you can do…

JOHN: He saw your Edinburgh Fringe production of Porno last year. Did you know he was coming?

DAVIE: I did. They were actually making two documentaries about him at the time and one of them asked if they could bring him along and film him watching the play. 

Right at the end he just jumped up and started a standing ovation.

JOHN: That must have been…

DAVIE: Amazing! We are doing seven Sundays here to start with…

JOHN: So it might get extended…

DAVIE: That’s my hope.

Local reaction to the relaxation of the heroin/cocaine drug laws in Vancouver

This report appeared in the Daily Telegraph, London, on 1st February 2023:

---

So I asked Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent, based in Vancouver, about the effect of the new laws…

---

Hi John,

Sorry for late reply, I was working amongst the masses… I have been helping revive overdose victims several times a week.

Sunrise in Vancouver… and an ambulance takes another drug patient to St Paul’s hospital… (Photograph by Anna Smith)

The consensus amongst addicts is that the small amount of drugs people are now legally allowed to carry is not enough… so their lives will still be disrupted by making multiple excursions to obtain enough.

The thing that drug users most want is called a ‘Safe Supply’, which means medically prescribed amounts (which can differ in people, depending on their drug tolerance and stage of recovery).

‘Safe Supply’ means government regulated supplies of the pure drugs.

Most of the overdoses are not intentional, but are the result of using drugs contaminated with fentanyl, benzodiazepine and ‘filler’, substances like veterinary medicines, chalk, etc.

The Vancouver Police Department has announced that people should not worry as “We are not going to be carrying scales around with us – We are just going to be ‘eyeballing’ it…”

That has not reassured the drug users I spoke with, who are addicts and low level ‘dealers’ amongst themselves. They would prefer to deal with their doctors rather than the police and their ‘eyeballing’ techniques.

It was twenty years ago today… a heroin addict’s mugging and a broken heart…

Earlier today, I heard some radio station playing the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper and its opening lines “It was twenty years ago today…”

I used to half-heartedly keep a diary on my computer. On a whim, I looked up what happened twenty years ago today… I have changed the names of other people and their locations…

---

Saturday 22nd June 2002 – Edinburgh

Shirley is trying to give up heroin. Her father is trying to give up chocolate.

In the evening, Shirley and I stayed up until 03.00am talking. She told me God gave her help immediately on three occasions she asked for help. She has a water container from which she swigs regularly during the day. I had presumed it contained water; in fact it contains Blue Star cider.

When she lived in Manchester, addicted to heroin, she was mugged by a tall black man and and a small white girl she knew. Without warning, the man kicked her in the chest. She went down on the ground and both started kicking her. She had been mugged five times before so she used her hands and arms to protect a pocket with only £2 in it. They stole that £2 but left her handbag and the other pockets in her jacket untouched – that was where she really kept her money.

(Image by Randy Laybourne via UnSplash)

---

Then I went back another year in my diary…

---

Friday 22nd June 2001 – Cambridge/Borehamwood/Clacton-on-Sea

I had lunch with a friend in Cambridge. It was her 16th wedding anniversary and I think she was feeling a little down. 

She told me her son (aged 13) is still being bullied at school. The other week, someone pushed him into a bush. Her daughter (aged 11) says she has decided she is going to marry a rich man, take over her mother’s house, have children early, then her mother can look after them while she goes out and has fun.

“Good luck finding a rich man,” my friend told her daughter.

“You managed,” she told my friend.

“I didn’t know he was going to be rich,” my friend replied. “I thought we were soul mates.”

After lunch, I drove back home to Borehamwood.

As soon as I got through the front door, my mobile rang – It was the matron at my father’s nursing home. My mother and aunt (my father’s sister) had walked in to see him and found him lying back with his mouth open, apparently not breathing (and, as I later found out, his false teeth dropped down from his upper gum) with a spoon in his hand and a bowl of jelly in front of him. My aunt, a former nurse, found he had no pulse.

The nursing home matron was up in the room within about a minute and found he had a strong pulse but, by this time, both my mother and aunt were in tears.

I drove out to Essex from Borehamwood in the early Friday evening rush hour – it took about 2 hours 45 mins instead of the normal 90 minutes – to find my father looking dramatically thinner, I thought: bonier than he had been when I saw him yesterday afternoon. I got there around 1830 by which time my mother and aunt were dry-eyed but still twitchily upset. I drove them back to their homes around 1900 – my mother broke down in my arms – and then I went back to the nursing home where my father was asleep. When I had left, I had told my father:

“I’ll be about half an hour.”

“You’ll be back – and the boatman?” he asked me.

“The boatman?”

“The boatman.”

“Probably.”

When I got back and he was awake, I asked him if he felt hot.

