REVISED IMPORTANT NOTICE

Judging by the amount of spam that I’ve received overnight, it seems that the Chrome browser version 150 has been compromised, especially when used with the Linux operating system.

Readers of this blog are therefore urged to check which browser they use, and if it’s Chrome version 150, to upgrade to the latest version or choose a different browser that isn’t based on the Chrome system.

As of 26th September, Chrome 154 has been compromised, especially when using the Linux browser. I had an enormous number of hits overnight. I recommend that anyone using Chrome switch to another browser such as Firefox, Comet or even one of the Microsoft browsers such as Edge because if Chrome is being continually compromised, I might have no other recourse but to ban Chrome from my site.

LIVE: Wednesday 14th October 2026 – I HAVE JUST …

Leave a Reply

… woken up after finding myself asleep on the porcelain horse.

And judging by the time, I’d been asleep for almost an hour too. And had it not been for a phantom doorbell ringing at what I thought was the front door but was probably somewhere in the back of my head, I’d probably still be asleep now.

What was worse was that I didn’t remember anything at all about feeling tired, and so waking up like that took me completely by surprise. I had no idea where I was … "nothing new there" – ed … and for a moment I thought that I was in bed and it was time to get up. And then I didn’t remember hearing the alarm to wake me up, so I wondered what time it was. That’s how much I was disorientated by everything.

So now, I’m going to start to type up my notes, and we’ll see how far we get before I crash out again.

All I can say is that it’s a good job that I’m no longer driving. Imagine the outcome if I’d been behind a steering wheel.

Anyway, retournons à mos moutons as they say around here.

For a start, I’m in a much better humour than I was after my outburst last night, which is good news, even if today has been a disappointment as far as work and everything else goes. It wasn’t helped, what with one thing and another, by going to bed at 00:30 this morning, and even less so by being awake at 02:19 (I checked the time).

Whether I went back to sleep afterwards or not, I really don’t know, but it can’t have been for long and I was definitely awake when the alarm went off at 06:29.

As you might expect, it took even longer for me to find my way to my feet this morning, and it really was a weary me who dragged himself to the front door to unlock it ready for the nurse when he comes. But then I realised that he wasn’t going to come this morning because I had my early morning appointment at the hospital and the taxi will be here before he will.

And so I dragged myself into the bathroom to sort myself out for the day, and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

There had been some kind of party and we had been to it with the children from our family and a few of our friends. We managed to have some kind of CD player working for the songs. When it came to pack up, there was an awful mess everywhere. We had so many things out, and all wires, cables and cassettes, CDs and all kinds of stuff that was lying around. I looked at it and I was in despair when I saw how much there was to do, but we made a start anyway. The first thing was to separate people’s belongings from other people’s belongings. We did that, and then there was this huge pile of stuff that was from Stoke-on-Trent somewhere, and we didn’t know where to begin with this. In the end, a couple of the girls brought it out, and I was surprised to see that they had brought almost all of it out. The first thing was to sort through the documents, paperwork, the dominos and things like that, and throw away what we didn’t want and keep what we wanted. We began to do that. This enabled us to separate a lot of the stuff that was all tangled up and knotted up. Having seen what this place was like before we tackled this pile of stuff, I was feeling a little bit more optimistic, although there were still several other piles of stuff to go through as well.

Whatever was going on in that dream, I can’t see any relevance to anything that has happened just recently. The reference to the two girls could be a reference to Alison and Jackie, who helped me move down here last August, and the huge tangle of wires would easily relate to the pile of wires and cables that I have lying around here.

And for some reason, when I recall this dream, an image of that apartment over the shop in Nantwich Road where an old schoolfriend and I lodged for a short while in the mid-seventies springs immediately to view in the back of my mind, but that’s about it.

