The View from the Flat

Snow is fantastic. It’s magical. It takes me back. It’s rare (in the south of England). A snowy day is a day out of our lives, and days out of our lives are good things. They disrupt the routine. They keep you fresh.

Above all, fresh snow makes even the dullest, basest, greyest parts of London look like the proverbial wonderland. Hooray for snow.

Peckham Snowman

Wonderland?

View from the Common

My lips are permanently dry. I moisten them with Carmex – very good, even though the ill-advised yellow packaging makes it look like superglue – but the relief is only temporary.

When I wake up, my skin is always dry. Nivea Moisturiser and Garnier Face masks help, but the neck and eyebrows and right cheek keep on drying out.

The dandruff has been plain absurd. A scratch of the head results in an avalanche on the shoulder. On the upside, my hair doesn’t get dirty as there’s no sebum being produced. Nonetheless, I’ve taken extreme measures and shaved my head, leaving a BA Baracus type Mohawk down the middle for posterity’s sake. But soon enough I’ll be totally skin.

My temper is shorter. Not that it’s ever especially long, but it’s shorter than normal. Irritability is rife. My serotonin levels are, apparently, lower than they would normally be.

Whenever I go out and there is sunshine, I have to cover up with some factor 40. I smell like I’m on holiday most the time.

I’ve had one drink in over three months, and that was to celebrate Fulham’s extraordinary escape from Premier League relegation. My liver, I’m told, would pack in if I indulge in any kind of binge drinking.

The appetite comes and goes, mostly it’s fine but often I’m craving fatty crap like chocolate, crisps, and fried food. Apparently, isotretinoin – for this barrage of bodily dysfunction is all his fault – relies on fat. It absorbs itself into fat and then gets to work on fucking your body up (with a side-effect of improving the skin condition).

The thing is, I’m not fat. My body mass index is damn perfect. So perhaps, and I’m no physician, but perhaps the body is saying ‘Eat shit, Eddie. We got these annoying brown pills asking for some grease, so get with it and fill yourself up with some Minstrels, Monster Munch and a chicken pie.’

I had a freaky episode a couple of weeks into February when I woke up in the middle of the night with shivers and sweats, an aching jaw and achy joints. The blood pressure dropped, although not worryingly so, and wouldn’t go back up to normal for a couple of days. But within 12 hours of the shivers and shakes, I was feeling fine again. Not so much 24-hour flu as overnight flu.

In short, it’s still me inside the body, but the body’s been interrupted. It’s not going about its business as normal.

It’ll be back soon, hopefully, with a 7-year skin problem solved. No guarantee on that, though, and progress has been disappointingly slow so far. But when the side-effects are so overwhelming and so plentiful, they become the ‘effect’ and the actual cure takes the sideline.

The best way to rationalize this barmy 6-month episode is to tell myself I am sick and I have to tolerate the treatment to get better. Not that I’m sick sick, but there is a bug living on my face and he’s steadfastly and stubbornly refused to be killed by numerous courses of antibiotics, three courses of homeopathy and a Vitamin A-rich diet of carrots, broccoli and mango.

Three-and-a-half months in, and the skin doesn’t feel much better at all, to be frank. Still over two months to go, so I’ve got to stay optimistic. The summer is nearly here, the temperature ought to improve, and my knees might not hurt so much.

This story made me happy. The American Association for the Advancement of Science reckons more than 50% of the stars in the Milky Way could have planetary systems similar to our own. The conclusion that rocky conditions could very well exist on these planets, apparently, means the chances of some kind of life existing beyond Earth is a greater possibility than it was a week ago.

When I was little, I was very much into the extraterrestrial thing. Whether it was watching ET at age 4 or not, I don’t know, but I always thought the idea of life on other planets was an issue of imagination rather than one of blind hope or idiotic faith (and I’ve sure read some idiotic books on the subject over the years.)

By imagination, I mean that I can’t let my imagination be so limited as to think we are the only planet in the whole vastness of space containing things that breathe, eat and shit. That seems at best narrow-minded and at worst arrogant.

So although this new study – which believes there may be hundreds of undiscovered worlds in the outer parts of our solar system – is by no means evidence, it’s exciting.

I’m keeping the imagination open and vivid. And why not? Concrete evidence may not be found in my lifetime, but if billions believe in God, why shouldn’t millions think there is life beyond our planet?