“I really don’t know,” he replied.

My father’s wedding ring was found on the floor below his bed this morning. Because he had lost so much weight, it had slipped off his finger.

(Image by Kelly Sikkema via UnSplash)

There was a funny smell inside an English prison in the 1980s…

Keith introduces a programme at Anglia TV in his inimitable style…

So, yesterday I was having a chat on the phone with the delightful Keith Martin, a TV announcer whom I encountered during his 27 on-and-off freelance years at Anglia TV.

“…when I went to prison for the only time in my life,” was the end of one sentence. So, obviously, I asked for more details…

---

HMP Wayland in Norfolk: “It wasn’t a high security prison…”

KEITH: I was working at Anglia at the time. How or why we were invited to go to the prison, I just don’t know. I went with another of the Anglia announcers. This was probably in the late 1980s.

It was quite a modern prison – Wayland. It opened in 1985; Jeffrey Archer was imprisoned there for perjury in 2011. But I was there, as I say, I think in the late 1980s…

It wasn’t a high security prison but, as we went into one section, the door was locked solidly behind us before they opened the next door. It was that kind of prison.

JOHN: Why were you there?

KEITH: Probably some promotional thing for Anglia. I actually never knew. It was arranged last-minute. But, for some reason, we were there to watch the prisoners performing a pantomime.

JOHN: Oh no you weren’t.

KEITH: Oh yes we were. We went into a hall, not a particularly large hall. I can’t remember if the chairs were screwed to the floor… In fact, I think we were probably sitting on big, heavy benches.

JOHN: What was the first thing you noticed when you entered the prison?

KEITH: The smell. When we entered the inner sanctum of the prison, there was a very strong smell.

JOHN: Of what?

KEITH: Drugs.

JOHN: What was the inner sanctum?

KEITH: As we approached the recreational area.

JOHN: Recreational drugs?

KEITH: Indeed so.

JOHN: If there was a strong smell of drugs, the prison officers must have been aware of this too?

KEITH: I had the impression it was one way of pacifying the inmates. They allowed a certain amount of it to go on.

JOHN: Did someone actually tell you that?

KEITH: The way I would prefer to phrase it was that it was implied at the time that this was… tolerated… that this would be allowed to happen.

JOHN: How did the prisoners get the drugs in?

KEITH: Well, I found out one way years later when I went to a second-hand mobile phone shop in Clapham Junction where they gave you money for your old phones. I told the man: “I’ve got one of the original Nokia phones,” and he said: “Oh! They’re very popular… because people use them for other purposes!”

“What?” I asked.

“They stick them up their arsking-for-it,” he told me… And that’s how they were smuggled in to prisons back then. With a contraceptive. They put the Nokia phone inside a contraceptive.

(This would have been around 1999/2000.)

JOHN: It would be embarrassing if the phone rang in transit.

KEITH: I don’t know what the signal strength would have been like.

JOHN: Do you still have a Nokia?

KEITH: Yes, the old one and it still works.

JOHN: Where do you keep it?

KEITH: In a safe place. As a back-up. But, as I’m sure you know, this was why they put certain people on the potty.

JOHN: Why?

KEITH: They used to put them on a potty and then wait until they did ‘an evacuation’.

JOHN: What?? In prison??

KEITH: Didn’t you know that?

JOHN: No. They did that in case a Nokia fell out?

KEITH: Other brands are available but, yes, this was part of the security thing. Maybe they used German toilet bowls.

JOHN: German?

KEITH: When I worked for BFBS in West Germany and West Berlin, there was a ceramic platform at the back of the toilet bowls onto which your evacuation fell so you could inspect it before you flushed and the water gushed it down the hole. Some Germans are obsessed about what’s happened to their poo.

JOHN: Up the Ruhr?

KEITH: Enough, John.

---

As a sign of how things have changed, a 2017 report in the International Business Times revealed that inmates at Wayland Prison were now being allowed to use laptop computers to order meals from their cells and had been given in-cell telephones to keep in touch with relatives in the evenings. 

All the prison’s cells had telephones and the prison was “also planning the limited introduction of ‘video calling’ to friends and family later in the year.”

“However,” the report continued, “in common with most prisons, HMP Wayland continues to battle a tide of contraband flooding into into the jail… So far, in the first six months of this year, the jail’s seized haul includes over a kilo of drugs, 177 mobile phones and almost 500 litres of alcohol, most of which was illicitly brewed inside the premises.”

What life is like overlooking an alleyway near a Batman set in Vancouver, Canada

Today I got an email from Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent. The houseboat she lived on sank in Vancouver around Christmas/New Year and she was made homeless. Now she has an update:

---

After a few small adventures, including nearly being expelled from a church shelter, I have now found a small apartment in ‘Railtown’, right beside the Port of Vancouver, where I hear seagulls and huge cranes.

