Tuesday 6th June 2023 – THERE WAS A LITTLE …

… more improvement through the night and for a change I had a better sleep than I’ve had for a few days.

It was 06:00 when I awoke and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up and about.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I revised for my Welsh lesson. And much to my surprise the lesson went quite well and I surprised myself with one or two things that I remembered that even impressed me.

But I think that I’ve reached a decision about my studies next year.

Having spent the first three months of the year in Canada or in hospital and so not being able to follow the course properly and as a result, deciding not to take the exam this year, I’m going to enrol in the next year’s course anyway but I’m going to find a way to retake this year.

There’s a Wednesday evening class that Coleg Cambria runs on-line from their College at Mold, but Coleg Cambria in Gwent also runs on-line courses and I’ve been to a few of their weekend and Summer schools. They might have something too

The difficulty is that the language in North Wales is different in many respects from that in South Wales.

A quick look at any map of Wales will see quite easily the line that’s drawn across the centre that represents the valleys of the Severn and the Mawddwy rivers. That’s the traditional route for invaders and occupiers.

Ever since the arrival of the Romans the country has effectively been split into two and the language has evolved differently in each part. With my grandmother coming from The Maelor I’m a northerner and say things like “rwan” instead of “nawr”, “efo” instead of “gyda” and “pres” instead of “arian”.

And that reminds me. If I do sign up to repeat the course in Gwent I’ll have to buy another course book. I won’t be able to use the one that I have.

For the rest of the day I’ve been working on my Canada 2017 voyage.

At St John’s I went to see my friend and we went for a meal together. And next morning I went off to Harbour Grace.

That’s one of the most interesting towns in the whole of Newfoundland. Apart from being a port and the centre of piracy in the early 17th Century, it’s the site of the terminus of the first railway line in Newfoundland and there’s an abandoned ship of several thousand tonnes that’s over 100 years old sitting on a sandbank offshore.

Much more interestingly though, there’s an airstrip above the town which was the site of the take-off of several of the earliest Transatlantic flights.

Amelia Earhart flew from there to become the first woman to pilot a plane across the Atlantic, and Brock and Schlee took off from there on one of the legs of their flight that became the first to circumnavigate the earth. All in all, 20 Transatlantic flights took off from there of which 9 of them failed to make it to their destination.

The physiotherapist came round this afternoon too. he thinks that i’ve twisted my ankle and that’s the cause of the problem.

He gave my ankle a massage and said that seeing as he’s in the building tomorrow he’ll look in and see how I am doing.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone from the night. There was a group of Americans working with us in what was my old school in one of the classrooms. For some reason they finished what it was that they were doing but the rest of us were still working. What I did was to pick up a handful of cards, go through them to try to find one or two that they could take with them and go to the library to write some research notes on topics on a couple of these cards

Then I was monitoring a lion for some reason although I was doing it on the quiet. There was a public watchman and there was me. One day the public watchman left to go to the shops for something. Someone else came by in his car. He parked up and from my little observation spot he went to the video camera and changed some of the settings, presumably so that it would record different things. When he did that he reset the times and went off again. I was wondering what he was doing, thinking that it’s a good job that I was here. The guy was then back in the area somehow. I didn’t see him but his sheepdog came bounding off the road and through the rocks on the side of the lake. From where I was sitting the other side of the lake I could see the lion lurking among the rocks. As the dog bounded past the rocks with the lion, the lion bounded out and began to give chase.

Dorothée, my little friend from Montréal, put in an appearance last night. She sent us a voice message. When we listened to it the first thing that went through our head was that it was someone breaking wind. I wanted to send her a message saying “next time don’t eat quite so many beans” but for some unknown reason the touchscreen on my phone wasn’t working. I couldn’t activate the reply function or the reply box to this particular message. I was there for ages trying to push the screen to make it accept.

It’s been quite a while since she last put in an appearance during the night. Probably the last time that I saw her in any shape or form was in the flesh when she and I went for a coffee together when I was in Montréal in September.

Someone else who put in an appearance last night was Zero, and it’s been a while since she’s come to see me during the night, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. She invited me to take her to the shops last night and of course I agreed.

But I sat up wide-awake at that point, obviously from shock. What a moment to wake up, just as I was about to ride off into the sunset with her.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with some of the left-over stuffing from yesterday. It was delicious too. And with the stuffing that remains I’ll add that to one of the half-portions of curry in the freezer.

So I’ll have to make some more naan bread tomorrow. That last lot was delicious and if I can make some more like that I’ll be extremely happy. I’m getting to be quite domesticated these days.

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Monday 5th June 2023 – LAST NIGHT WAS …

… somewhat better than the previous one.

But that’s not difficult. Almost anything could have been better than that.

Feeling as tired as I was, I went to bed early and was asleep quite quickly. Just the occasional tossing and turning here and there.

Mind you, I did awaken early and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up. Not quite “about” but I was sitting on the edge of the bed dressing.

After the medication I went and had a shower. It was something of a struggle to climb into the bath but only because of the pain in the lower calf, not because of any underlying health issue that might have affected my climbing into the bath in the past

The nurse came round at 08:20 and gave me my injection. He went afterwards to my neighbour who had the bad fall. Apparently things are not looking so good for her and that will be quite a shame.

And the nerve specialist finally phoned me back early this morning too. He can fit me on on 20th June at 10:15.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent travelling through Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island and on the ferry across the Gulf of St Lawrence. We’re now pulling into port at Argentia ready for Strider, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me to drive up to Saint John to see my friend who lives there.

Argentia is quite an interesting place. The slow Transatlantic convoys – those with prefix SC – in World War II set out from Sydney, from where I’d just sailed, and the destroyer patrols that guarded the convoys in the early stages of their journey sheltered here in Argentia.

The village itself was demolished to make room for the naval installations. Even the bodies in the graveyard were dug up.

On 10th August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt met in the harbour on board a ship in the harbour to discuss issues concerning the conduct of the War to date and how the USA could help to further the UK’s War aims.

When I was HERE IN 2010 it was in the middle of a torrential rainstorm so I didn’t have much of a look round. And when I was there in 2017 I was in too much of a rush.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. I was keeping a diary. One of the entries on which I was working was about my trip to the hospital where I’d ended up being in some kind of class that was doing something like an eye examination test where everyone was being asked questions about eyes etc but in a more vernacular rather than a scientific sense. I wasn’t asked any questions but I still had to take part in it. I was writing it up in the diary. There were lots more than happened on that particular day but I can’t remember much of it now

There was another dream about a circus, Silcock’s Circus but I can’t remember how it went. But then I was with my friends from the Wirral and another one of my friends but the woman with him was neither of the women with whom he has been married. We’d all met up once for my birthday but it was time to go. We walked back to the bus stop in Weston. The couple from the Wirral were walking ahead so I was walking with the other two who were bringing up the rear. I said my fondest goodbyes to them and that I’d see them again but I wasn’t sure when, then walked off to say goodbye to the others. The Wirral couple cut me off and headed that way. The other two went to speak to them. I thought “never mind. I’ll wander off anyway and leave those four to it”. Eventually the 6 of us (so who was the sixth?) were together at the bus stop. I pointed out the new views of Crewe with all of the redevelopment and cutting down of trees you could see so much more of the town from here than you could 30 years ago. We talked about all of the changes that had taken place in the area. Mrs Wirral asked me if I could fly by aeroplane. I told her that I had done but the problem with aeroplanes was the transfers. If I go by bus it’s basically door to door with no wandering around unnecessarily whereas with the aeroplane I’d have to walk miles and that was what was the problem with that. It wasn’t the question that I couldn’t afford it. That was something else.

I was an explorer back in the early Middle Ages. I discovered Paris on behalf of the French. That led to huge dances and celebrations all over the country. I was at one of them. For some reason King George ended up displeased and I was arrested. Crowds of people still came out to the exit to watch me take my exercise. I was thinking that one day they would decide to cut off my head at the end of all this. They were presumably letting things drag because nothing at all seemed to be changing.

At some point during the morning I dozed off for half an hour. I’ve clearly not recovered from Saturday night and my lack of sleep.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper, made with one of the peppers out of the freezer. And I cooked it in the air fryer on a low heat of 160°C for a total of 17 minutes, and that cooked it to perfection. It really was done to a turn.

And on the subject of things being cooked to perfection, my fruit buns were certainly delicious. It was an excellent batch that I made yesterday.

So tomorrow I have a Welsh lesson so I need to prepare for it. And the physiotherapist is coming round tomorrow afternoon too. I’m not sure what he’ll have to say about my leg and the little incident on Saturday morning, but with having had the nerve specialist contacting me again, it looks as if things are slowly moving forward.

it just makes me wish that I was.

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Sunday 4th June 2023 – THAT WAS A HORRIBLE …

… night last night. I don’t think that I went off to sleep for a moment.

My left leg was hurting all the way through the night and I just couldn’t make myself comfortable.

So much so that I was wide awake at 08:00 and out of bed by 08:30 and when was the last time that that ever happened on a Sunday?

After the medication and the mails and messages I spent much of the day working on my Canada 2017 journey. I’ve now spent a week at my niece’s house, done some work on Strider and now I’m on my way for the Bay of Fundy to pick up Strider’s insurance.

That’s something that I won’t have to worry about in the future because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, Strider is up for sale. There’s no point in having him sitting rusting away at the end of my niece’s drive when someone else can make use of him.

Liz came onto the internet too. Her grand-daughter is into ballet and is off shortly to Portugal to perform. She’s appeared in a couple of videos just recently so Liz sent me the links to watch.

Tonight’s pizza was another masterpiece. I seem to have this off to quite a fine art now and that’s really good. I’m not sure how I can improve on how they are turning out at the moment.

What helped today though was that the oven was stinking hot when the pizza went in. I’d run out of fruit buns at the end of the week so I made a batch this afternoon and they look quite good. I’ll tell you tomorrow about how they taste.

There’s a little room in the freezer now to put the spare ones. While I was ferreting about in there I found a plastic container with some soup in it. Carrot and ginger it was, and I remember making that and how good it was.