Read the article here.

Two days ago, I started my 4-month course of Isotretinoin, a medication also known as Accutane or Roaccutane.

This drug is used in the treatment of persistent acne, although in my case it’s supposed to rid me of a 7-year problem I’ve had called folliculitis. The hair follicles in my face get infected and go all red, itchy and sore. I’ve tried five or six different courses of antibiotics, with absolutely no success whatsoever. I had to stop one of the treatments early because I was getting nasty side-effects, including waking up in the middle of the night with nausea. That’s not cool.

 I also tried two course of homeopathy at the prestigious Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. My specialist was a former GP who had turned her back on conventional medicine completely. Seeing a homeopath can be a very pleasant experience. They make you feel like they’re really listening to you, and they actually give a toss. They don’t just ask about your symptoms, but they ask you about fears, phobias, hopes, relationships, psychological history and even whether you prefer mountains or beaches. Appointments last half an hour. It felt very good and I desperately wanted the homeopaths to find me a cure, but it didn’t work out.

So I found myself back in the four walls of “conventional wisdom”, otherwise known as chemical science. Again, no success on the treatments, and so here I am, almost exactly seven years after my problem began, beginning a course of the hardcore, last resort, bazooka drug.

Isotretinoin is controversial – and rightly so. It has caused miscarriages and deformed babies, and has been strongly connected to suicides and depression. The suicide and depression bits are very rare, but they highlight just how hardcore this shit truly is. When I picked my pills up from the hospital pharmacy, the extent of the pharmacist’s advice was, “Cover yourself up if you go out in the sun, and read the leaflet enclosed.”

And read it I did. The first thing to note is the appalling bastardisation of language that this particular pharmaceutical, Beacon, and I dare say numerous others, are propagating. According to Beacon, the medication does not produce side-effects, a term that implies a connection to the medication, a byproduct of its good bits, but instead it has some ”undesirable” effects - i.e., “hey, it’s not our fault, folks – we don’t desire this to happen, so don’t even think of calling Futterman, Goldberg and Brownback ‘coz we ain’t going anywhere near a court”.

Every medication has side-effects, and we all know this. But from my research, isotretinoin produces a lot of them in a lot of patients. It was originally designed as a chemotherapy drug, for Christ’s sake. This ain’t aspirin.

Feast your eyes on this list of “undesirable effects”:

-dryness of the skin, especially lips and face 

- chapped lips, a rash, mild itching, peeling

- dryness of the throat, nosebleeds, irritated eyes

-muscle aches, pains and sore tendons, arthritic pain

-hair loss

-”some people have experienced mood changes (depression or symptoms of mental disorders) and in very rare cases thoughts of suicide, suicide and attemps of suicide” (in that order?)

Then there’s the less common list of “undesirable effects”, which include headaches, nausea, tiredness, changes in vision, liver disease, anaemia, seizes, inflammation of the pancreas, inflammation of blood vessels, diabetes, uric acid problems, greater risk of infection.

The drug packet is emblazoned with warnings that females should use 2 contraceptives whilst using isotretinoin, and take regular pregnancy tests.

Oh, and you can’t drink alcohol. That can lead to serious problems.

So why am I taking this? Because I guess I’m prepared to take the risk to get rid of a stubborn condition that just won’t go. But I can’t help feeling I’m being a bit silly.

So, in short, I’m off the bottle and on the pills for at least four months. I’ll be keeping an online, weekly diary of how it’s going. If anyone notices me getting diabetes, depression, jaundice or a chapped lip, let me know, ok?

The older you become, the harder it is to believe in Father Christmas. I was 7 when I began to question his existence, and it took some twenty years for my faith to be restored. In that time, I did watch Ernest Saves Christmas on numerous occasions, and it’s pretty damn convincing, I must admit. In this masterful 1980s movie, Ernest P Worrell explains the science behind Santa’s Christmas Eve mission succinctly:

You take the International Date Line, multiply it by the Time Zones, divided by the accelerated rotation of the earth… uh, carry the 1, and, uh, allowing for the Vernal Equinox on the Tropic of Cancer, he might just pull it off. 