After finding the place, I went for a walk around the area at night and I was surprised to learn that I had been transported to Gotham because, as I walked up a bridge over the railway line and looked down, the first thing I saw was a big sign reading:

GOTHAM CITY SHIPYARD

Below the towering cranes, people were standing about casting long shadows. 

Clouds of fog obscured some of the port buildings and then three cars side-by-side, one of then a Mustang, revved-up their engines and then took off, drove at high speed and then circled back to precisely where they had started. They waited there, with their lights on. Then a much larger black car followed the same route, but totally silently.  

They were filming a Batman series or movie.

I have not quite moved in to my new apartment yet: it requires a bit of cleaning and – horrors – FURNITURE !

That was one of the things I loved about living on my boat: whenever I passed by a furniture shop I had no covetous thoughts whatsoever…

However, there were a few OK pieces of furniture left behind at my new apartment and my new neighbour – a kind, curmudgeonly sort of guy – has loaned me a couple of fine wooden armchairs. He said that I would be doing him a favour by keeping the chairs for now and that he generally likes to keep to himself. 

I told him: “That’s perfect. That’s just how I am too!”

Although it’s just a few blocks down from notorious Hastings Street, the apartment is remarkably quiet. It is set back from the street, at the intersection of two alleyways.

There is no end of people using substances out there, usually crouched beside dumpsters or slumped in a doorway.

One sunny morning I saw an increasing number of young men sprawled out, with their knapsacks and foil and pipes, lolling peacefully enjoying their meth, as if at a bucolic picnic. Suddenly a large courier van turned into the alley and stopped. The men were oblivious and made no attempt to get up and I imagined the frustrated driver, probably wondering what to do next.

The apartment below has recently been renovated and all its contents dumped in front of the building – old shower curtains, rotting regular curtains, a queen size mattress and even a toilet, perched precariously near the front door.

One time I saw a man standing up on the queen size mattress, bouncing up and down enthusiastically like a small child. 

I don’t have all day to look out the window but, when I checked twenty minutes later, he was still bouncing. Then a black SUV pulled up and he ran to the passenger side. Then they both left. Drugs ?

One day the mattress just disappeared.

Later, two jolly-looking derelict men, wearing good but battered hats, both using canes, came tottering past.

One cried out with surprise: “Look, John! Your bed is gone! “

A few days later, some ragged-looking people moved the toilet off the front stoop and covered it with a soiled curtain. Some of the other rubbish had been organised somewhat. A pillow was placed neatly on a pallet and so on. 

I thought: “Good. At least we don’t have to look at the toilet.” 

Another day, a friend who was in the apartment taking-in the ever-changing cast of characters reported: “There’s a man in a kilt now”.  

I imagined some scrawny punk guy covered in tattoos but, when I looked, it was a beefy older man in full blue and white tartan regalia right down to his socks, marching along as if on his way to an event. 

Then the toilet had its blanket removed and two chubby drunks – a man and a woman – were hauling it away.

But it turned out they had just left it in the alleyway, behind the building.

The rubbish pile keeps shifting with orange needle caps, random socks and discarded clothing appearing and disappearing.

A tall wonky cedar tree and a Queen Elizabeth rose and a depleted strand of bamboo somehow rise up from the garbage pile. I read that the rose enjoys mulch, but it didn’t say anything about whether it likes shower curtains or socks.

Songbirds perch on the bamboo and flit in and out of the cedar tree.

In the daytime, crows stand at intervals atop the blue fence, waiting for an older Chinese lady who empties out a huge bag of peanuts for them every day. They noisily grab a peanut and fly back up on the fence or into the space inside it, which has big signs above it saying: FILM CREW AND SPECIAL EVENTS and NO DUMPING. 

Once in a while, the vacant space fills up with film crew cars, but I don’t think there have been any special events of late.

There is a constant din of dockside cranes loading and unloading container ships, mixed with the cries of seagulls, but there is little car traffic near the place and no crowds of people, as there are just a few blocks away at Main and Hastings.

I walked through there last week and it is as chaotic and raucous as ever, like a demented fairground, people selling anything and everything. There are a lot of dogs too and poo on the ground, clouds of dust and more and more people jammed together smoking methamphetamine or shooting up. 

In the middle of all this, they are also sitting on the pavement furiously crayoning in colouring books, which is supposed to be therapeutic, but to me it looks sad.

People are dressed either in rags or the latest streetwear fashion, in stuff I haven’t even seen in magazines – or in their pyjamas or in rags. There are an increasing number of fashionably dressed First Nations people, wearing clothing printed with their traditional or modern Coast Salish designs. I lusted after an innovative white jacket from Bella Coola that I saw a good looking young man wearing. He was walking very quickly though, so I couldn’t ask who made it.