And notice the use of the past tense. The soup no longer exists and it was just as delicious as I remembered it. It made a nice change from cheese on toast at lunchtime.

Despite what I said just now, I must have gone to sleep at some point during the night because there was some stuff on the dictaphone. I started off in the Air Force in World War I. My aeroplane had been attacked and I’d been killed. I was still somehow going through the lines of a song trying to work out the lyrics and have the tune fitted into them because it wasn’t as straightforward as it might have seemed.

Then I was in the mountains of Central Europe last night with a couple of other people. We’d been climbing these rocks and were having to move this wood about, these very long tree trunks. At times it was extremely difficult and complicated on these rocks. More than once we almost dropped them into the valley down below. When we reached a place where we could relax I was talking about cars. Someone knew where there was a certain type of car for sale but it was in Bulgaria. he translated the advert for me. I mentioned that I’d be interested in paying so much for it. In Bulgaria he said that’s an “anhorse”. I had to be very careful not to confuse it with “anhorst” and a few others that meant different sums. he coached me through it and then wrote it down. I looked at samples of his writing. There was writing of other people there. Some of it was really close together but very tall. He talked about whose that was. We agreed to make an appointment to see the vehicle but now we had to retrace our steps back the way we’d come with these two enormous tree trunks which was really difficult. We almost dropped them again in the same place. One of the other people suggested that he go in front so that he could hold them from the front while I held them at the back and we slid them along. How he was going to go to the front past me and these tree trunks was another big complicated issue. There was also a young girl there too but I can’t remember what she was doing or why she was there.

And then very early on Sunday morning I was heading into Crewe Town Centre to do something about this leg. I’d gone over the bridge in Flag Lane ready to turn into Delamere Street and they both came round the corner, my father eating some chips. I grabbed a chip and said that I hadn’t had any this weekend. I asked how they were and they asked how I was. We had a little chat really about nothing very much in particular

Shortly I’m going to bed – nice and early too. I’m absolutely whacked and I’ve already fallen asleep once or twice today sitting on my chair. I’m hoping to have a really good sleep tonight. I’m certainly tired enough but things never work out quite like that, do they?

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Saturday 3rd June 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… really bad fall today.

And this one is the worst that I’ve had. Even worse than the one on the boat coming back from Jersey last summer.

And not only that, it’s much more worrying too. usually what happens is that all of a sudden there’s no sensation at all in my right leg and when I put my foot down I simply fall over gently as if there’s no leg there.

However today, it was the left leg, my good (or maybe I should say less bad) leg, there was a stabbing pain all the way up my left leg and I had a really heavy fall.

It happened on the car park at Noz and I wasn’t able to stand up afterwards. I had to crawl on my hands and knees to Caliburn and lean on him to help me up.

Right now, I can’t move without being on crutches and each time I try to stand up or put my leg in an unusual position the pain comes back.

It’s not a “broken leg” type of pain but definitely a muscle or nerve issue. I’ll have to wait until the physio next comes to see me and have a chat with him. In the meantime I’ll be taking it easy

Not that I took it easy during the night. I stayed up until I finished the notes for the day in Canada 2017 on which I’d been working so that I could go to bed with a clean slate.

But once more, we seem to be back in the “tossing and turning during the night” stages. I thought that we’d got over all of that, but apparently not.

When the alarm went off this morning I was fast asleep again and it was a struggle to beat the second alarm.

There were a few things that I needed to do before setting out and then Caliburn and I went out to the shops.

And today I didn’t buy a thing at Noz. It really was a waste of time going and had I known how it would turn out I wouldn’t have gone at all.

At LeClerc I bought everything that I needed (although I bet that I’ve forgotten something) and then went to the appliances department in a separate building to buy a gas cylinder for my sodastream

Back here I had a fight with the freezer to fit in the beans that I’d bought and then settled down with my coffee and cheese on toast.

Regrettably, I crashed out for a while too. That’s becoming a habit, it seems, whenever I go out and about.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night. I was a passenger on a coach trip with a young girl, someone like my youngest sister. We were in like a ballroom place sitting down talking. There were all kinds of things happening. We’d left the room for some reason but when we returned the band was just striking up a waltz. I grabbed hold of whoever I was with and we waltzed into the room. We were the only couple on the dance floor. my friend from Germany was there so she took her husband and they began to dance. We began to have a ballroom dance-type of thing. My partner wasn’t particularly good but I was able to guide her around somewhat. It began to be a nice pleasant evening.

Later on there was a family, something like the Lyons (as in “Life of Lyons”) family who lived at 222 some street or other. One of their children had to go to the radio centre to introduce a radio show. I went to pick him up. First of all I was surprised. I was expecting mansions, all this kind of thing but they were just modern terraced houses in a big square. I drove around and found the house. What was interesting here was that there was no front door. The living room overflowed into a common area. The doors behind went into the kitchens and bedrooms. I could hear the children talking in there. I recognised the voices so I went and knocked on the door leading to the back and they began to come out.

At that moment though I had a horrible attack of cramp in my left calf and that awoke me so I’ll never know how that would have ended..

Finally I had to go to a Tax Office last night to take all my papers. The first thing that I had to do was to take a plastic bag in which to put everything. There was a big pile of them. I took one that implied that I was Moroccan. I don’t know why I did that. I put all my papers in and had to join this queue. There were probably 20 clerks sitting at a long desk. You just went to stand at the desk and one of them would talk to you. I handed all the papers of my employment to her. I was marked down as “leaving definitively”. I had to hand in another certificate to the guy sitting next to this girl. He looked at it and said “we already have these. You didn’t need to bring this”. I replied “I bring everything anyway”. he began to go through all my paperwork with the girl. he asked me “do you have any more income with the Commonwealth?”. I replied “no”.

The rest of the day has been spent feeling sorry for myself and writing up the notes for the next day’s walk (in the days when I could walk) around Québec.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that years ago I wrote something about THE CHEMIN DU ROY from Montreal to Québec. I started from Repentigny because I wasn’t sure of the route out of Montreal but over time I traced the route and so I was on foot from the centre of the town out as far as the Jacques Cartier Bridge and a little bit futher east.

And one thing that I’ve often wondered. In North America most of the landmarks are named for the first European who actually saw them. I always wondered what Jacques Cartier must have said when he sailed up the St Lawrence to what in those days was the Iroquois settlement of Hochelaga in 1535 and saw that massive bridge.

There was a burger that had been in the fridge for a while and when I inspected it this evening I decided that the best thing to do with it would be to file it under CS. Consequently I had a further fight with the freezer and put one of the two remaining lasagne slices in there to keep

The other one, I ate tonight with a vegan salad and it was all extremely delicious. I’m really impressed with that lasagne, that’s for sure.

Not so impressed with my health though. It seems that I only have to think about going back to the Land of my Great Grandfather and I have a bad fall, just like last year.

However that time, I ignored it and went all the same, and look how that turned out. I think that my body is trying to tell me something.

What I’ll do for now is to carry on around the Port of Montreal ship-spotting and when things quieten down, dictate some radio notes that I’ve prepared.

No alarm tomorrow. I’ll have a good lie-in. But I have to be a-baking though. I’ve run out of fruit buns. No idea where I’m going to put the ones that need to be stored though. We’re back to where we were ages ago with not even the hint of a place to put stuff

Well, it’ll all work out somehow. It usually does. I just wish that I would.

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Friday 2nd June 2023 – MY LUNCH TODAY …

… was just as good as last Friday’s.

And for the same reason too. I’d been for a walk down into the supermarket in town and they had more of the fresh broccoli on special offer.

So once again I chose the head with the thickest stalk and made a broccoli stalk soup.

Not that it did me much good though because we had something of s struggle throughout the day

Once again, I wasn’t up before the alarm went off. Its raucous rattle awoke me at 07:00 while I was deep in the arms of Morpheus and it was a struggle to leave my stinking pit.

But leave it I did, and before the second alarm too.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I carried on with Canada 2017.

At the moment I’m on Day Three – happily wandering around my favourite building in Montreal, the abandoned Gare Viger GARE VIGER of the Canadian Pacific Railway which I think is the most beautiful building in the city.

It was a lovely day out and I certainly put the miles on Montreal’s public transport system and then a wander around the docks on my way to my hotel for an evening meal and bed.

But by the looks of things, during my time in Montréal I didn’t go to my favourite Indian café out at the Cote Vertu. I really must be slipping.

So with Day Three not yet finished – out of a total of 60 that I spent in North America that year, you can see that this is going to be a very loooooooooooong project.

But there is one thing, and that is that I’m beginning to understand why I wasn’t in a rush to finish things off once I became ill. And that’s because right now I’m having huge pangs of nostalgia and I can’t wait to be on a plane again for Montreal

However, although I know that being in Montreal on crutches is totally impractical, it doesn’t make much of a difference.

There was a break in the proceedings for my trip into town this morning. And walking down the hill I fell in with one of my neighbours and we had a good chinwag for quite some considerable time.

However, a little further on my right leg gave way again. Luckily I was leaning on a crutch at the time otherwise I would have ended up in an undignified heap, and I’ve ended up in more than a few of those in the old days with some of the cars that I owned.

At the Carrefour I bought the broccoli, some mushrooms, some more peppers for freezing (making sure that they weren’t too big for the air fryer) some peaches that were on special offer and another crusty bit of bread. I’ve I’m going to have broccoli stalk soup, I’m going to have it in unashamed luxury.

The walk back up the hill onto my rock from town finished me off as it usually does, but I blanched the broccoli and set it to drain while I made the soup.

Half an onion cut into small pieces and fried on a very hot heat with cumin and coriander, and then garlic, diced broccoli and a couple of diced small potatoes and left to simmer in the water in which I had blanched the broccoli.

