A Parody

Apparently.

Presenting My Conditions For Political Support.

Dear Your Excellency,

With the forthcoming Presidential election looming larger than a huge thing hovering over a tiny thing, perhaps even larger, I think the time is right to outline my conditions for my support. According to Blogger I have the grand total of sixteen people who are now official followers, I feel that my support for any candidate could gain between ten and fourteen of those votes, a large sum by anyone's standards.

Here they are:

1. Embarkation cards - You know when Suddhas leave Sri Lanka, well there needs to be better signage to tell them / us that we need to fill out an embarkation card. Otherwise they queue up to get their passport checked, making the queues longer for all of us, only to be told to go over there and fill out the form.

2. Odel - Please sort out the mens' department. And also we could do with a down escalator. Why is there just the one, why does it go up, then get us to the wrong floor? These are important issues.

3. Freedom of speech - I reckon it's a good thing and should be encouraged. Dissent is usually constructive and helps people to formulate decent opinions and ideas. Violent protest, terrorism and hateful behaviour aren't good things, most people would agree, not that I've spoken to most people. Get rid of the "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality, start a "you can be with us and disagree" one.

4. Barefoot devilled King Prawns - Please get rid of this delectable dish from the specials menu. It's all well and good to enjoy when a fellow's there but dwelling on the taste and the aroma from my desk on a December morning in West London is quite painful and makes my mouth water. It's not as painful as nailing your balls to a wall but you probably get what I mean. Just ask DD, he'll no doubt agree with me.

5. A Sri Lankan passport - May I have one please? My parents are Sri Lankan, as were their parents. I feel Sri Lankan and love the place, for all its madness and sheer frustration, for its beauty and serendipity. I'd quite like to get one without the need for thousands of pounds to change hands and be verified by all sorts of people, most of whom we're all related to anyway.

6. Release the IDPs.

That's it really. I suppose some of these things are easier for you to do than others, but just imagine if you lost the election by ten votes or so. To be honest with you I'm not too fussed about the whole embarkation card signage business. I actually find it quite funny to watch the tourists get turned back after queuing up.

I'd be happy to come to your house sometime if you want to hear more, I think I know roughly where it is. I can't come on Friday though as I'm on a diabetes clinic thing.

Good luck and all.

RD

The Diabetes Diaries

Indi's post here reminded me that I haven't told you the state of play with my whole peeing in a test tube and diabetes thing. Well, basics, as my kids would say, because to say the word basically is just so time consuming, the results came back and are that I've got type 2 diabetes, something I take as good news.

It's good news because I now know the illness that's causing the symptoms and can get on with treating it and moving forwards, in my own little backwards way. I heard on the radio the other day that there has been a fifty per cent increase in people with type 2 diabetes in the last five years in the UK. I also heard that the chances of getting it if you're a South Asian male over forty are about as high as the chances of a lead singer, in a gig, forgetting to go to a chorus and then turning round and glaring at the rest of the band as if they've played the wrong thing. Which is to say, pretty much a dead cert.

So having this type 2 diabetes thing means that, and please forgive me if I get the technical stuff a bit wrong as I'm not Jennifer Aniston or one of those other scientific types, my body isn't particularly talented in the field of extracting sugar from my food and making it into energy. I think that's because the RD body in question isn't very good at producing insulin, which is what helps it to do all the converting sugar into energy stuff.

Apparently fellows can have it for months, maybe even years before the symptoms accumulate and they got to their Doctor's because they're concerned about them, exactly what happened in my case. If you know me then I think you'll agree that it's fair to say I'm not a fat bloater type of chap. I eat a reasonably balanced diet, I get a fair amount of exercise from drumming and I don't drink much alcohol.

So I'm now on drugs, to do stuff, and after about a month I'm getting a full night of sleep without a barrage of toilet trips. I'm not getting through an ocean of Evian water each night, bad news for the mineral water industry but good news for me, and I'm not getting cramps in my legs at the most inopportune moments; drum solos and the like.