A few nights ago I saw somebody on the corner who specialized in selling aluminum walking canes, which lay on the sidewalk, radiating out in a circle…They are a hot item, with so many people needing them around here. I wondered where they were stolen from. Or maybe they came from a care home.

A diabetic friend from the marina ended up in a care home in New Westminster and his daughter went to great trouble to get him a nice wheelchair, so he could explore his surroundings. He explored them so well that he discovered the room where they stored all the wheelchairs of people who had died.

So, the next time she went there, he was roaring around in a motorized chair and busy with a racket he had set up in the gazebo, buying cigarettes from street people in exchange for apple juice bottles he collected from the other inhabitants of the place.

There is a huge courthouse and jail that takes up an entire block of Main Street. I’ve noticed nice vehicles parked right in front – an expensive all matt black Japanese motorcycle one day, a bright red 1969 Thunderbird car the next. I can’t figure out who they belong to. Successful criminals? Or lawyers? Or maybe just people with nice cars who think outside the courthouse is the only safe place to park.

Meanwhile, back at my apartment, glancing out the window again, I was startled to see a large young Chinese man with a box-shaped camera on a tripod, pointing right at the back of the building. I wondered what he could be taking a photo of. All that was there was a grey stucco wall, two windows covered with rusty grates and some vague, not very interesting graffiti. 

He must have been an art student I figured, or maybe a hobby photographer from one of the trendy warehouse/condos closer to the waterfront. When I left the building, I saw that the toilet was still sitting out back. 

So THAT was what he was photographing! 

One more thing… 

Just as my friend and I were exciting the building yesterday, a couple of middle class guys were taking a shortcut through the alley. One of them pointed at the building (and at us) and said loudly: “I can’t believe people actually LIVE in that building!”

It is really quite nice inside though. 

Especially the view of the alley.

Anna says: “Here is a photo of what used to be a  snowball or maybe it was a snowman. Snow it goes.”

Taking cocaine in the 1980s and early 1990s…

The only recreational drugs I was interested in when I was in my late teens were LSD and heroin… LSD because of its alleged creative expansion of the mind… and heroin for the opposite reason why most people take drugs – the downside not the upside.

I remember when the government’s first anti-heroin drug ads were screened on TV – all that despair, despondency and crouching-down-in-the-corner imagery – a friend of mine said to me that the people who designed the anti-heroin campaign didn’t seem to be on the same wavelength as the people who might be attracted to take heroin. They thought the images would be vey unattractive, but she found them almost a turn-on. 

Ironically, she had, in fact, taken heroin once and the up-whoosh she found completely overwhelming to such an extent that she was frightened by her own attraction to it; but she was also attracted in a self-destructive way to the downside afterwards.

When I myself would have taken acid or smack, they were not really available in the then limited circles I moved in.

By the time they were accessible, I had seen and read about the dangers – Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd had gone completely doolally on LSD and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys had allegedly initially got psychologically hooked on acid then went doolally after someone spiked his drink.

When I was around twenty, a female friend of mine married a heroin addict.

In I guess the mid-1980s, I remember for some reason sitting in on someone else’s overnight video edit in Soho. The guy I knew directing the edit was being obsessive about every single exact cut and two in particular, getting them moved back and forth by individual frames (there are 25 frames per second on UK videotape).

The edit took about four hours, with those particular two cuts taking about two hours in the middle of it… and with him making regular trips to the toilet, usually emerging rubbing his nose.

Not recommended by me (Photo free from Wikipedia)

At the end of the edit, when he was again in the toilet, the editor told me that the two edits were, at the end of the session, exactly where they had been at the very start.

Around the same time, I also had a job interview with a female company boss who – unsurprisingly but absolutely genuinely – was from South America. She sat behind her large desk and I sat facing her.

Halfway through the interview, she took out some cocaine and asked me if I wanted to join her. I said No; but she herself indulged and for the rest of the interview was occasionally face down on the desk, snorting the stuff while asking me questions or allegedly listening to my answers. Totally true.

I did not get the job which was not really much of a surprise as it was not really much of an interview, with her distracted for most of it.

On another occasion, I was working as an associate producer in an open plan office, sitting opposite a production secretary. When the company boss came into the office in the morning or afternoon, she would guess if he had or had not been snorting coke that morning by the speed he walked across the office floor to his desk.

On yet another occasion, I was at the National Film Theatre where a top TV executive was giving a major presentation to the assembled throng. As it was a very right-on event, to the right of the stage a lady was doing sign language for the deaf although I don’t think there was any reason to suppose there were any deaf people present.