After 20 minutes I went and whizzed it up, realising as I type these notes that I had forgotten to add a stock cube. Nevertheless, it was extremely nice with my crusty bread.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night too. I’d been out somewhere in Caliburn. There was a bad tyre on him. I had some wheels in the back of the van so I bought a new tyre and had it fitted on the wheel. I drove to where I was going and then took out my tools to change the wheel. Everyone looked at my enormous power bar. You could see that they were impressed and about to say something about it but I changed the tyre anyway. Then I noticed that Caliburn’s Controle technique was about to expire. I phoned the garage but they said that there was nothing at all that they could do for 6 weeks. I thought “well, I’ll have to take that, won’t I? And trust to luck for a few weeks driving around without one. Then he said that he could fit it in on Saturday morning. However I wasn’t going to be here on Saturday morning. I’d still be in Leuven. I wasn’t sure at all what I could do. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity having made a fuss, otherwise I’d have to wait 6 weeks and it wouldn’t show me in any good light having made such a fuss and then turning down the appointment

Later on I was at a football match and we were in the dying seconds of the game. The ball went out for a throw-in. The team wanted to restart it really quickly. A few players including their goalkeeper ran to take it. Someone else from the other team took the throw-in and threw it really quickly while the goalkeeper was out of position so one of the other players tried to stop him advancing. He threw a punch. There was a huge melee after that. The referee had to pull everyone apart and had to find a megaphone to announce to the crowd what had happened, what he’d seen and what he would do.

Finally, a plane had gone down in the sea. While they reached the plane and were able to rescue it they couldn’t find any of the people who had been in it when it had hit the water. I don’t know where it went after that

So no Harry Potter, no family, no cats and no Castor, TOTGA or Zero.

What there was though was that I crashed out for some of the afternoon. It seems that walking down into town and back again is too much for me in my state of health.

But is it going to stop me? It reminds me of that sticker that I saw on the back of an old Renault a few years ago – “Nothing is going to stop me! Not even my brakes!”

Tea was the last of those small breaded quornburgers that had been in the freezer since the Dawn of Time. They went down well with another vegan salad and the remaining small potatoes cubed and fried in the air fryer.

Tomorrow I’ll be shopping and there’s quite a list of things that are running low again. I had to use my cherry tomatoes on the salad this evening and the cucumber had gone the Way of the West.

And then there’s some radio work to be done of course. I have to push on with that of course.

No football though. There’s a match here but I haven’t been at all this season to watch any game, never mind one in the French Fourth Division at the Stade Louis Dior. I’m having to content myself with internet highlights. I watched Partick Thistle v Ross County just now.

Nnot because I really wanted to but, as the old saying goes, “it’s the only game in town right now”.

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Thursday 1st June 2023 – MY LASAGNE …

… for tea tonight was actually quite good.

There’s room for improvement of course but bearing in mind that this is the first one that I’ve made since I was living in Reyers more than 25 years ago, it was by no means disappointing.

There wasn’t enough filling, but that’s a minor problem. There’s enough food left nevertheless to make two more meals so it’s just as well that it worked.

What I did was to put some lentils in the slow cooker and slowly bring them to the boil. Then they were rinsed and put back in with clean water and some basil, oregano and tarragon. Mind you, I almost forgot to rinse them and had to leave my comfortable bed to do that.

Later on this afternoon I added some bulghour and later still, because there was still plenty of water, I added some porridge oats to soak it up and stiffen the mix.

At teatime I fried an onion and garlic with more of the herbs, added my mix from the slow cooker and some tomato concentrate, then layered alternate layers of pasta sheet and my cooked mix, topped it off with a thick cheese sauce and baked it in the oven, and away we went.

During the night I went away too. So much so that for a change just recently I wasn’t up before the alarm. It awoke me with a start when it went off but I didn’t hang around at all in bed.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I had a listen to the dictaphone notes. And I really Had been away. Back at Hogwarts at one point too during the night with HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE seeing the kids at their dance. Ron had split up from Lavender Brown. There was another girl there who was sulking for some reason or other. Ron went to ask her to dance but she replied “they aren’t playing our tune”. All her friends told him to leave her alone. Just then the music started to play it so a couple of people went to dance her and missed. She moved away. I don’t know what happened to Ron and this girl then but Hermione was there dancing with someone whom I didn’t know when the dance floor collapsed. They carried on dancing and it looked as if they would dance into the ladies’ lavatory. Someone just coming out of the door said to hermione “do you want some paper as well?”. It all was very strange.

Back in Harry Potter again later and there was something about spying on someone’s house. It was very difficult to do. There was a fallen tree with its branches and we had to hide ourselves in the fallen tree’s branches to do it. We piled into a car and set out to drive. There was a lot of traffic and I was weaving in and out of it and almost had a collision with someone. They went in front of me and put their brakes on to slow down so I did too. We had a slow drive with all the traffic on the road. We came to Barbridge where there was a fallen tree in the middle of the road. I said to the others “lock your doors and hang on because this is a trap” thinking that someone had cut down the tree for it to fall across the road to stop us and ambush us when we left the vehicle to see what was happening.

Later still I’d seen an AC Cobra for sale in the local newspaper so Laurence and I went round to see it with Roxanne. It was somewhere off nantwich Road in Crewe so we eventually managed to find the house. We walked straight into the house without knocking. We found the car in a downstairs room covered by a blanket. First of all my taxi detector wouldn’t work. Then I realised that an AC Cobra wouldn’t have been a taxi anyway. Found the guy and his wife sitting in a room next door, not in the least perturbed by the fact that we were in their house. We went back into the room and began to look around at this vehicle. He told me that he wanted £30,000 for it, which I thought was cheap. But that turned out to be the deposit to take it for a test drive – it was really £250,000. There was no way that I could afford that. I pretended that I was interested and got down to look underneath it. It was quite badly rotten around the edges. I thought to myself “he’s asking for a lot of money for something in this kind of condition. Even if I were to buy it, I didn’t have the mobility to crawl around underneath it with welding tackle etc these days. There’s no way that I could consider this vehicle” but I wasn’t going to tell him that until I’d had a good look around to find out what else was wrong.

I was back in this dream again later on and we were leaving. Down at the bus station was a bus going to Mold. We were saying our goodbyes but the driver prepared to close the doors. This woman and I ran to the door and scrambled aboard. We had a look for the guy who was with us but he wasn’t on board. By now the bus had set off. I thought “never mind. We’re on here and Roxanne is on here”. I asked for two and a half to Mold. he smiled and said “I’m not going to Mold”. “Well, take us to wherever you’re going”. He gave me two and a half tickets which came to 11/-. The first thing that I did was seeing as I had some money ready I said that I’d give him the shilling but it was a £10 note. Then I had a 10/- note for him. He looked at me and asked “is that correct?”. I suddenly realised that I’d done, took the £10 note back and gave him 1/-. I went to sit down and to worry about contacting the other guy later. There were 2 boys on the bus who made some kind fo remark about me handing over a £10 note and how did I spot it from that distance? I replied “when you reach a certain age you don’t look at the money, you can smell the difference between the notes.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent on Day Two of my 2017 trip to North America and the page is practically finished. However, we did hit an obstruction.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that one thing always leads to another, and once you start, you’ll be surprised just how many other things there are.

The subject of Marguerite de Bourgeoys cropped up on that web page.

She was a big friend of Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the founder of Montreal and she was on one of the very first emigrant voyages to Nouvelle France where she occupied herself with spiritual works and the welfare of the filles du roi, the young girls from orphanages who were sent out to become brides for the soldiers who remained there to settle after having been discharged from the army.

They both came from Troyes which was on my shuttle route between Virlet and Brussels so on the very last time that I drove the route, instead of doing it overnight as I usually did, I took a whole week and visited every place of interest that I could find along the way.

One of the places that I visited was the family home of the Chomedeys and I found all of my photos. But seeing as Troyes is such a beautiful old town I took dozens of photos of many old house and I couldn’t remember which one was his.

No trace of the notes that I made, which was a surprise – especially as they were written up from the following day all the way back to Virlet.

In the end, I had to dive back into the bowels of the back-up disk and find the dictaphone recordings from the journey and re-transcribe the notes for the relevant day and mate them to the photos.

That’s another project that I’ll have to do one of these days. The road between the Belgian border at Rocroi and down to Nevers is one of the most beautiful and historic in all of France. I had a plan that when I was stuck for something to do (whenever that might be) I’d pick a long road like that, explore it thoroughly and write a book about it.

The TRANS LABRADOR HIGHWAY was done in 2010, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and I’m doing Version 2.0 even as we speak.

After that, I wrote a pile of stuff about Lanouiller and de Bécancour’s CHEMIN DU ROY between Montreal and the city of Québec and all the way down the “Forgotten Coast” as far as it’s possible to go.

The road between Rocroi and Nevers was to be the third of the trilogy but ill-health and feeling sorry for myself somehow conspired to get in the way of all of my plans.

Someone else for whom I was feeling sorry for was the physiotherapist. He came by at 17:00 to tell me that he’s busy and will be back at 19:30. That was a major inconvenience, disrupting my evening like that and I made sure that he knew.

Rosemary phoned me at lunchtime and we had another one of our marathon chats that go on for ever. She’s being swept up by the turn of events and it’s not easy for “a stranger in a strange land” to deal with some of the things that go on. It’s not something that bothers me too much because I couldn’t care less, but Rosemary is much more sensible and focused than I ever am.

After she hung up, I went for a shower to clean myself up ready for His Nibs to come round and put me through my paces

As I mentioned earlier, tea was delicious. And now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed.

Tomorrow I have to nip into town which will do me good. And then I have to carry on with Canada 2017 and sort out the mess that will be Trans-Labrador Highway Version 2.0

So once I finish that I’ll have to do Rocroi-Nevers next, then carry on with the Arctic stuff, go back and carry on with the Emigrant Trails stuff, organise the Grand Banks trips and probably 1000 other things too.

Never mind anything else – I’m far too busy to die right now.

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Wednesday 31st May 2023 – I’M ABSOLUTELY EXHAUSTED.

And that’s no surprise considering the distance that I’ve travelled today.

This morning after the medication and checking the mails and messages I left my motel in Québec and headed to the library of the Department of Nordic Studies at Laval University to look for a thesis.