Round about 08:00 I went to sit in the kitchen while I waited for the taxi, and it turned up bang on time at 08:15. The driver drove me to the hospital, and when we arrived, she went to find a wheelchair for me. I know that I said that I won’t ever go in a wheelchair and that my autonomy is important to me, but the scanners are miles down the corridor and at that time of the morning, the drivers are usually very busy and don’t have the time to wait for me to walk there.

When I arrived at the scan department, I had to wait a few minutes, and then they put me through the machine. It was one of those Austin Powers time tunnel things made by one of my former employers, General Electric, and you have to breathe in, hold your breath and breathe out in accordance with the voice in the machine. And what they did seemed to be exactly the same as they had done a couple of months ago, so I’m not sure why they did it this time.

When it was finished, I had to wait fifteen minutes for the taxi. I suppose that I’ll have the results in due course. It was the same girl who had driven me. Back here, my faithful cleaner was out on her rounds dealing with some of her other elderly and infirm clients, so the driver helped me back to the apartment, which was nice of her.

Back in here, I could at last make my breakfast, albeit about an hour later than usual, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Today, our author is talking about the Pulpit Oak at Upton, and he refers to the collection of poems known as “Hesperides”, written by Robert Herrick and published in 1648. He quotes a line from one of Herrick’s … gulp … 1200 or so poems which says –
"—Dearest, bury me
Under that holy oke, or Gospel tree;
Where, though thou see’st not, thou may’st think upon
Me, when thou yeerly go’st Procession."
And reminds us that "But surely such a request could only have been properly asked of some gay young member of that office which has descended from remote antiquity—the parish beadle."

All of the author’s recent writing makes me wonder what on earth is going on in Herefordshire in 1870 and 1871.

No sooner had I finished breakfast when there was a knock on the door. One of my neighbours had come along for a chat. We spent about an hour chatting about nothing specific – just the events in the building and in the locality over the summer. It’s not like me to be sociable, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but I do have to make an effort, especially as everyone in this building is so friendly.

After he left, it was the turn of my faithful cleaner to stick her head in the door to make sure that I was back safely, so I reassured her.

Round about now, it was the time for my disgusting drink and midday medication, so I sorted that out and then came back in here to start work – at long last.

However, there was football on the internet. Last night, Stranraer had been playing Kilmarnock’s B team in the Scottish League Cup.

The result was 3-3, which meant, when the results of the previous rounds were taken into consideration, Stranraer were eliminated.

My interest was, however, in Kilmarnock’s centre forward, Ieuan Owen. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last season, he was playing for Y Barri in the Welsh Premier League where he and Ollie Hulbert were tearing the opposition defences to shreds with their lightning pace. I was interested to see how he was getting on at Kilmarnock, and there he was, still producing these devastating runs that outpace just about everyone, and he scored Killie’s first goal last night.

With all of that out of the way, I could now get on with work, but by the end of the afternoon, I hadn’t done anything like as much as I had wanted. I was hoping to have all of the music chosen, reformatted, re-edited, paired and segued by this evening so I could start to write up the notes tomorrow, but to date, there are only about nine out of the ten chosen as yet, and none of them are paired and segued.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … these last few days have just been one big disappointment.

So eventually, the clock came round to 19:00 and I stopped to make tea. Tonight, it was a taco roll filled with the other pack of that spicy tomato and kidney bean sauce stuff that I found in the freezer a week or two back. And it was just as delightful as the other pack was when I tried that. I wish that I could remember what was in it, or maybe it was something that my friend made when he was here just now.

And afterwards, I had some pineapple chunks with some home-made chocolate ice cream that I’d made a few months back and had forgotten about. That was nice too.

Tomorrow, I might try one of the curries that I made a couple of weeks ago. That should be nice too.

What else that seems to be nice is that I’m back eating regularly again, at long last. Still no lunch, though, but a cooked meal at night is as important as my breakfast, even if I can’t find much to tempt me.