The executive, by repute, was no stranger to coke and was speaking so fast that the sign language lady could not keep up with him and had to stop him occasionally to catch up.

There was some light laughter from the audience, though whether it was laughing with the sign lady or at the executive was unclear.

Difficult to be certain as there was a chance that maybe half the audience was also out of their heads.

A pain in the neck: Why I really don’t trust the UK’s National Health Service

Bad: cut head. Good: if you have freckles, no need for hair…

I got my Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccination yesterday. Apparently over 12 million people have now been given the jab.

No side effects so far except that, about half an hour after getting the jab, I fell over backwards in my back garden.

I was unable to control the fall, landed flat on my back on the concrete path and hit the back right side of my skull against the sharp edge of my back doorstep.

Now I have a very sensitive-to-the-touch large domed bump on my head and a V or Y-shaped cut. Surprisingly no blood.

Nothing to do with the vaccine, of course – I just accidentally clicked my heel against the slightly raised concrete path by the grass and fell backwards. But it’s a kinda clickbait way to start a blog.

The execution of the vaccination itself was stunningly efficient. A steady flow of people entering the venue, being rapidly processed and exiting. I can only assume the organisation of it was set up by the Army not the NHS and not politicians.

I think anyone who has ever worked with me knows that I do not get on well with mindless bureaucracy.

All large bureaucracies are inherently mindless, inefficient and incompetent, no matter how well-meaning the staff may be.

Aye and there’s the rub. 

Settle back with a nice cup of something hot. This is a lengthy, self-indulgent blog.

Early last week, I contacted my local doctor because I have a persistent pain at the right side of my neck, across my shoulder and in a straight line down the outside of my right upper arm. The pain has been there since late November. It is now early February and has been a bit worse the last month or so.

I think it is a muscular pain and the problem is really in my neck. I could be wrong. 

My shoulder was broken in 1991 – pulverised in two places

In 1991, while standing on a pavement, I was hit by a large truck. It pulverised (technical talk for “powdered”) my collar bone in two places. The back left side of my head was cut open when it hit the edge of a low brick wall as I fell.

It also turned out later that my spine had been damaged at the bottom. The same effect as a slipped disc, though I don’t think it’s medically called that. And it hasn’t mended.

After the knock-down, I was in my local hospital for a week.

I was in the bone section ward of the hospital because of the shoulder injury; but I was bureaucratically under the care of the brain section people because of my head wound. These were/are two different departments/wards on two different floors of the hospital. 

It meant that, in the hospital, although the nursing staff in the bone ward cared for me and looked out for any after effects on my shoulder and brain, the consultant supervising the bone ward ignored me.

“He is not our responsibility,” said the doctor, passing by.

One day, I heard him say, as he approached my bed with a bevy of (I presume) eager and attentive trainee doctors: “This is Mr Fleming. He is one of Mr XXXX’s patients, so he is not our responsibility.” And, as normal, he passed by my bed without stopping or talking to me. 

Mr XXXX, who was on a different floor of the hospital, never visited me.

Eventually, late one Friday afternoon, an exhausted and I presume very over-worked junior doctor who worked for Mr XXXX came down, had a brief chat with me and told the nurses in the bone ward I could be sent home. Presumably they had advised Mr XXXX that I had no long-term head problems. (Which was not the case, as it turned out.)

After I was sent home, there was no physiotherapy, no after care of any kind. Much later I discovered there should have been but – hey! – it’s a big organisation. Shit happens. Some things don’t.

For about the next nine months I had waves of inability to think properly, I presume caused by concussion. I am still unable to read books because of concentration problems. Oddly, I can write books on a computer but I cannot read printed books.

I also buggered my shoulder. Mea culpa.

Because of the fractured bone(s) in my shoulder, I could only walk very carefully and slowly. I discovered walking is quite a violent shock to the torso. Who knew? Every step was a jolt and a knife stab into flesh because my bone had broken diagonally, creating two very sharp pointed ends. And I had to sleep on my back at night. Throughout my life I had previously slept on my side.

To avoid turning over, I slept with my left arm stretched out at right angles to my torso. This meant I mostly did not turn over but also had the side-effect (not realised at the time) that my shoulder bone, fractured in two places, mended with the bits of bone overlapping rather than re-attaching as before.

Not me (Photograph by Dylan Sauerwein via Unsplash)

This, in turn, I think, had the result that my left shoulder is slightly shorter horizontally than it should be and muscles around the back of my neck are a bit bunched-up.

So, occasionally, the back of my neck gets very tense and bunched.

In November last year, this was happening again and the right side of my neck started having an occasional vertical pain. As this developed, it also went along the top of my right shoulder and, for some reason, in a straight line down the outside of the upper half of my right arm.