Then I went to the site of the battle of Sainte-Foy and then hit the road for Montreal where I spent a couple of days.

Leaving Montreal I went to Kingston in Ontario to see my cousin Sandra, and then crossed the border into the USA.

Strider, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I then drove all the way down to see my friend Rhys in South Carolina.

After spending a few days there, I headed on south so that Strider could tell his friends that he’s been to Georgia and then we went to Myrtle Beach for a few days to rest.

Myrtle Beach brings back some very strange memories because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we’ve BEEN HERE BEFORE on our way back from Rhys’s wedding.

When Alison and I worked at that strange American company, we had a colleague who waxed lyrical about Myrtle Beach and said how wonderful it was, not knowing that I actually knew the place.

So I produced all of my photos from 2005 and she never said another word. In my opinion, the centre of the town is like Rhyl but with sun, as the photos went to show.

After a nice rest in a cheap seaside hotel, I came back all the way up the Outer Banks and I forget how many ferries I took as I kept to the outside. Forget Interstate 95 – the Outer Banks is the way to go north.

Especially with all of the ferries. people have been saying that I’ve been all at sea for years.

We finally hit the mainland at Bridgeport in Connecticut having had that gorgeous sunset going over Long Island Sound, and then STRIDER, STRAWBERRY MOOSE AND I IMITATED JACKSON BROWNE and went “Rollin’ down 295 outta Portland, Maine” (although in my case, I was rollin’ up it).

That song, by the way, was actually recorded on Jackson Browne’s tour bus as it really was rolling down Interstate 295 and you can hear the engine in the background.

However, back to today and we ended up back in New Brunswick, parked up Strider, celebrated Thanksgiving (I think that everyone was giving thanks that I was leaving), caught the bus back to Montreal and the plane back to Belgium and the hospital.

So you can see that I’ve been a very busy boy today and I’ve finished sorting the photos. I’ve even made a start on rewriting the notes.

But my visit to Laval University was interesting.

An author by the name of James Enterline wrote a book arguing that the Norse didn’t actually sail down the Labrador coast on their epic voyage of discovery in 1000AD but instead, went to the west of Cape Chidley and ended up in Ungava Bay.

He quoted at great length from the report of Thomas Lee who had excavated at Pomiok Island in the bay and had found what he (Lee) claimed to be a Norse longhouse.

Lee’s research was funded by the University of Laval on behalf of their Department of Nordic Studies. Unfortunately though, Laval is one of the few Canadian Universities that doesn’t have its theses on-line these days.

So off I went to find Lee’s report and eventually it turned up in a dusty corner where it had sat untouched since the mid-1960s

To my surprise, it contained a note to the effect that Lee had seen Enterline’s arguments and he went to great length in this appendix to dismiss them out-of-hand.

The sad thing about this is that Lee’s style of writing was polemic and contentious to the point of being confrontational, certainly not academic. And presumably as a result, his request for funds to continue his excavations the following year was denied.

And no further excavations has been carried out.

This is the big problem with a lot of incestuous academia. Everyone starts off with all of the best intentions and attacks their work with gusto. They do quite a lot of good research, obtain their Master’s and then go to work in a Bank and that’s your lot. It’s all forgotten.

Meanwhile, in other news, my cleaner came round again this afternoon to try to bring order out of chaos. She told me some bad news about my neighbour who had a very bad fall a couple of weeks ago. It looks as if she’s done herself a permanent mischief. There are people much worse off than me, that’s for sure.

Tea was a half-portion of curry from the freezer with the fridge leftovers, some rice and veg and a naan bread. And I’m eating really well these days, that’s for sure. That was lovely.

And there are some lentils simmering in the slow cooker too ready for my lasagne tomorrow. I’m looking forward to that so it had better be good.

Plenty of stuff on the dictaphone from the night too. I was round at some woman’s house and she had a lot of animals living in there, like a zoo. On one particular occasion a tiger took quite a fancy to me but in the wrong kind of sense. I had no intention of being a tiger’s main course meal so in the end I had to chase it away. She locked it outside the room where we were sitting talking. She went out with it and I barricaded the door. There was then a knocking on the door. It was her so I had to unlock it and let her in. another animal tried to come in too so I had to somehow chase it out, close the door again and wedge a sofa up against the door. She asked “if you’re doing all of that how are we going to manage if you have to go to the bathroom?”. I replied ” I couldn’t care less about going to the bathroom. I just want to keep away from these animals”.

Later on I was with someone whom I knew from my time in Stoke on Trent, and not any of the “usual suspect” eithers. We went into a pub in Hanley somewhere. We’d come out of work and there was some kind of discussion about how we never went for a drink any more, basically because there was some kind of atmosphere going on between a group of us and we’d decided that we’d go our separate ways. Talking to him, he said that he’s thinking restarting going to the pub early in the morning before coming into work. I thought that that’s not a particularly good idea. We ended up at the pub and that person whom I mentioned concerning the bad feeling was there playing darts. I couldn’t buy a pint for just the 2 of us, I had to buy one for the 3rd guy. I went to the bar to order while my friend and this lad stayed behind talking. The first thing that I noticed was that the Mild tap had been taken off the bar. I asked about that. The barman told me that they didn’t have any at that moment. I thought that I’d better order two brown ales or something and see what the 3rd guy wants.

Later on, L found myself driving towards Fredericton last night. While I was there I went into the Bulk Barn but I awoke before I remembered what it was that I was going to do there. Bulk Barn shops by the way are very exciting. Anyone who remembers “Weigh and Save” in the UK in the 70s and 80s will know the type of shop but in Canada it’s a huge chain and about 100 times better than Weigh and Save ever was. Of course Canada has a mush more rural population still carrying on the traditions of the 1950s (which I like) so a place like that does really well.

Finally I was doing another taxi job last night. I had to take someone to the hospital but via a medical centre type of place. I arrived and a couple of people helped the guy out. They said that I could leave him there and drive on. I tried to have someone sign the book for the account but no-one would. They all wandered off. In the end I just had to turn round and drive back into traffic.

Tomorrow, I’ll push on with my website stuff. I’ll see how far I get and whether I can actually complete this project without falling by the wayside. Then I have plenty more after that to crack on and finish. I’ve not even finished editing the photos from the High Arctic in 2019 yet and it’s almost 4 years since we set out on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR in Aberdeen and alighted, after many misadventures, on the Canada-Alaska border.

High time that I extricated my digit instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself.

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Tuesday 30th May 2023 – HAVING SAID THAT …

… I wouldn’t do any Harry Potter impersonations last night, I ended up in a swimming costume last night. It had taken ages to actually make it fit and to put it on properly. For some reason I began to have a panic attack while I was wearing it. I couldn’t understand why because there was nothing out of the ordinary or unusual at all about it.

That make a change, doesn’t it? Panic attacks when I’m asleep don’t happen all that often. I can only recall a dozen or so in total.

And while we’re on the subject of dreams … “well, one of us is” – ed … while I was going through the back-up disk a week or so ago, I came across all of the notes that I’d made when this project first started. Right back in 2000, as it happens. It’ll be interesting to see who was featuring in the voyages back in those days and what were the interesting topics that came to mind.

This morning was another morning when I was awake and up and about before the alarm went off. Well, maybe I ought to says “awake” in inverted commas because while the spirit was willing, the flesh was somewhat weaker.

Once I’d had the medication and checked the mails and messages I had a listen to the dictaphone because there was some other stuff on there too. I obtained a part-time job working in a library last night. I just turned up on the Monday evening when I was supposed to be there . There was a girl at the counter so I introduced myself. She asked me if I’d be comfortable stamping the books when they were either returned or handed out. I smiled and laughed “I could just about manage that, I reckon”, put my stuff down and went round behind the desk to sit there and start work.

And then later on I stepped back into that dream back in the library. I was extremely busy and having to organise some girl’s research etc. As well as that I was swamped with phone calls of people making other kinds of enquiries.

Most of the rest of the day has been spent sorting through the photos from my journey around North America in 2017. It’s going to take an age to sort them all out, and that’s before I even think about writing the notes.

Today I’ve sailed the Gulf of St Lawrence, been to see my friend in St Johns, driven all the way across Newfoundland and across Labrador, and I’m currently in a motel on the edge of the city of Québec which I still think is THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITY IN NORTH AMERICA – but that’s probably because it’s the most “European-medieval” city on the continent

And that reminds me. I wrote my magnum opus on the city of Québec in 2012 and I’ve been there several times since then. So I must have tons more notes and photos that need adding in.

The high winds that we had yesterday had dropped this morning so I sorted out the glass and plastic rubbish ready to take out. So evidently, once everything was sorted out and ready to go, the wind got up again. Just gale force today though, not hurricane force like yesterday so I decided to brave it.

It’s not easy because I’m not steady on my feet even with crutches and the bags of rubbish acted as sails that blew me around the front of the building. It was quite a struggle to go there, empty my stuff and then stagger back.

The physiotherapist came round this evening too. He’s beginning to be concerned that the progress that I made over the early part of the year has now ground to a halt and that there are no signs of further improvement

He’s not the only one. I was quite pleased about how things were going and I was optimistic that I could pick up my bed and walk before too long. But it doesn’t seem to be going to end like that at all.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with some of the left-over stuffing from yesterday, accompanied by rice and veg. And as usual, the stuffing improves when left overnight.

There’s still some stuffing left but not a great deal. But last week I made some curry and froze it in half-portions and I’ll add the leftover stuffing into one of those along with anything else that’s lingering in the fridge

And I must remember to put some lentils in the slow cooker when I go to bed tomorrow. I’m going to have a bash at making a lasagne on Thursday and I need some stuff to go with the pasta and cheese sauce.

Yes, a cheese sauce. Now that I can find a reasonable supply of vegan cheese I intend to make the most of it

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Monday 29th May 2023 – I’M GOING TO HAVE …

… to stop watching all of these HARRY POTTER films.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, while I’m eating my tea I’ll be watching a film on the DVD, gradually working my way around my collection of DVDs. Right now, the film that’s on the machine is HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE.

