Toxic Kairdiff

So what am I reading at the moment? I’m reading Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America. I’m reading that because he’s one of the favourite authors of Miruki Harukami who is a famous Japanese Author whose book was being read by an ethnic Chinese woman, born in Vietnam but raised in Canada. She got on the bus outside a butchers on the leyline, Cowbridge Road East! It was a Saturday and she had been to a Haiku Workshop in Canton Library! How do I know? Well I plucked up the courage to ask her! "Where have you been?" No happy ending! Just a question see!

Why are you writing brother? For the end result or for the journey? It’s got to be for the journey but if your honest, its for the end result. You want to see what you’ve written end up between two covers with a price tag on it. You want to see those librarians rushed off their feet. "Sorry, we don’t have anymore in stock. Yes, he’s a local author. I can’t say I know him. He was  here quite regularly, like every day. He had an attitude, yes, he had a Bad attitude with a capital B". 

Why am I writing? Because I think that writing is going to get me the girl! It wont and even if it did, would I want that type of girl? the type of girl that is only with you because you write.  

I need a challenge. My friend had a Venus Fly trap, I remember clearly, the fly landing, having a nose around and then the spikes closing. No I don’t know what happened then, whether the fly escaped or the bud opened or whether it just got stuck in there because I had to get home for my tea. 

They say Devon is nice. I’d like to get down there for a look. 

You can be too Welsh, can’t you? I think that has been one of my problems that on occasion I have been too Welsh.

The poverty of the Dead does bother me. There was a guy who walked across the road to the doctor’s surgery with a walking stick. I watched him cross. His face was a picture of pain, anxiety and fear. He was white with green veins. I had looked at him and felt very sorry and looked away as he came close. He hadn’t given up hope though because as he passed by me he said “Good Morning”. I replied, rather startled, the same. If you can state that it’s a Good Morning Fella, then it certainly is a good morning. Live to work or work to live, neither. 

If this collection of musings does make it into book form then I shall state in my last will and testament that the book is placed on my funeral pire and set alight with my carcass.  I actually favor the Zoroastrian burial ritual of being laid out for the vultures in a tower but I know that the Vultures won’t have any taste and they will leave the book. They’ll eat me sure but they’ll leave the book. How many vultures with reading glasses have you seen? Ok I don’t mean the ones in the city of London.

 Richard Brautigan mentions Benjamin Franklin’s statue in Trout Fishing in America well I am going to mention my namesake’s statue in Caerphilly which mention’s Benjamin Franklin on the bottom.
 My blog is entitled Shark Fishing in Wales, it has got nothing to do with Shark Fishing in Wales but what a title. I can see some disappointed faces standing in the book shops. Some real Ernest Hemingway types ready to sally forth to the Gower in Galoshes. “Point me towards those sharks”. They’ll be sitting at the back of their speed boats driven at speed from the Barrage/ Cardiff Bay which used to be the Docks by the way and they’ll say to the porter/sherpa/skivvy/maid.

“Pass me the book “Shark Fishing in Wales” written by that guy with a Welsh name. Turn to Chapter Three. “Sharks”. It’s about shisters and unscrupulous landlords in Wales.

This is no good. Toss it overboard. And you know what, the Sharks didn’t want it either.

It’s kind of strange this synchronicity thing. If I hadn’t seen the Chinese woman on the bus reading Haruki Marukumi, then looking him up on the Internet and seeing that his favourite author was Richard Brautigan then I would never have got Trout Fishing in America off the shelves and I would never have had the idea to write this. 

Twenty four years of existing in toxic Kairdiff. That’s a long time. I need to be spending the next twenty years someplace else.  Now I know what I’m dealing with ‘Bipolar Disorder’and I’ve had that for the last thirty years give or take three years. I know exactly when my condition was triggered it was 1979, the same year that Herr Thatcher, the Iron Chancellor came to power. I’m hoping you’re all too young, hip and trendy to remember the Bitch. Yes my Mental Health Condition began at the same time as the UK’s mental health condition began. It was the age of selfishness, the age of greed, there's’no such thing as community. I'm lucky I got a diagnosis. I get a second chance.