Currently I get a pain on the right side of my neck and in that line down the outside of my right arm. I can’t really lift my arm more than halfway up my torso without a shooting pain.

All this, I think, is muscular and related to my buggered back-of-the-neck – not anything to do with bones or trapped nerves.

So I phoned my local doctor earlier this week. We are, of course, still in mid-COVID pandemic, so seeing anyone is pretty much of a no-no. The first person I talked to put me through to a second person. She told me: “There are no appointments left today. You have to phone back at 8 in the morning to book an appointment.” I was not asked why I wanted to talk to a doctor.

The next morning, I set my alarm for 0756 and phoned back at 0800. 

This was the same number I had successfully phoned the previous day.

The answerphone said: “Thankyou for calling. This number is no longer in operation. Should you require urgent medical advice, please hang up and dial 111.”

111 is a general NHS advice number.

---

As an aside… In May, I was advised after a negative COVID test to contact my doctor because I had odd non-COVID symptoms.

When I phoned the GP surgery and told them my symptoms, their initial reaction was: “It is not our responsibility. Phone 111.”

When I phoned 111, they told me to phone back the local GP surgery and tell them that 111 said I HAD to talk to my doctor and he had to talk to me within three hours. I did. He phoned back just over three hours later and got an ambulance to take me to A&E because he believed I had had a stroke (although I had no symptoms of having had one). 

When A&E tested me, they took me into hospital immediately. I had dangerous kidney function/calcium levels. Someone later told me I was probably within spitting distance of being on kidney dialysis machine.

Anyway, back to this week…

---

I phoned back the surgery’s number again after a few minutes gap. Same message. “Thankyou for calling. This number is no longer in operation. Should you require urgent medical advice, please hang up and dial 111.” 

I went online and checked the surgery’s number. It was the correct number. I phoned back again.

“This line is no longer in use,” a different message said.

I phoned back again. The answerphone again said: “Thankyou for calling. This number is no longer in operation. Should you require urgent medical advice, please hang up and dial 111.”

I phoned back again. Same number. This time, I got a receptionist who put me through to another receptionist who asked what, in general, was wrong with me and said a doctor would phone me back “sometime today”.

Later that morning, the doctor phoned me from a very echoey room. He was either in his kitchen or a very small room with hard walls. It sounded like a toilet but I felt that was unlikely.

He listened to the symptoms I had had since November. I told him I had tried rubbing on Deep Heat, Tiger Balm (suggested by Boots chemist) and Chinese Wan Hua Oil, all to no effect.

He suggested I take paracetamol or some other simple over-the-counter pain killer.

This is why I largely distrust Western Medicine. The object is to relieve the pain and hide the symptoms… not to cure the cause which will continue, masked by the drugs.

“Pain is a sign that something is wrong, Rosemary…”

I have, perhaps, been unduly influenced in my thinking by a line in Rosemary’s Baby… “Pain is a sign that something is wrong, Rosemary.”

I somehow, perhaps foolishly, doubt that I am pregnant with the Devil’s baby, but pain is my body telling my brain that there is a problem in some part of my body, its seriousness reflected in the level of pain transmitted.

I would rather know there is a problem and try to solve it rather than not know and let it develop unknown by me.

I have a feeling that a good neck massage might help me, but – hey! – we are in a COVID pandemic where no-one wants to get to close to anyone else.

The doctor did say he would text me two NHS online exercises for neck pain and shoulder pain. And get a physiotherapist to contact me.

Whether this physiotherapist actually will contact me or not is in the lap of the Gods, but I had a look at the two pages of NHS advice as sent by the doctor.

The one for Neck Pain says: “See a GP if pain or stiffness does not go away after a few weeks”.

The advice for Shoulder Pain says: “See a GP if the pain is getting worse or does not improve after 2 weeks”.

As I mentioned to my GP, I have had pain since November.

I can’t imagine this NHS treatment happening in a pandemic…

Ah well, I should look on the bright side. I am seeing my Chinese doctor in two weeks.

The good thing about Chinese medical philosophy is that they try to cure the problem not mask the symptoms. 

Western Medicine and the NHS is a pain in the neck.

The unsinkable Anna Smith gets a COVID vaccine jab in Vancouver…

Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent, is currently homeless because her 33ft boat sank. (See my last blog) but yesterday she had The Jab…

---

COVID vaccination arrangements at the Carnegie Center

I got immunized for Covid-19 yesterday morning, at the Carnegie Center in Vancouver.

My friend and I lined up for two hours in the cold, watching fights break out, fire trucks passing by and an unending parade of physically and mentally ill people on crutches, canes or pushing each other in wheelchairs. A police car went speeding past going twice the speed limit, weaving between lanes, without its lights on.