I'll tell you what, sleeping through the night after months of nights feeling as if I've had a dozen short naps, is exhilarating, luxurious and a teeny bit of a mindfuck. It's much harder for me to wake up these days as the alarm clock has to do the job of raising me from deep instead of light, might need to get up and pee at any moment, sleep. Then, once I'm up and have done the whole scratching my balls, rubbing my eyes and farting ritual, I'm all bright eyed and bushy tailed. I hit the day with the enthusiasm of a forger who's just been asked to do a load of new Lankan Rs 1000 notes.

I have to eat breakfast, something I'm not used to and therefore a large change in the routine. Each morning, were you to be one of G's many sexual partners, you'd be able to witness me in my apartment munching furiously through a bowl of cereal, a couple of Ryvitas or some natural yoghurt.

Just in case you didn't know G is the bloke who lives in the apartment directly opposite me, with a boat, a 911 and more girlfriends than Hugh Heffner in a good year. I've discovered that he's also a captain of industry and sold one of his companies some time ago for many millions. Frankly I don't understand what these girls see in him.

Cereal, Ryvitas and natural yoghurt are somewhat girly breakfasts but this has to be done. I'm talking about cereal that doesn't even have a plastic toy in the box as well. No dinosaur or tiger anywhere to be seen. I've always liked ryvitas and natural yoghurt is just curd but made under hygienic conditions, so there's no big hardship there but I could kill for a big English brekkie or some strings though.

And that is the state of play. It's also been quite a good reminder to me of the many good things about the UK National Health Service. The treatment has been good and serious, though I do get a bit annoyed with some of the red tape and bureaucracy. On Friday I'm going to an all day thing where they teach us about diabetes, what to do, eat and all. It might be a bit boring but I reckon it will be useful information. I've been given a flu jab, a swin flu jab and I now get free prescription medication. How cool is that? The drugs are on me!

It sounds all good and it largely is.

Except for my Mum. You know her, the Sri Lankan mother who's also a Doctor.

I shake my head in despair, you can probably imagine what I'm going through.

By the way, did you know that the word "yoghurt" come up as an error when you run the spellcheck thing here? That's Americans for you!

The Passing Of Time

Taken in the hills of Kandy, same place only about ten years apart. The top one was this year. Interesting eh?

Dear 16 - The Final Shot

As at Friday afternoon this was the posish, as much as I could see. It will have mutated more by the time you read this, mostly because of rebellious rulebreakers, leaving open tags, multi tags and some who have even tagged merely one person.

I think the time has come for me to let go. It's been good, the tag has spread far and wide. I read about it in the Sunday Leader Kottu section, the online version of course, wondering if there might just be a flood of readers unfamiliar with Kottu and Sri Lankan blogs in general who'd email their letter in to Indi.

There have been bastardisations, such as Whacko's letter to his sixty year old self, a nice and different approach, and there have been funny as hell ones, like DQ's distinctly "that's worth another look at" one. We're still waiting on Indi's and Electra's versions, possibly they're too cool for school, maybe they just don't want to do it or are too busy with small things like plays and politics.

As we read this, well you read it and I write, there may well be some chap over in another blogosphere who has been tagged and is busily thinking about what he's going to write. Odds on he's thinking that it might be really funny if he tells the sixteen year old him a bit about sex, perhaps how he'll have it quite soon and never stop thinking about it.

That's been the best thing for me about this tag; discovering some blogs I hadn't heard of, "meeting" a few new people and seeing what we think we've learned since we were sixteen.

And no one has dared to tag Java. We're all too scared, including me. It would be like waking one of those ogres in a cave, good fun but dangerous and foolhardy. But, if anyone dares to tag him I reckon his letter might the most interesting one ever.

Sorry if you're missing from the chart, I've tried to keep track but it ain't easy.

Happy Monday out there all.