And so during the night I had to go to a wizards’ conference to learn something or other on a course. Wondering how I was going to go there, someone turned up and said that they’d take me. They had an umbrella that was like a helicopter blade. I hung onto them, they hung onto the helicopter blade and off we went. We flew past the house of someone whom I knew. I always suspected that they were rather strange and there were 5 people hovering over their house on broomsticks. I waved. Suddenly we came down to earth. The guy said “I’m going out of my area now so you have to get off and walk”. I asked “how go I come back?”. He replied “you come back to this spot and I’ll pick you up”. “So how do I come back here?”. he replied “you could always call a taxi”. I said goodbye to this guy and set off to walk. When I arrived at this place they were burying a cat that had been hit by a car. I thought that the collar might have special magic powers so I was wondering if I could have it. But they were obviously intent upon burying the cat wearing the collar so it was probably inappropriate to ask. They carried on with their plan to deal with the cat while I prepared myself for this weekend course.

It’s actually a film that I remember very well, having been to see it with Marianne when it was doing the rounds of the cinemas. And I remember thinking, when Dumbledore took out his wand to clean and rebuild Professor Slughorn’s house, that I would give all that I own and more besides to have a wand that would do that

A couple of weeks ago, it was the 10th anniversary of her voyage to meet her maker. It’s bizarre how quickly time flies. It seems like only yesterday but a lot has happened since then.

So retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, and in particular, about today.

It all started off with me once more raising myself from the dead before the alarm went off. And once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages, I made a start on the radio stuff that I’d dictated on Saturday night.

There wasn’t any rush today so it took a while, but in the end I finished up with two more programmes completed. There are only notes for two more, and then I can begin work on the next batch. But I’ll have to take it easy because I’m now 9 months in advance of broadcasting. I know that I want to be well ahead, because you never know when the bell might toll for me, but this is becoming rather excessive.

Being that far ahead isn’t really a good idea. I remember back in the old “Radio Anglais” days when I wrote and recorded a programme about Chris Squire, only for him to shuffle off this mortal coil the morning the programme was due to be broadcast. I don’t think that there’s been a radio programme rewritten as quickly as that one was.

Anyway, eventually I managed to finish the programme, despite the interruption from the nurse who came to give me my injection this morning.

One thing that I was going to do was to take out the rubbish to the bins but we have another hurricane blowing around outside. That’s the problem with living in what is one of the windiest places in Europe.

Mind you, it used to have its compensations. In this kind of weather I’d be out on the headland with the camera taking photos of the sea roaring over the sea wall into the harbour but these days I can’t even open the door of the building.

Instead, I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I’ve already mentioned one of them but there were still several others. I was just dropping off to sleep when I heard the physiotherapist shout to me. I don’t know what happened there but there have been a few times here and there over the years that I’ve had this phenomenon of people calling my name when I’ve been asleep and it’s awoken me with a start. I’ve never worked out why.

But strange things happen when you are asleep. I knew someone who dreamt that he was awake, and when he awoke, he was!

Later on I had to take my overtime sheet to the supervisor to have it signed so that I could submit it for payment. She began to ask me all kinds of strange questions about my hours etc that really weren’t anything to do with overtime. Then she asked me about lunches. How did I cope with lunch?. I replied “every so often I’d go to buy some meal tickets and hand over a meal ticket when I picked up my lunch”. She said something like “your brother will buy a spaghetti with his lunch money. Why don’t you do that?”. I couldn’t understand what was the issue or why she was making such a fuss out of something like this. All I wanted was my overtime sheet signed and none of this had anything to do with that.

At another moment I made a start writing a humorous book about an estate agent as well during the night but I didn’t get very far with that unfortunately. And when I awoke I couldn’t remember any of what it was that I’d written in my sleep.

With what time has been left, I’ve been sorting through the notes for 2017. It’s going to be a very long and laborious effort because Strider, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I travelled about 12,000 miles during those 5 weeks.

Right now I’m in Pictou in Nova Scotia on my way to see my niece’s daughter who was at University in Antigonish at St F-X.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg. And we had something of a calamity in that the pepper was too tall to fit in the air fryer. That’s something that I need to watch for the future. Frozen peppers wotk well enough in the air fryer but the microwave makes them sodden and the oven would take years for them to bake from frozen.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t the disaster that it might have been, and there’s still plenty of stuffing left over for a taco roll for tea tomorrow.

There’s no Welsh lesson tomorrow as Coleg Cambria is having a week off. I might do some revision for a change and then continue with my 2017 notes. I’ll be pushing on up the Cape Breton coast towards Sydney and the ferry to Newfoundland.

And then I’ll be pushing off.

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Sunday 28th May 2023 – A BIG HAPPY …

… birthday to Caliburn. He’s growing up – sixteen years old today.

And we’ve had plenty of adventures together, usually accompanied by the third member of our team, STRAWBERRY MOOSE. We’ve been to about half the countries in Europe together, battled our way through snowdrifts and mountain passes, towed mini-diggers all the way from North Lancashire down to the south-ish of France non-stop on a 34-hour journey, gone off to photograph a suspension bridge 2 hours down the road and not come back for almost 3 weeks and endless shuttles from Brussels to Virlet overnight in the early days of our relationship

At his last controle technique the examiner told me that he still has a few years left so it’s likely that he’ll outlast me, so here’s to many more years of happy Caliburn motoring.

The only regret was that I never succeeded in taking him over to North America for a run around. We had all of our ducks in a row at one time but then Strider came along and he was a much more appropriate vehicle with which to attack the sub-Arctic byways. Caliburn, good as he has been, would never have got down to that abandoned iron mine at the abandoned town of Gagnon.

It seems that I’m being overwhelmed with nostalgia over the last few days and I’ve no idea why. It’s probably because I have too much time on my hands right now. Perhaps I ought to do something about that – like “go back to bed and sleep it off”.

Last night was one occasion when staying in bed sounded like a good idea because it’s a Sunday and that’s always a lie-in around here. I’ll get up at any time you like for 6 days of the week, but never on Sunday. Everyone’s entitled to a day of rest.

So even if I awaken at something silly like 09:00, 10:30 is much more like a realistic time to show a leg.

It took me a while to gather my wits which, seeing how few wits I have these days, is quite surprising. But once I’d entered the Land of the Living the first thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We started off with something happening about oil filters on vehicles, yellow heavy-duty plastic spin-on ones rather than filter cartridges that you’d have to change but I can’t remember very much about this dream at all.

And then I was working as a lorry driver for someone. We were extremely busy. Someone had gone off sick and I’d had another spell of ill-health so I ended up taking a couple of days off. He had a lorry loaded with waste that needed tipping somewhere so he rang around and ended up speaking to a woman who was a lorry driver and asked her if she would do it. He explained the urgency of it, which I thought was strange because it would give this woman a lot of power over him if she knew how urgent the job was. I could hear the conversation because I was in bed in the next room. She sounded dubious and asked him “what had happened to so-and-so?”. He replied that there was something the matter with him. She asked what was the matter with me. He gave some sort of reply that basically he thought that I was malingering, which I thought was a horrible thing to do because I’d never ever missed a shift as long as I’d worked for him and had volunteered to do all the extra stuff.

After breakfast, or lunch, or whatever you might call it, I sat down and made a start on work.

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was going to go on the attack with my Labrador stuff so I sat down and reviewed the directories that I’ve been keeping.

Up to 2015, everything is all shipshape and Bristol-fashion. But then I had all of my hospital issues and then went to live in Leuven and since then everything went haywire and it’s just a complete mess.

For a start, I can’t find any trace whatsoever of any of my notes from my 2017 trek around Labrador so I’ve decided that I shall have to go back to basics and start from the very beginning.

There are the dictaphone notes – well, some of them – and then the blog notes from the relevant periods and that seems like a very good place to start.

But then you won’t believe this but I had to have a really good hard think because I’d forgotten how I write my websites. Back in the old days I’d be churning them out on a regular basis but since my health issues over the last 8 years I’ve not written more than half a dozen.

That’s the problem with growing older thought. Two things happen to you when you reach my age. The first thing is that you forget absolutely everything.
… “What’s the second thing?” – ed.
“I can’t remember”

Anyway, even just collating the stuff from 2017 is going to take an age, never mind adding it in to the earlier voyages.

What’s worse is that I can’t find the mileage notes.

With travelling several years over the 2100 kms of the Trans Labrador Highway and taking a couple of thousand photos, it’s important to have them all in the correct order and in the correct positions. And although I noted the mileages because I anticipated this problem, I’ve travelled the highway in both directions so the eastbound mileages are not the same as the westbound mileages of course.

Back in the past (or past in the back if you are George Bush) I managed to identify a couple of identical views taken from each direction on different occasions so I used them as reference points and calculated all of the mileages of every photo from every trip to correspond with those marker references. But if I can’t find my notes I’ll have to go back and do it all again, I reckon. That’ll take a while and no mistake.

There was a break while I made s batch of pizza dough, seeing as I’d run out. It rose quite nicely too. Two lumps went into the freezer later on and I made a base with the third. And once more, we had a magnificent pizza. Using these small cherry tomatoes cut in half and putting them on top of the cheese is definitely the way to go.

So before I go to bed I’m going to make a start on editing the radio notes that I dictated last night. I had a go recording them directly onto the computer now that I’ve configured it, however the quality was really poor and it all ended up in the bin and I redictated it using the ZOOM H8.

Had I been of a mind, and had it not been 01:00 when I finished, I suppose that I could have filtered out the interference and enhanced the quality, but I’ll have to work on that for another time.

Tomorrow I’ll finish off the radio programmes and then carry on with the Canada 2017 stuff. Right now I’m on a bus heading through the mountains to pick up Strider. There’s a really long way to go yet.

We haven’t reached the funny part of the whole trip though and I’ll dine out on this for ever, I reckon. That year I went to see my friend in St John’s so that meant the long sea crossing across the Strait of Belle Isle to Argentia instead of the short (as in 9 hours) crossing to Channel Port aux Basques.