And there was the ever-present purveying of every drug known to man… and cheese. 

Behind us in the line were two patient First Nations teenagers wearing sports jerseys. They explained: “We’re getting the vaccine so we don’t give it to our parents…”

Anna Smith with warm COVID nurse Felicia…

Ahead of us in the line were a couple, very thin and ill-looking, wearing dark hoodies. Huddled together in the cold, their figures merged together, it was almost impossible to distinguish them from each other.

They seemed like an outline of one tall, thin person.

After ascertaining my identity, which was her job, the very warm and personable Nurse Felicia from Liverpool was interested to hear that I contribute to a British blog. She asked me how to find it and scribbled down So it Goes…

After the vaccination, we went upstairs to the City of Vancouver run cafeteria and picked up delicious meals: a beef dip  – thin sliced beef on toast topped with cheese and gravy, served with a side salad of iceberg lettuce and radish sprouts and crispy empanadas with spinach and feta cheese dressing. It cost the equivalent of three UK pounds. We are very fortunate in Vancouver to have three of these city-run eateries downtown, as well as several places serving good food for free. Sort of odd, though… all these well-nourished people, but still we’re so lacking in affordable housing.

Five unexplained dwarves having a bit of a rest in Vancouver

When I left, heading towards a bus, I encountered some resting dwarves outside Pacific Central Station, on Main Street.

Mad Mike’s Mushroom tent is gone for the winter, but I discovered a cafe selling psychedelics and other things – which, of course, I don’t recommend – in the Strathcona neighbourhood.

My arm became a little sore later in the day, yesterday, and today I got a little rash on the opposite arm, but might just be a spider bite.

 

That’s one thing I miss from the boat. It was like a spider sanctuary. I had different species in different parts of the boat. There were some fat yellowish-white little spiders that I would only see in the summertime. They would startle when they saw me and jump up in the air and land facing the opposite way. Like dancers.

 

I will miss the little waterbugs too. They used to entertain me on hot summer days with how they walked on the river’s surface, in the cool shadow under my boat.I wrote a little blues verse about them, which I still like:

 

All you little water bugs

Underneath my boat

You have such great big families…

And I am all alone

 

Christmas in Cambodia with former comic and addict Chris Dangerfield

The always-controversial businessman and former comedian Chris Dangerfield has not cropped up in this blog for a while.

He now lives in Cambodia. Things have turned out OK for him.

When the weather is suitable, he wears $2,000 suits and $600 shoes. We spoke via Skype.

As always, blogs involving Chris are not for the faint-hearted reader.

---

JOHN: Here we are in the middle of a world-wide economic calamity. Are you still running your lock-picking business?

CHRIS: Yeah. Internet businesses are doing very well.

JOHN: When did you move to Cambodia?

CHRIS: Three or four years ago this March, I think. But I really don’t know. I’ve lost count.

JOHN: Why did you move to Cambodia?

CHRIS: I used to come out here to get clean. To Thailand. To get off the heroin. I used to come out here, cold turkey and stay clean while I was here but, every time I went back to London, I wouldn’t last long. I started associating my life in England with drug use and a sort of melancholy. It’s cold and grey and England’s changing in dramatic ways that I don’t support in any way.

JOHN: So why did you not move to Thailand?

CHRIS: That was the initial plan. But the visa there is not so simple. With me owning a business in Britain. You’re right. Patong, Thailand, is in many ways my spiritual home… but the phrase I’ve used before is I didn’t want to marry my mistress. Wherever you live is your life and I want Patong to be a holiday for me. I didn’t want to live there.

JOHN: It always struck me as a tad odd you went to Thailand and lived in a brothel to get off heroin.

Chris chose Cambodia instead of Thailand

CHRIS: It was very difficult to get heroin in that part of Thailand. Really. Compared to ice and weed and all the other stuff. So I didn’t have a hook-up for heroin in Patong. Also, I had an affair with a Thai madam who, when I met her, was a street-walking prostitute but, as our relationship developed over the years, she ended up running two of her own massage shops.

JOHN: Your business acumen helped her?

CHRIS: Not at all. She’s an incredible woman. But part of going out to Thailand to get clean was knowing that she would be there and she loved me and she would help me. I knew she would. I had never met a woman like her before. All the women in my life had been psychotic and awful… Well… I had a part to play in that. The common denominator was me…

…though also they WERE all mental.

Anyway, about five or six years ago, after about five weeks of the acute period phase of withdrawal, I just started writing this novel for the lack of anything better to do because I didn’t have the strength to go out. I was shuffling about like a zombie.