But all of that is tomorrow. After tea, that was when I seem to think that I went for a ride on the porcelain horse and fell asleep. But honestly, I really can’t remember. But now, late as it is, I’m off to bed when I’ve finished what needs to be done. It’s dialysis tomorrow, so don’t expect much sense out of me tomorrow night.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about curry … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone walked through the doorway of a building and asked "can I have a chicken tikka masala with rice, please?"
The woman behind the counter replies "but this is a library, sir."
"I’m terribly sorry. Can I have a chicken tikka masala with rice, please?" he whispers.

LIVE: Tuesday 13th October 2026 – I HAVE JUST …

Leave a Reply

… had one of the worst days of my life.

But I’m not talking medically, because I’m actually feeling quite good right now … "makes a change" – ed … but I mean as far as work goes. I’ve done nothing, finished nothing, accomplished nothing, and all in all I have totally wasted a complete day.

To give you some idea of what I mean, I was still writing up the dictaphone notes (something that I usually do before breakfast) at 21:05 tonight. That’s how far I am behind. I really am going to have to stop being so nice to people in the hope that they stop taking advantage of my good nature.

Nature seemed to take advantage of my good nature last night. I was in bed round about 22:45, not too much later than my ideal curfew time of 22:30, and I was looking for a really good sleep so that I’d be refreshed for my Welsh class later this morning, but it was not to be … "no surprise there" – ed …

Even though I’d gone to sleep quite quickly, thanks to that little mantra that I used to recite a few years ago, round about 03:50 or something, I awoke, and that was the end of any ideas of sleep that I might have had. I tried my best to go back to sleep but that was impossible.

When the alarm went off, it took a few minutes for me to pull myself up and sit on the edge of the bed, and then about ten minutes for me to rise to my feet. Once I was up and about, I went to unlock the front door, ready for the nurse when he arrives later this morning, and then I went to the bathroom to sort myself out.

Once I was looking and feeling a little more reasonable, I came back in here, where my first job would be to finish off the notes from last night that I had abandoned when sleep overwhelmed me rather dramatically.

Whatever it was that held me up, I really don’t know because I hadn’t made much progress when the nurse arrived. While he was dealing with my legs and my feet, we were chatting about his week off, and he was asking me questions about what I’d been up to, not that any of it really mattered.

After he left, I made my breakfast of porridge, coffee, toast and juice, and the morning medication that I need to take, which is probably enough for a meal on its own. I should have been reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870 except that I was hopelessly side-tracked.

The party of Woolhope Naturalists are descending from Croft Ambrey camp to Croft Castle, lower down below the camp. I read about the history of the castle, and that started off on an adventure that led me, for some weird twist of fate, as far as the German “Albatros C1”, to which I’ve just arrived. I shall have to try to get back to the book tomorrow.

Back in here after breakfast, I had to prepare for my Welsh lesson and send off this week’s homework. I’d done the homework yesterday so it simply involved checking it over, converting it to a *.pdf and then sending it off.

The revision passed really well today. It was comparatively straightforward without any complications, so I attended the lesson in an air of optimism. And the preparation had done its job because for the questions that we had to do in the middle of the lesson, I got almost all of them right.

There was a stop in midstream for a paned, or “cuppa”, when I had my disgusting drink and midday medication, and by the time the lesson was over later, I was feeling that I’d actually made a useful contribution to the lesson rather than being a passenger.

Then there were the blog notes to finish off and bring that entry to a conclusion, however, I didn’t get far – not that I was expecting to – because my faithful cleaner turned up to do her stuff and to chase me under the shower. And a really nice shower it was too. I really feel like a nice, clean boy now, although where I’m going to find a nice, clean boy at this time of night, I really don’t know.

That led to finishing off … "yet another attempt" – ed … the notes from last night. That, however, was a task that took much longer than it ought to have done, and in the end, when it was finished, I rejoiced somewhat, and as the waves of fatigue were already washing over me, I called for an energy drink instead of another disgusting drink.

Right now, I could turn my attention to the dictaphone notes at last.