“Roaming” was switched off on my telephone of course because it’s quite expensive in North America but as we were sailing along the southern coast of Newfoundland the phone suddenly went berserk with missed phone calls, messages and all of that kind of thing and at first I was bewildered.

However there’s a French colony – St Pierre et Miquelon – on an island in the Gulf of St Lawrence and obviously my French mobile network supplier provides the service to it. For a brief moment my telephone connected with the network and caught up with everything that I’d been missing.

That explains all of that, but it still doesn’t explain the situation in 2019 when we were in mid-Atlantic, 1000 miles from just about everywhere on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR, and I suddenly picked up an internet connection out of nowhere. I’ve never been able to explain that.

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Saturday 27th May 2023 – WE ARE NOW BACK …

… in the position where we were a few months ago. The freezer is now full to bursting once more.

It was a good day round at the shops to-day and once again, Noz came up trumps as it does every so often.

But anyway, I didn’t beat the alarm this morning. I was somewhere down in Newcastle under Lyme at the PMT bus garage where I was to pick up a bus to work a local service around Newcastle. They’d given me the information and then given me a route map but the map was a kind-of abstract map. I couldn’t identify anything on this map compared to how it is in real life so I had to find someone to explain the route to me. I was wandering around this depot trying to find someone. I found one or two people but they were of no help whatsoever. I really needed an inspector or something but I just couldn’t find anyone at all. There were all these buses parked up. No-one had actually told me which one was mine. I thought to myself “I can see this being a disaster too if I don’t organise things quite quickly” and that’s something that is a recurring theme too.

It didn’t take too long to organise myself this morning, which is a surprise. and it’s just as well because Alison phoned. She needed to talk about things like kitchens and showers so we were there on the ‘phone for about an hour discussing various things.

As a result I was rather later than usual going out to the shops but who cares? I’d much rather talk to my friends than almost anything. As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I don’t have many friends but those whom I have are the best in the World.

So at Noz, the first thing that I discovered was a pile of McVitie’s ginger biscuits, and the vegan version too. I know that I like to bake my own biscuits these days but I’m not going to miss out on several rolls of these.

And in the deep freezer they had carrot burgers from some Italian company and a pile of those breaded quorn fillets that I like, only a Findus variety with the labelling in Danish and Swedish.

My diet can be somewhat monotonous if I’m not feeling adventurous so I’m not going to miss out on the chance to add some extra stuff into it so I grabbed several boxes of each of those to shake things up a little.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, Noz is a chain of shops that buys bankrupt stock, surpluses, short lifespan products and the like and sells them off quite cheaply. I’ve had piles of stuff from there over the past 10 or 12 years since I first encountered one and there’s usually always something in there to add some excitement to my diet.

LeClerc came up with the goods too. Some of that sliced fondue vegan cheese in the clearance range so I liberated a pile of that too. I also bought some lasagne. It’s years since I made myself a lasagne and I had a sudden craving for one. I might have a go at that next week.

But there was something rather surprising in LeClerc today. They have a few assistants who roam around the store to help the elderly and infirm with their shopping, and one of them came over to me to ask if I needed help.

In the past I’ve been told, and on one or two occasions quite bluntly too, that I didn’t look as if I’m dying. But after my adventures last autumn everyone who saw me on my return told me how ill I was looking and how they were worried that I might not pull through – even my doctor. But I reckon that it’s becoming clearer by the minute now and if Regina is reading this, then “I told you so”.

It’s all very reminiscent of when I used to live in Brussels and one of my friends happened to see me
“Eric!” he exclaimed. “We thought that you were dead”
“Not at all. It just smells like it.”

Back here the first thing that I did was to clean and dice the 2kg of carrots that I’d bought and set them off a–blanching. I’m running low on carrots in the freezer so I need to stock up. And then I had breakfast – cheese on toast and some nice, strong coffee.

There was time to transcribe the rest of the dictaphone notes, because I’d been on my travels quite a lot during the night. I was in a group last night with a few other people. There was a keyboard player and a guitarist whom I remember. The guitarist was quite young. We took the stage and began to play. A girl came up and went over to the guy playing the guitar and singing and began to gyrate around him. It was clear that she was putting him completely off his stroke. When it came to the part where he was supposed to sing he turned to the keyboard player and said “you’ll have to sing this”. This led to an argument between the two of them. As soon as the concert finished and it was already undignified with a few spectators and someone was getting an awful amount of mileage out of this, teasing them both about their group, how disorganised and how bad it was.

And isn’t that a shame? I seem to have gone beyond the days when girls would come along and gyrate all around me – even when I’m off on another plane of existence. I’m losing count of the number of times that I’ve snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in this respect during the night, without counting the number of times members of my family have come along to queer my pitch in the middle of something exciting.

Later on I’d been staying in a cabin with a couple of old guys, the type of thing that you’d find on the frontier 150 years ago. Cabin fever was definitely striking and we were arguing about just about anything. One of the guys decided that he would let rip with a full-blown argument point out to me all my faults and defects. I had an answer for everything that he said but it was just one of those things that if you became involved in this argument you’d be there for ever and nothing would ever be resolved.

And that’s something else, isn’t it? Cabin fever is quite a well-known phenomenon in the High Arctic and there were several cases amongst some of us after several months on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR. My suggestion that we round up the more cantankerous members of our party and send them ashore on the first zodiac to see whether there were any polar bears about did not however meet with universal approval, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

Immediately after that little episode I awoke with a terrible pain in my right knee as if I’d over-exerted it yesterday. However it eased off after a while and I went back to sleep.

Once the carrots were draining and drying off I headed into town in the beautiful sunshine. And do you know – it’s taken me about 6 months to realise that if there is a set of steps with the handrail on the right, I can go down much quicker and easier if I go down backwards?

The Aranesp was waiting for me so I picked it up and headed home. Having struggled with my shoulder bag falling off my shoulder and knocking me and my crutches out of balance, I’d found a backpack that I’d bought ages ago to use as a day pack when I go out walkies (not that I’ll be doing much of that these days) and that was much better.

On the way back I fell in with one of my neighbours, Pierre, the one who owned the Spirit of Conrad on which we sailed down the Brittany coast FOR A WEEK a few years ago. We had a good chat about this and that. As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I seem to be the flavour of the Month since I now own a share of this building.

From there I came back in a regrettably, at that point I … errr … had a little relax, just as I thought that I might. It’s all becoming rather monotonous, but there’s nothing that I can buy in Noz to alleviate that.

While Alison and I had been chatting earlier I’d told her that I’d sort out a few photos of the kitchen that I’d had installed in Expo so I had a rummage around in various old directories (yes, they are still “directories” – I haven’t recovered after learning DOS 5.0) and sorted out a few to send to her.

The rest of the day has been spent resurrecting an old project. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when they opened the road over Eagle Plateau in 2010 so that you could drive all the way across from northern Québec to the Labrador coast, I was one of the first TO ATTEMPT IT

At that time I went as a tourist and I had no idea what to expect so after I returned I did a pile of research and went again in 2014 and then in 2015 by which time I’d bought Strider who was a much-more suitable vehicle for going off-roading. The aim on those occasions was write a sequel but from a historical and social point of view.

Unfortunately that project ground to a halt because a few months after returning in 2015 I was swept up in all of this.

And as well as that, I went again in 2017 when I went out in a couple of small boats to visit some of the abandoned settlements that were cleared out under Joey Smallwood’s “bigger is better” policy of the 1950s and for which even 70 years later the people of the Labrador coast are still paying the price.

However, I digress … “yet again” – ed.

The task therefore, if I choose to accept it, is to resurrect what I was doing in 2015 and to add in the stuff from 2017 and start again. So this afternoon I’ve been trying to find all the notes that I made back in those days.

Tea tonight was a couple of small breaded quorn fillets that I’d bought ages ago and were festering in the freezer. Wo while I pulled them out, I stuck the carrots in. I had the fillets along with a salad and some fried potato cubes done in the air fryer. That was really nice.

Tomorrow is a Sunday of course so I’ll be having a lie-in. But I have some radio notes that I’ve written and I’ll dictate them tonight once the street outside is quiet. That’ll give me something to do tomorrow and on Monday, and then I can crack on with this and that.

But before I go, yesterday I was talking about South Pass. There’s one song that I always associate with South Pass and THAT CAME ROUND on the playlist.
“We rolled across the high plains
Deep into the mountains
Felt so good to me
Finally, feelin’ free
Somewhere along a high road
The air began to turn cold
She said she missed her home
I headed on alone, oh, oh”
(and who do those last two lines bring to mind?)

The song is all about “The High Plains” of Wyoming, which WE VISITED IN 2002 when I was on my course at the Solar Energy Institute but the photo in the posted extract is a long, long way from the High Plains of Wyoming. Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its earlier guises will recall having seen that image BEFORE.

“Next time
We’ll get it right”

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Friday 26th May 2023 – MY LUNCH TODAY …

… was delicious.

Down at the supermarket in town this morning they had some fresh broccoli on special offer so I bought a chunk, trimmed off the florets, blanched them and then stuck them in the freezer for a later date, now that I have room.

There was a nice, thick, chunky stalk left over so I made a soup. I fried an onion and garlic in olive oil with some cumin and coriander, diced a couple of small potatoes and diced the stalk, added it to the mixture to fry and when it was all soft, added some of the water in which I’d blanched the broccoli.

After about 20 minutes’ worth of simmering, I whizzed it with the whizzer and ate it with some crusty bread.

And I’ll do that again!

But here I am, waxing lyrical about going to the shops and buying some broccoli as if it’s the highlight of my life. One of those memory things popped up on my social network, reminding me that 11 years ago today I was out on an icebreaker as we smashed our way through the pack-ice on our way back to Natashquan after taking relief supplies out to THAT ISOLATED ISLAND off the “forgotten coast” of Québec.

The moral of this story is “whenever an opportunity comes your way, grab it with both hands and go right to the end. You’ll never know if you’ll have another chance, and you never know what the future has in store for you”.