I figure that believing in Santa Claus is no less plausible than believing in God, and there was certainly something divine about the delivery of my Christmas wish this year. When the inept and out-of-his-depth Lawrie Sanchez was appointed manager of Fulham in May of last year, I told anyone who’d listen that I wished him to be gone by Christmas. It’s not that I get pleasure in seeing a man made unemployed, but Sanchez knew next-to-nothing about managing a Premier League club, and under his stewardship we risked dropping down a division, stuck as we were in a rut of dull and depressing football.

My fears were proved right when we made a catastrophic start to the 2007/08 season. With just two victories between August and December, and £25 million spent on players who could barely control the bell let alone score with it, the writing was on the wall. But Fulham’s chairman Mohamed Fayed was rather preoccupied with the inquest into the death of his son, Dodi, and Princess Diana. I had a horrible feeling he wasn’t keeping his eye on events at Fulham, which were fast spiralling out of control.

But Santa heard my early Christmas wish, and duly delivered. Sanchez was kicked out a week before Christmas. What happened next proves that this wasn’t merely coincidence, but part of Santa’s master plan to make me happy. I had clearly been a good boy in 2007.

One of my heroes is a 60-year-old man from Croydon called Roy Hodgson. He is a fellow Scandophile, having lived and worked in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway as a football manager. When I lived in Sweden, I wrote the odd football report or two, and so often Swedish football fans and journalists would tell me how great a manager Roy Hodgson was. He had won everything there was to win in Sweden, and is widely credited with leading a roots and branch overhaul of the way Swedes play football.

In England, he’s rather less respected by casual football observers who haven’t paid close attention to his extraordinary CV. But the journalists who know their stuff – admittedly few and far between – have long defended him.

I’ve spent the last seven years or so banging on about Hodgson, about how much of an over-achiever he is (rather like Sweden itself). I would fantasise about him becoming Fulham manager, knowing deep down that was about as likely as George W Bush holding his hands up and saying “You know what? I’m out of my depth. I resign. Party on, America!” Hodgson had been rejected by his homeland once before, after an uneasy time as coach of Blackburn Rovers, and he was snubbed in favour of Swede Sven Goran Eriksson for the England manager’s job in 2001. Not only that, but in November of last year he accepted an executive job at one of Europe’s footballing giants, Inter Milan.

But so it came to pass that my Christmas wish – and the final bit of Santa evidence – appeared a couple of days after Christmas. Roy Hodgson ha changed his mind about Inter Milan and been appointed Fulham manager. He got the phone call offering him the job whilst on holiday in Torquay.

Within hours of the announcement, I received a flurry of text messages from friends who know I have a lot of love for the Hodge. My friend John jokingly wondered if I’d had some sort of influence on the decision. This was a monumental event and it made absolutely no sense.

It may not seem much to you, and I do often lose all rationality and reason when it comes to football, but Hodgson’s appointment is my idea of a dream-come-true and on Saturday the Hodgson Revolution truly began. This was the first time the Hodge fielded a team featuring a number of his own signings – three Scandinavians – and the team put in a gutsy, committed performance. The result was our first win since early November, against a team more than 20 points above us in the league table. It was heroic stuff, and more than that – I won £26 from a £5 bet that Fulham would win, and win 2-1. This rare betting success will almost cover my ticket to watch the team play Everton in a few weeks’ time.

There’s a long way to go, and Fulham are still very much stuck at the wrong end of the table, but all the players are falling over themselves to compliment the new boss, gushing about his experience, skill and motivation skills. Whether he can motivate a squad comprised largely of mediocrity remains to be seen, but one of the most successful English managers in football history is leading my club, and I’m thanking Santa for the honour.

Sticking to this Christmas theme (we need something cheery to get us through the dark and dismal February) take a look at this video. It’s a tutorial I made for making a gingerbread house. Pictures of the completed house are available on the left of this page, in my Flickr profile. Enjoy!

“If we’re going to have a muppet in the White House,
let’s vote for one who’s the real deal,” says
shock-haired author.

Here is the review in all its splendour:

I found this book difficult to read because it was WAY too dirty for me!! It was a tale about a boy who lives temporarily with his dad and older sister in London, where he meets a beautiful young girl who he basically has sexual intercourse with. It’s very dirty, and is very difficult to read because of all of the graphicness of the book.

I am genuinely touched and delighted with this. Basic sexual intercourse and graphicness is about as good as life gets.