There had been some kind of festival taking place, and as the crowds were leaving, my brother and I were cleaning everything up. We had a pile of it and set it on fire. The more things we found, the more we added to the flames, and at one stage it was burning quite well. But there was something happening with my health, and I reached the point where I wasn’t able to really do much more. My brother was teasing me about that kind of thing but I noticed that he had stopped adding things to the fire too, so we had to shovel the fire around to make sure that it burnt everything that was in the fire and didn’t leave anything unburnt or simply charred. But that was another big, difficult thing to do as well for me and I wasn’t quite sure what was happening.

This actually sounds like the very first Glastonbury Festival. At Woodstock, they simply dug a big hole and bulldozed all the waste into the hole, whereas at the first Glastonbury Festival, they did go along and pick it all up to burn. Rumour has it that three or four festival-goers, still asleep in their sleeping bags, were thrown into the fire, but then again, they said that at Woodstock with them being bulldozed into the hole.

But the story about my health giving out has a very sound base to it. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that back in 2015, I was with a friend and we were cutting down a big tree. Or, rather, he was cutting down a big tree and I was removing the wood in a wheelbarrow. When I was halfway through, I began to lose my breath, and later on, it all went completely. I could no longer work and no longer breathe, and I didn’t have the breath to climb the stairs at home. That was when I went to see the local doctor, and that was when they discovered that I was seriously ill and all of this lot began.

The next interruption was from someone who wanted a chat, so I was there until 18:30, thinking as the discussion came to a close that I’d have thirty minutes to finish the dictaphone notes and then I could go for tea.

But that didn’t work out because Rosemary wanted to talk to me. She was having problems doing a scan, and she’d also lost a Word file that she’d just saved. Could I help as it was urgent?

So how long do you think that I spent helping her? Five minutes? Ten minutes? Not a bit of it. I was there on line with her for one hour and fifty minutes, we didn’t find the files and I’m still at a loss as to what she’s doing and where her files are going. We tried everything to find them, even down to creating some more and savng them into a known directory, but when you are trying remotely to help someone four hundred and fifty kilometres away and you can’t see their screen, you’re relying completely on what they are telling you. And what she was telling me made no sense at all.

In the end, I’m glad that her ‘phone rang, otherwise I’d still be there now, I suppose.

But the answer to all of this is simple. I’m going to have to stop being so nice to people and somehow stop them bothering me like this. I can’t do anything, I can’t get anything started, never mind finished. I have so much to do and I’m living on borrowed time. Dialysis is taking up far too much of my time and I need everything that’s left so that I can push on with my own life, but all of this is driving me up the wall.

And that includes the food. For once in my life, I was actually feeling hungry, but look what happened to my mealtime. Instead, there I was at 20:30, when I should have been doing other things, putting half a dozen falafel balls into the air fryer, a diced potato in the microwave and adding them all to the rest of that nice potato salad that I made last week. What a meal that wasn’t.

Once I’d finished eating, there was the rest of the dictaphone notes.

There were three guys who were having a lesson in my apartment with a particular woman teacher. This lesson turned out somehow to be a rather nasty lesson and this woman left in quite a bad temper. Anyway, these three guys decided to set out and go after her. I tried to dissuade them but they just went out anyway. I made sure that the house was tidy and went out a little later on. saw these three boys going back, but they were each somehow sitting at a table and chair with wheels on it. They had a coffee or something, and they were pushing themselves along with their feet to go back to my place, so I avoided them and headed to the corner where my friends were due to meet me. They were all there, even the kids, and even this woman was there and she was most upset. There had been some kind of confrontation. Anyway, we all agreed to go back to my house, and when we arrived, there were these three tables and chair things parked in a car parking space in the street. It was the day of a strike or something, and someone was trying to pay for a parking fee without success, so we told him that there was no parking fee today. Anyway, we went into my apartment and I could hear music coming from one of the bedrooms, so I went, and these three guys were in there. One of them was in my bed and the other two were lounging around on it, so I told them that they would have to go now as I was having company, so they simply packed up, went downstairs and left. Then the people began to come in. One woman was smoking, so I told her that smoking was not allowed in my apartment but she made some kind of gesture and carried on, so I thought that I would deal with her in a minute. Everyone came in, including one actor-type guy. He was being his usual expansive self and he asked “what’s going to happen now?”. I said “you can always help in the kitchen making us some food”. He looked at me and said “no”. Then he went to find this woman and said “do you know what that man said to me? He said that I had to work in the kitchen, so I told him ‘no I’m not'”. She said something like “it’s OK” and then she said to me “well, don’t worry. He never helps anywhere”. I thought “well, if he doesn’t help anywhere, I can’t see him being allowed back to my apartment again”.