While we’re on the subject of the High Arctic … “well, one of us is” – ed … the first track to come round on the playlist this morning, after what I had said yesterday, was THE VANILLA QUEEN.

It’s been a long time since that “fascinating lady” has been to “haunt me in my dreams” after “the bright, nocturnal Vanilla Queen” and I stood together on the bow of THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR watching the midnight sun in the Davis Strait. I was never the same again.

And while we’re on the subject of the High Arctic … “well, one of us is” – ed … the lovely Dyan Birch, whose voice is up there with Kate Bush, Julianne Regan and Annie Haslam, put in an appearance shortly afterwards.

She was well-know of course for her stint in Kokomo but before that she sang in an obscure Liverpool group called Arrival and their first album was one of the very first albums that I ever bought all those years ago.

The song that featured on the playlist was HEY THAT’S NO WAY TO SAY GOODBYE and I picked that as one of the ones to be broadcast in one of my radio programmes in due course.

It’s the song that came into my head up in the High Arctic as I watched “someone” walk from out on this desolate windswept and icebound airstrip to her aeroplane without waving or looking back and I thought to myself “hey, that’s no way to say goodbye!” but a few years later when I was saying goodbye to someone else on another airport, I suddenly realised the reason why some goodbyes have to be said in that way.

Samuel Gurney Cresswell, the artist and Arctic explorer, was once asked to explain Robert McClure’s loss of nerve after their dreadful experience in the moving pack-ice not too far from the first airport that I first mentioned. He replied that a voyage to the High Arctic “ought to make anyone a wiser and better man”.

However it didn’t work for me. One day I’ll write up the story of those three missing days.

But that’s enough maudlin nostalgia for the moment. We all know that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

Let’s turn our attention instead to this morning, and the fact that one more I was up and about (in principle because I was far from awake) before the alarm went off.

But a shower slowly brought me round and I put the washing on the go. Oh! The excitement! It’s almost as riveting as the day that I had when the highlight was taking out the rubbish.

There was plenty of time before I had to go anywhere so I transcribed the dictaphone notes from the night. This was another one of these work dreams again, and I’m having plenty of those. I was working in an office but I wasn’t very productive and I wasn’t doing very much at all. Mostly wasting time. The Germans invaded the country and occupied the town where our office was situated. They ordered most people to leave. Those people gathered their things together and started to set off. At that moment I came back into the building having missed everything that was going on, saw them going, and said something like “goodbye, my colleagues. I don’t know how many of us will meet again after this thing has happened. Wishing everyone the best”. I’d heard some stories that some farmers had been far too friendly with the invaders and denounced a couple of people already. So we sat and started on what was going to be a very long ordeal.

But invaders again? We had them the other night, didn’t we?

Then there was something else on these lines. Someone ended up sending something or other to the office where we were working, as a kind-of sign of discontent but I can’t remember anything about it.

I also spent much of the night in company with a young girl and I wish that I knew who she was. We were talking about the area up at the back of Barrow, places like that. I mentioned a fishing port that was formerly very busy. When the fishing died out they came and moved some of the railway lines that connect the port network to the main line but left a diesel shunter behind that was now stranded on the dock and can’t be moved. We were chatting about all kinds of interesting things. Right at the end there was some kind of problem about her having to pay her rent on her little apartment so I suggested that she comes to live in mine. This was another one of those really nice, warm comfortable dreams that I wished would go on for ever and I don’t have too many of those.

But seriously, who would want a relationship with me?

It was a slow stagger down to the doctor’s and I didn’t have long to wait to see him. But as I thought the other day, he confirmed that with this series of injections, there’s nowhere else to go. He wrote out everything that I needed, wrote out the prescriptions, and that was that.

And that got me thinking.

It’s not the first time that I’ve mentioned it but a few years ago I was standing ON THE CREST OF SOUTH PASS, the gap that the “trails west” emigrants used when crossing the Continental Divide where to the east the waters drain into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, and to the west they drain into the Pacific.

It’s the most peaceful place on earth and I want to go back. I’m getting itchy feet again.

At the Carrefour round the corner I bought the broccoli, some mushrooms, some potatoes and a couple more of the small peppers. Now I know that I can freeze them, i might as well put a stock in the freezer now that there’s room.

Have you any idea how much a month’s supply of Aranesp costs? You really don’t want to know. And because it’s not on the list of GP-prescribed medication I have to pay for it up front and claim it back from my health insurance. That will hurt for a while.

So loaded up with a ton of medication (I’m singlehandedly keeping the French pharmaceutical industry afloat and they won’t ‘arf miss me when nature takes its toll) and having to go back tomorrow for some more, I crawled back up the hill onto my rock where I made my soup, had lunch and then … errr … relaxed. This stagger back takes its toll of me.

This afternoon I finished off choosing the music for the next batch of radio programmes but I’ve run aground at the moment. There’s a French musician called Miquette Giraudy who collaborated with Steve Hillside-Village and she wrote and played on several tracks. But you try to find them. None of my usual sources came up with the goods. The best example of her work that I can find so far is the album on which she collaborated with Hillage after he left “Gong”.

Both Alison and Liz were on line later so I ended up chatting to both of them. Alison was telling me more detail relating to our chat yesterday and Liz was showing me photos of her little week away in the Marches.

Tea was chips (now that I have some potatoes) done in the air fryer, with salad and some of the veggie balls. So you might say that part of my meal was a load of balls this evening. But then again, you might not.

Shopping tomorrow, not that I need very much at all but I have to go through the motions. I’ll go to LeClerc of course to see what they have to say for themselves, and I’lll also go for a prowl around at Noz. There’s usually a few surprises there and it’s nice to buy something different. It helps to shake up the diet.

And then after lunch a walk into town to pick up the Aranesp, which means that in the afternoon I’ll be crashing out. Terrible, isn’t it?

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Thursday 25th May 2023 – I’VE BEEN HAVING …

… a day of nostalgia today (as if I haven’t had a few of those just recently).

They say that music is something that is capable of moving you to another place. That’s certainly true. Anywhere that puts on a “Smiths” song anywhere near where I am and I’ll certainly move to another place.

But that’s not what they really mean, of course.

Today while I’ve been choosing music for my radio programmes I stumbled upon a Golden Earring album. Everyone knows “Radar Love” of course but in the Netherlands they are much better-known than that.

Back in the Summer of 1993 I was lucky enough to stumble upon them quite by accident on the beach at Scheveningen playing an acoustic concert when I was out for a ride on the old CX500 that I had, and it was one of the most enjoyable evenings that I’ve had, even though dawn was breaking by the time I arrived back in Brussels.

Then a few years later when Roxanne went off on a sleepover one night, Laurence and I went to Oostende in my old Merc to see them at the Kuursaal.

And of course, regular readers of this rubbish will recall the significance of “The Vanilla Queen”.

If that’s not enough to be going on with, Tom Petty came round on the playlist.

Back 20-odd years ago I was in Montreal in a heavy snowstorm and had to drive to Bar Harbor in Maine, all the way through the Appalachians.

As usual, I’d brought a pile of cassettes with me but this was the first car that I’d ever hired that had a CD player. So down the road from my motel out at Jarry was a second-hand shop where they had INTO THE GREAT WIDEOPEN, DAMN THE TORPEDOES and a few others.

So steaming all the way through the mountains and the snow, taking a ferry across the Bay of Fundy and going via Halifax to the accompaniment of various Tom Petty albums on continuous play in this Chevrolet Cavalier.

Those were they days of course, and we shan’t see their like again The way things are, it’s an achievement if I can manage to get out of bed.

But get out of bed I did this morning, and before the alarm went off too.

And we had a calamity last night, as I found out once I was up and about.

For my little project about doing my own “Hawkfest” on the radio, I’d collected about 6 hours’ worth of music from obscure space-rock bands. With having a friend whose son was sound engineer for The Pink Fairies, it’s amazing the stuff that turns up.

Anyway, it was all in an obscure recording format so it needed to be converted to *.mp3. It’s not like trying to convert a standard audio or video converter. The “estimated time” was something like 57 hours so the computer was on through the night the other night but last night Bane of Britain forgot and switched off the computer with just 9 hours to go

So no use crying over spilt milk. I went and had my medication instead.

As well as choosing a pile of music and writing out some notes, I’ve been looking at cameras. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we no longer have the NIKON D500 due to certain controversial circumstances, the NIKON D5000 has never been the same since I DROPPED IT in the ferry terminal in Québec waiting to cross the St. Lawrence, the NIKON D3000 is showing its age and I’ve never been a big fan of the mirrorless NIKON 1 J5.

Anyway Nikon has launched a new camera this week and my friends tell me that very soon they will start to clear out all of the previous models. I’ve been chatting with my friend in Vancouver who works for Nikon and he reckons a NoS NIKON Z6ii is the way to go. At least it has an eyepiece viewer that the Nikon 1 doesn’t have and which I miss.

And the advantage of that is that with an adapter that is easily available, I can use all of the old AF-S lenses.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too referring to my nocturnal perambulations. I was with one of my friends last night but I can’t remember who he was. He was feeling rather thirsty but instead of actually buying a can of drink he set about actually taking the back off the drinks machine in the hall and taking the drinks out of the back. Of course while he was doing that the headmistress and one or two teachers came along. They were discussing what was happening with the drinks machine, that things were missing etc, and wondering how it was being done. And there we were right behind it dismantling it. I expected there to be an investigation and we’d be discovered straight away but the more they kept on talking about it, the more we dismantled the machine. In the end he went to grab a can but he missed. It fell down into the chute round the front. No-one of all the people round at the front actually noticed. he quickly put his hand round and took the can of drink, opened it and poured it into another can so that it looked as if it hadn’t come out of our machine and slowly started to reassemble it. By this time there were people going past etc and no-one for even a minute noticed what it was that we were doing and that we were behind the machine and that the machine had been pulled out from the wall a couple of feet.

Nothing about my family last night, and nothing about cats either. But something happened during the day concerning cats. There was a link that popped up on my social network about an elderly cat that is going to be put to sleep because no-one would adopt it and in a fit of weakness I contacted the shelter.