In other matters, I stayed up till 3am last night to watch the latest, and by far most farcical instalment in this year’s Presidential Circus. It was the Democratic Candidates’ debate, live from South Carolina, where the primary is held on Saturday.

Sideshow Wolf of CNN was back for more lily-livered debate-chairing, allowing himself to be run all over by Obama and Clinton inbetween crap questions such as “Was Bill Clinton the first black president?” You couldn’t make this stuff up if you smoked five joints, drank seven shots of Tequila and listened to early Blue Oyster Cult all night. America needs some proper political journalists, and fast.

As usual, Edwards wiped the floor and the CNN focus group, made up of 16 undecided South Carolinians, voted by a clear majority that he had won the debate. However, when asked who they would vote for on Saturday, they opted for Obama because he had ” a better chance of winning the Democratic nomination”. Hardly surprising they should think that, given the media blackout on John Edwards and the media love-in for the black man vs white woman pitch.

But the ugliest spectacle last night was the hideous bickering over nothing-very-significant between the celebrity candidates. Honestly, do Americans want either of these petty careerists running for office? Watch and weep (particularly fun bit at around 3:05):

A quick word on the biggest circus in the world, also known as the US presidential election. Nice to see Obama and Clinton are now stealing both ideas and phrases from John Edwards, by far the most progressive candidate among the Democrats.  Soon enough they might even develop some policies. Obama may have Oprah behind him, but Edwards has his own funky bunch: Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Madeleine Stowe, John Mellencamp and, best of all, Kevin Bacon. It’s unfortunate that in such an open year for America, with no incumbent President or Vice-President running, the Democratic race is being painted as a strictly two-horse affair between two corporate Democrats. Even more regrettable when you consider that Edwards has the best chance of defeating any of the Republican candidates.

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Special Quiz!

Which American magazine is printing such liberally-biased news stories as these?

“In a disturbing trend, a number of US allies are using the language and tactics applied to terrorism to address civil disobedience and peaceful protest. In July authorities in El Salvador arrested 13 protestors at a demonstration against a plan to decentralize the water system and charged them under antiterrorism laws. In August British police used stop-and-search powers granted in antiterrorism legislation to control crowds at a huge peaceful global-warming demonstration at Heathrow airport.”

“Despite ever-increasing data on wrongful convictions and the suspension of the death penalty in states such as Illinois after startling DNA test results, every Democratic candidate for president except Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel is a supporter of capital punishment. Hillary Clinton even helped expand the number of crimes subject to the death penalty. As a result the 2008 election looks likely to follow the previous four, in which both major-party candidates favoured death sentences.”

Can you guess where it’s from? The New Yorker, perhaps? Or Vanity Fair? Nope, this slice of thinking comes from that bastion of progressive ideology, Playboy.

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I must confess, I am feeling a little guilty at the moment. I may have just started a national epidemic. Whilst in Sweden last month (an eventful trip I must blog about soon), I picked up a nasty bout of Winter Vomiting Disease, or Norovirus. It’s all the rage in Sweden, and I was sure it was exclusively a Nordic thing until I did a bit of research online.

It turns out that it’s a regular seasonal occurrence in all of Northern Europe, sort of like a festive edition of gastro entiritis. A few years ago, over 1000 people were taken ill suddenly at a Charlatans gig in central London. Some poor soul had thrown up outside the gig, and an even poorer soul dragged the vomit into the gig on his shoe. Once inside, the spew entered the air conditioning system and before you could say One To Another, over a third of the Charlatans crowd had contracted this highly contagious disease.

WVD, if I can call it that without it sounding too much like a sexually-transmitted disease, comes on quickly and hits you with vomiting, fatigue, dizziness and a generally nasty feeling. To make it worse, I was staying with friends when I got sick and barfed all over their wooden floor. At least it wasn’t carpeted.

About five days later I came back to England and was fully recovered. Then, last week, the news broke that 200,000 people a week were coming down with WVD and that the UK is in the grip of a full-scale epidemic. 3 million people are currently suffering. I am truly sorry.

“As Barack Obama arrived in New Hampshire early yesterday, Americans woke up to the historic possibility that the day when they might have a black president was closer than they thought – not just within their lifetime, but within the year. Until Thursday night that was little more than a remote likelihood.”