So I just started writing down what I’d gone through during that very intense withdrawal. I didn’t have any methadone or Subutex or anything. A couple of Xanax here and there, but…

Anyway, after that I kept doing bits and bobs and bits and bobs of writing and I was talking to Will Self about the novel and, when I finally got it near finished last year – about 110,000-120,000 words – I asked Will: “Look, what do I need? A copy editor? A proof reader?” 

He introduced me to a friend of his called Nick Papadimitriou, who wrote a very successful novel called Scarp.

And me and him got on like a house on fire. We were chatting about it for the year leading up to a couple of months ago and I gave him the manuscript and there’s a lot of work needs doing on it but I’m kinda hopeful it will be out in around March 2021. It just keeps taking longer because Nick wants it to be as good as it can be and, because I want people to read it, he wins… I’m very, very proud of it. 

The working title was Thai Style Cold Turkey, but I think maybe it’s going to be called Pharmakon Patong.

JOHN: It’s a bad time to be publishing books, isn’t it?

CHRIS: I think there’s not been a better time to be a writer.

“There’s not been a better time to be a writer.”

Amazon Direct Publishing is the way to go at the moment. It’s unlikely you’re gonna sell hundreds and thousands of novels and get rich. It does happen, but not often. When you self-publish through Amazon, your novel is available 48 hours after uploading it and it’s available as a paperback or a Kindle. And you get 70% of the cover price – not 7½% which you get with traditional publishing. 

So you publish the novel, do as much marketing as you can, do podcasts, build up a social media presence which I’ve kinda got – I’ve got 20,000 YouTube followers, 6,000 Twitter followers and ten years of stand-up gave me a little bit of a reputation out there – and you might sell 50 copies a month… which isn’t gonna make you rich…

But, on YouTube, I have told 400+ hours of stories. At the moment, I do two streams daily on my YouTube channel.

So, after this novel, I’m going to transcribe all those and I’ve probably got about five books of short stories. So I can put all them out there. And they might all sell 50 a month.

So I might be selling 300 copies of different books a month.

300 x £7 is not bad coming in monthly.

Then I do another novel. And another novel. And, if you can get two novels or two books of shorts out a year and create a little bit of interest in you then, in five years, it wouldn’t be unreasonable, to be earning a few grand a month from writing.

JOHN: Where did you get this business brain? Your parents?

CHRIS: (LAUGHS) No. Unless you include a failed Amway period by my old man. He was buying loads of really stupid cleaning products and pyramid selling them.

“… because it turned out quite nice…”

JOHN: But you ARE quite entrepreneurial.

CHRIS: It was noticed very early at school sports day – I used to go down the old cash & carry and sell sherbet dib-dabs and make a few quid. My grandad once gave me a sheep’s skull. Not covered in meat. Just bone. But I set a little stall up in my front garden and people could touch it for 2 pence. I mean, like, I’m Thatcher’s Child. I was like 10 years old in 1982.

JOHN: So you have this upcoming book to promote…What’s the elevator pitch?

CHRIS: At the start, a man is at Heathrow Airport. He’s decided to get clean and go to Thailand. And the end of the novel he is on an aeroplane going back to England. So it’s seven odd weeks. True story. There’s very little creativity there. It’s just what happened.

JOHN: So the moral is you should never leave your own home country?

CHRIS: No, the moral is you SHOULD because it turned out quite nice. BUT there’s two stories running simultaneously. There’s one in Thailand – which is written in the first person present. There’s also one about my childhood, which is written in the first person past. And they kind of interlink.

One of the problems I’ve had with the editor is he keeps talking about the architectonic of the story.

JOHN: Architectonic?

CHRIS: Architectonic.

JOHN: May the Lord protect us.

CHRIS: Yes, I’ve had to Google it regularly, too… But here’s the point… Much like my stand-up, I tend to start telling my story, then remind myself of something else, then go into that story then, while I’m telling that story, I’ll go into something else… so it’s kind of like fractular. 

JOHN: Fractular?

CHRIS: Fractular. Now, that’s OK so long as, at some point, you come back to the first story and second story and round it all up. That’s fine.

But what he’s been saying is sometimes it’s just confusing. He says he knows there’s an element of it reflecting what I’m going through in the novel, which is kind of cool… If the form of the novel reflects the content, then you’re on to something. But he says sometimes it just gets in the way of the storytelling. So that needs looking at.

JOHN: So back to the elevator pitch. What’s the novel about?

CHRIS: I set out to write a novel about addiction and withdrawal but I think it’s a story about love.

JOHN: Love of whom or what?

CHRIS: Just love as an idea and what happens when there’s not a lot about.

JOHN: You’ve got to love something. It’s a verb that needs an object.

CHRIS: Right. So when you don’t have a lot of love in your life, you end up doing what goes on in this novel.