Foolishly, I made the mistake of saying that I was glad that it was an older cat because I didn’t want a circus around here at 03:00. And that led to a really bizarre rant from whoever it was to whom I’m speaking, a rant about
“and what would you do if it awoke you at 03:00? What would happen then?”
My reply was “I didn’t say anything about being awoken. I mentioned “a circus””
“I don’t know what a circus is!” went the person, in one of these indignant, belligerent tones.
“Well, I’ve made my offer. It’s up to you now”
“What offer?”

It’s really too much hard work to try to help people out, isn’t it? I have a nice comfortable home that would suit an elderly cat for a couple of years but I don’t have time to engage in a debate or to put up with people’s attitude. If they want to pick a fight they can pick it with someone else.

Tea tonight was pasta, veg and some of those mini vegan bread-crumbed things that I bought from Noz a couple of months ago. They are actually quite nice and it made a nice meal. But the freezer is emptying quite nicely now and if I’m not careful I’ll have to start to restock it.

Alison and I had a chat on the internet later, now that she’s back from her perambulations in the real world. She has some exciting news to impart but more of that anon.

Tomorrow I’m off to the doc’s to tell him the news about my injections and to have a few prescriptions prepared. When I come back I’ll have to make plans. I’ll be eating the last of my ginger biscuits and I’ll have to bake some more. I could remake a type that I’ve made in the past (like those delicious chocolate ones) or try something completely new, in which case I’ll have to check to see what I have and what I need.

While I’m at it, I might have a go at making a vegan pie. I’ve not made one for ages and the last time that I tried, I had forgotten the knack about how to make pastry. At one time I had it going really well but since I stopped eating pudding I haven’t made anything like as many.

There’s no pizza dough left either so I’ll have to make some more. And if it turns out as well as the last batch, I shall be one very happy bunny indeed.

And it’s about time that there was some happiness in my life. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

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Wednesday 24th May 2023 – I AWOKE AT …

… about 05:55 with the idea in my head of some woman who was dressed in some kind of Eighteenth-Century formal Court dress like someone out of the French Empire. It was such a shock but it awoke me bolt-upright and there was a very uncomfortable feeling for a few minutes as to how this had come about for I remember absolutely nothing at all of what happened, just the image of this woman that had appeared in my head so dramatically.

So as a result, when the alarm went off this morning at 07:00 I was already up and about. Not by much, I have to say, because it took me a while to come to my senses (not that I have too many senses to come to these days) after I awoke.

After I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages the first thing that I did was to check the curry that had been simmering away in the slow cooker over night. It was fairly liquid, more than I expected, so I bunged in a couple of potatoes duly diced and some bulghour and let it carry on simmering.

In case you are wondering what spices I use these days in a carry, there’s cumin (ground as well as seeds) turmeric and coriander of course, and then some hot chili powder, fenugreek and fennel. There was also some garlic salt too, as I always put in if I’m leaving something simmering overnight. I’ve no idea of the proportions of the spices though. I just add the stuff until it tastes right.

Next task was to telephone the doctor. I need some more Aranesp and much more of it too, what with having to take it every week with effect from next week. So on Friday at 10:45 I have to stagger down the hill into town. And, presumably, stagger back too. That’s the bit that finishes me off these days.

Checking the dictaphone next because there was more stuff on there from the night. I’d been left alone in my parents’ house while they’d gone out. I’d been doing a few things like the washing up and tidying up, getting everything ready and then feeding the cats. By now it was sometime really late at night so I thought that I’d just go outside for 5 minutes for a breath of air or something and then go to bed. I went outside and there was plenty of snow around. I was just standing there at the side of the house when almost immediately my parents pulled up. They had one of our cats with them but it was on a lead. Of course it wasn’t my parents in real life. They wanted to know what I was doing and why I was outside. It was very difficult to explain that you’d just go out for some fresh air.

So my family again, and also a few cats. This is becoming rather monotonous.

This afternoon the cleaner has been here tidying up for me. I had a shower before she came so that at least I’ll smell nice, instead of just smelling. And that reminds me – the laundry basket is rather full now so I’ll have to let the washing machine do some washing on Friday while I’m in the town.

While she was doing her stuff I’ve been choosing the music for the next series of radio programmes. Once again we’re back into the obscure artists bit, including a track recorded by someone who was at one time Pete Townshend’s chauffeur.

And I also had a little … errr … relax. The strain of the early morning was rather too much.

By the time that I was ready to make tea, the potato and bulghour had done their stuff and the mixture in the slow cooker was now nice and thick. So I fried a couple of large onions, a few lumps of garlic, the leftovers out of the fridge and then added the pile of stuff out of the slow cooker.

There’s enough for 6 helpings so five of them will be going into the freezer (now that there’s room) when they have cooled and the sixth one went down really nicely with rice and vegetables and one of my naan breads.

Tomorrow I’ll finish off selecting the music and then make a start on writing the notes. But I really need to have a good think about what I’m going to de for my 200th radio programme.

For my 100th, I did an overnight 12-hour rock festival of the various groups and musicians who I’ve encountered on my travels around the Northern Hemisphere but I’m not sure that I’ll be doing the same thing again. Going through the back-up drive I’ve found a few tracks on which I played back in the 70s but the quality isn’t good enough and the there isn’t enough of it anyway.

However, there is always that infamous Colosseum concert. It’s accompanied me on many of my voyages around and about, including the time that I sailed across the Atlantic on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR when I reckoned that I would have plenty of time to remix and re-edit it.

But it was on those voyages while I was trying to re-edit it that I had my strange encounters, firstly with The Vanilla Queen and then with Castor so it’s a concert that has a … errr … certain significance. If it ever does find its way onto the airwaves it should certainly stir up something.

And that’s the idea, I suppose. Life is quite boring these days without being able to go off and make things happen. It’s high time that I made some excitement happen, although I’ve no idea how I can manage it. Finally getting the Colosseum concert onto the airwaves is a good place to start.

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Tuesday 23rd May 2023 – REMEMBER YESTERDAY …

… when I said that I was feeling that my injections weren’t doing what they used to do?

You probably won’t believe this, but I promise you that it happened. But this afternoon I had a phone call from the hospital in Leuven.
“Over the last two weeks we’ve been examining your medical results from your last visit to the hospital. We’ve noticed several anomalies in the tests and so we want you to have your Aranesp injections every week instead of every fortnight starting from next Monday, and for your doctor at home to have blood tests taken every four weeks to control the results”

Things are obviously heating up around here now. So whatever will happen next?

Actually, I know what didn’t happen. And that was that it was today, not Thursday, that I should have had my appointment with the nerve specialist but I mixed up the dates. So I’ll have to contact him tomorrow too and rearrange the appointment.

It’s been one of those days where not all that much has gone right. For a start, I didn’t beat the alarm this morning. I’d had a late night but even so, it’s not very often that I sleep right through until the alarm. But at least, I awoke in bed rather than on top of it.

And then I couldn’t get going. It took an age to finally come round into the Land of the Living and start to prepare for my Welsh lesson.

And then we had a tragedy. The college at Mold doesn’t have much money so we’ve been making do with whatever on-line video conferencing has been available. And the one that we used until recently revoked all of the free licences so we had to go elsewhere.

The only free video-conferencing that they could find is one that’s very resource-hungry and it won’t run on any of the portable computers around here (there are, for various reasons, five of those that work at the moment, including the one that I bought in desperation in North Dakota in 2019).

However, luckily, ages ago I’d bought a cheap webcam so I had to configure all of that and run it off the big desktop machine, something that I didn’t want to do.

And then to configure a microphone to run directly off the computer because everything here usually runs through various mixer desks

In the end I missed half of the lesson with all of this messing around but at least it worked. And once the lesson was up and running it passed off quite well too.

This afternoon, sorting out a few things that I needed to do, I came across a football match that I’d missed from 2 years ago, Caernarfon Town v Barry Town in a Europa Cup playoff match. So despite everything else going on, I took a couple of hours off to watch it.

And in news that will surprise almost everyone (because it certainly surprised me) I carried on with what I started last week and did some more rearranging of the bedroom. It’s starting to look a bit more like home now, which is always nice.

After a good session on the guitars, I had a listen to the dictaphone. Despite being stark out during the night there was some stuff on there from a little voyage. There was some kind of case going on about a large company where there was some manipulation about to take place with the shareholding in respect of a battle over who had control. Whilst I didn’t fully understand the implications of what was happening, it all sounded extremely suspicious to me. When I was looking through some paperwork I found that the company had been brought to the attention of the authorities on another occasion in respect of something or other underhand and was undergoing investigation. I thought that I should make a report of this conversation and pass it through to whoever it was who was investigating it but as I couldn’t grasp the implications of it and couldn’t really understand much of what was taking place, it was very difficult to write a note. I thought that the more I keep it waiting while I make up my mind what to write, the more distant this is going to be and the more I’m going to forget. It’s not going to help anyone by me waiting for too long. I need to pull myself together and write something down immediately

After the ‘phone call from the hospital and missing my nerve specialist, the physiotherapist came round. He gave me a really good workout – the longest session that we have had so far and I was exhausted at the end of it.

Tea was a taco roll with rice and veg, but the cooking session isn’t over by any means. There’s not very much in the way of leftovers for a curry tomorrow night so as I have plenty of tofu and some lentils, I’ve set the slow cooker on the go.

The lentils are being cleaned right now and as soon as I’ve finished this, I’ll take them out of the slow cooker and rinse them, and then put them back in with the spinach-flavoured tofu that I have and a load of spices, and leave it all to marinade in the slow cooker until tomorrow evening

That should make a really good curry, and I do have to admit that I’m in the right kind of mood for one of those.

In fact, anything to distract me because I’m not very happy about the idea of doubling the dose of Aranesp. It’s the medicine of last resort and there’s a warning that it is “recommended for patients with chronic kidney failure or cancer to use the lowest possible dose”.

Over the last year or so I’ve gone from 20mg a week to 60mg a week to keep me going and I’m not sure where you can go after all of this.

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