So says journalist Gary Younge in today’s Guardian, the British broadsheet newspaper. Younge, like almost all his colleagues in the popular media here and in the US, spectacularly misrepresents the situation in the US presidential primaries.

“A remote likelihood”, “shock result”, “the underdog” – these phrases have been thrown about with regard to Obama since he won the Iowa caucus with 38% of the vote a few days ago. What a load of rot. Obama was no underdog in Iowa – he was joint favourite, along with Hillary Clinton, and he had been spring 2007. The idea that he was an underdog is made even more ridiculous by the excessive, almost entirely favourable media attention he has enjoyed both in the US and abroad since he announced his intention to seek the candidacy for the Democrats. And if he becomes President, it will be because of the preposterous primary and caucus system, whereby a candidate who builds up enough media momentum can rake in extra cash and scoop the candidacy in the space of five weeks.

If anyone is an underdog in this race, it’s Senator John Edwards. I’m unashamedly a cheerleader for Edwards, and I have been since 2004 when he emerged from nowhere to become John Kerry’s running mate. I even slapped a tenner on him at 10-1 to be the next President (which, knowing my betting luck, may well destroy his race for the White House).

Edwards, you might not be aware, finished second in Iowa. He edged ahead of Hillary Clinton, who outspent him by something in the region of 3 to 1. Edwards frequently trailed both Obama and Clinton in the polls, yet he clinched second spot. His name is hardly being mentioned on TV, radio or in the newspapers since his strong 30% result.

What’s more astonishing is how, over the past few weeks, Obama has lifted much of Edwards’ rhetoric – particularly in relation to Washington lobbyists – with nobody on CNN, Fox, ABC or anywhere else bothering to notice. The blogs on the Washington Post, ABC News and others are filled with comments from ordinary citizens demanding fairer and more balanced coverage of the race, which is a bit like asking Pol Pot if he wouldn’t mind calming down a little.

If the purveyors of popular media were a little less lazy, they would notice that Edwards’ result was significant. Here’s a guy who talks with pride and passion about not accepting a single penny from lobbyists. He’s the first Democratic candidate to present a costed and universal healthcare plan for all. A guy whose campaign budget is a fraction of the Obama and Clinton war-chests. He got his message across to Iowans despite a virtual media silence. But above all, Edwards is a guy who is the most overtly left-wing candidate of the ‘big 3′, and who managed to squeeze out the allegedly unstoppable Hillary. (Lest we forget, the popular media has spent the last 3 years crowning Hillary as President-elect.)

Edwards’ achievement is drowned out as the vast majority of TV channels, newspapers and online news services prefer to focus on Obama’s “miraculous” win, and Clinton’s “disastrous” third place. These celebrity candidates make for an easier story in these American Idol times. The question asked now by “experts” is “Can Hilary come back?” rather than “Will Edwards succeed?” If you’re lucky, you learn about Edwards’ phenomenal achievement in paragraph 3, as a side comment. Lazy journalism becomes irresponsible journalism in one easy move.

I watched the Iowa results unfold on CNN, a sorry excuse for a news channel, presented by Wolf Blitzer, a sorry excuse for a news anchor. Sideshow Wolf kept on introducing the studio ‘experts’ as “the best team on television”, as if he was proving the point to himself. These experts struggled to come up with something original to say every twenty minutes (who could?), so they resorted to clichéd waffle, perpetuating the myths they themselves created.

There is no media conspiracy against John Edwards, there is merely media laziness and a casualisation of the journalism trade. People like me are brought in on short-term or freelance contracts, with little training and virtually no understanding of their employers’ ethos. The result is sloppiness, mediocrity and misleading misinformation.

But watch out for the Bobby Kennedy-alike Edwards – he’s currently trailing in New Hampshire, where the primary occurs on Tuesday, but as Rocky Balboa would say, it ain’t over till it’s over. Edwards is neither black nor a woman. He is not a celebrity candidate. But he is a man of substance and sincerity, of charm and good humour, with a set of detailed policy plans. Obama is quite the opposite. He pitches himself as the candidate for change whilst offering no word on exactly how he will implement an assault on the status quo. And if he represents “rock and roll politics” – that’s a term used by, you guessed it, the popular media – I think he’s more Cliff Richard than The Doors.