A Saturday Smiler

You're Fired And You're Hired

I'm doing a bit of housekeeping here at LLD. I was thinking about changing the whole layout, the colour scheme and even the header, not because I don't like them as they are but just because I believe it's good to get a nice balance between familiarity and freshness. Where that balance lies is anyone's guess and the catch is that each person have different preferences anyway. But, I like my header so much that I can't bear to part with it right now, even temporarily, thanks be to that Mika Tenekoon and her artistic talents.

So the housekeeping has taken another form and is in the one of some new bloglinks and a few deleted ones. I always feel a little bit sad whenever I delete the link to a blog. Fellows tell me that they get a few hits when I chuck a link up and I take that as a nice compliment, a reflection of that fact that LLD is reasonably well read in the Lankanosphere. I don't mean to sound arrogant there, I'm very proud of my blog's popularity but also aware that these things can die overnight.

The sadness is not out of sympathy or anything, it's more that it means I'm less likely to read the blogs that have been sent off to the naughty corner, for the large majority of my regular reads are from the links over there on the left. Google reader and RSS Speedwagon and the like are way beyond me, more for the young bucks, which is basically all of you except Java and myself.

And conversely, which is not to do with basketball boots, the new blogs listed are ones that I've found myself reading regularly and also that are updated frequently.

Let's start with the blogs that are being sent off the field of play.

First there's Cynically yours, Sach's blog. It was one of the very first that I read and I've learned a lot about writing from observing Sach's journalistic endeavours and style, not to mention her piercings. The blog still exists, but it's like one of those ghost ships in Star Trek, maintaining a state of existence with no signs of life onboard. Actually, come to think of it all the blogs I'm deleting links to are in that situation.

We all know that Sach told us she was going to stop this blog and that she was going to start a new one, I can't find the new one for love nor money. If anyone can point me in the direction I'd be most grateful. Thanks for Cynically yours oh cynical Sach but the time has come.

Next is Ravana. Most of his posts are gems, precious ones at that, but there just aren't enough of them. I believe that he's too busy writing to write on his blog, which is ironic Alanis okay.

Lastly, for what I suspect and hope is going to be a temporary period, comes Kalusudda. I'm one of his many ardent fans but none of us know where he is, if he's okay or what's going on. The fact that his blog hasn't been touched for over four months is indisputable and makes it a wasted link. So, with a lot of regret Kalu, you're fired, hopefully only until you return from the sabbatical.

The new links, which you'll see over on the left, go like this.

At the front, much overdue as I've hung on his every word for as long as I can recall, is Mr D Blacker esq, with The Blacklight Arrow. His blog is eclectic, covering many aspects of his life, from the love side to the car side to the whole being a soldier side of things. I think it's the variety and the thoughtfulness of his words that make the Blacklight Arrow so well read. I wish he'd write more but he probably couldn't without churning out rubbish, like those fellows who publish posts every day and talk about poo and stuff.

Second in is N, whom we all know. He used to be called something else, but I'm unclear if I'm allowed to say that, so I won't.

Here's an uncanny story; the other day, about an hour after I'd started writing this post, a friend was telling me about a dream she'd had. She told me that she'd dreamt about a chap whose name was N, the same N as N, and his surname was X, the exact same surname as N has, though his real surname doesn't begin with X. I just assumed that she (the dreamer) actually knows N and he'd popped up in her dream, but no, she told me that she's never met him and never heard of him. Yet a fellow with the exact name had turned up in her dream. Weird.

So his blog is called In the confusion and aftermath and it's eminently readable. I hope I don't have a dream about him now. Chee!

The final addition is DBS Jeyaraj. I was first put onto this blog by David Blacker and I now find myself visiting it with increasing regularity. I admire his bravery, I respect his wisdom and I like his writing. More important than all of those is the fact that I learn a hell of a lot about Sri Lanka each time I read one of his posts and the hundreds of comments that they attract. Somehow I doubt that the esteemed Mr J has even heard of LLD but I'll forgive him for that as I'm such a fan of his.

There we are, out with some old, in with some old but new.

May the weekend be with you, may it be a spiffing one.