Believe it or not, I do actually know a thespian (or who thinks that he’s a thespian, anyway) who thinks like this. “I’m exceptional” and “I’m special”. And, in fact, he won’t be coming around here any time soon (not that he would anyway because he doesn’t live around here). My friend are lovely people, and we all chip in to do the work that’s necessary wherever we are.

It’s the same with the cigarette smoker. I know people like that too, and they won’t be coming to visit me either. There’s this thing called “respect”.

As for the rest of the dream, it doesn’t mean much to me, although the woman teacher could be my old friend Marianne who died in 2013. And I’ve been in an apartment like this before in a dream too, where there were loads of children hanging about. But that’s about it, I suppose.

There was something in that dream about a girl who had a Chrysler V8 sewn onto her jeans. I said that if I wanted to do that, I’d get one off my niece’s husband’s truck. She asked what he had and I replied that it was a big Dodge 5.8 diesel pickup and so we were talking for a while about these big American pick-ups after that.

My niece’s husband in Canada does have a V8 diesel, but it’s in a Chevrolet lorry, the one that I drove down to New Hampshire in the USA to drop off that racing engine that had shot a con-rod through the side during a tractor-pulling event. And I don’t recall it having a badge like the one on this girl’s jeans, but what does that matter.

Anyway, now that I’m starting to calm down and cool down after my outburst just now, and my notes are finished, I’ll finish off whatever needs fnishing and then go to bed. I have a hospital appointment in the morning and I have never felt less like going to it, but I supose that I must, although I’m not sure why.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about thespians … "well, one of us has" – ed … I’m reminded of the famous pathologist Dr Keith Simpson, performing an autopsy in front of a class of university students.
"In real life," he said "this man was an actor …"
And someone shouted up from the back of the class "well, if he’s acting now, he’s bloody good!"

LIVE: Monday 12th October 2026 – MY COTTAGE PIE …

Leave a Reply

… is delicious, even if it isn’t made with real cottages. That was an excellent recipe that my chatbot found for me, and if he knows any others as good as this one, I shall pick his brains again.

However, no matter how nice it was, I hope that it makes me sleep better than last night. I ended up in bed much later than I had intended, and although I was asleep quite quickly, it wasn’t for long enough. I awoke quite early on – I’ve no idea of the time because I didn’t look – and after that, despite everything that I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep again.

When the alarm went off at 06:29, I was still awake, but even so, it still took me a good few minutes to leave the bed and stand up.

The first port of call was at the front door to unlock it ready for when Isabelle the Nurse arrives, and after that, I went into the bathroom to sort myself out and to have a good scrub up. And even a shave too, in case Emilie the Cute Consultant comes to see me at dialysis this afternoon.

Back in here, I checked the dictaphone to see what was on there, but there was nothing much, so I found a few other things to do until Isabelle the Nurse breezed in.

Today, we talked about my cottage pie, or Hachis Parmontier as they say around here, and a few other things too before she parted off on her week’s break, where planning the installation of her Halloween decorations seems to be Priority Number One.

After she left, I made my breakfast, and as I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

The commissioner is talking today about the Bower Oak close to Croft Ambrey. He tells us that "It should be called ”The Lovers’ Oak,” from the romantic scenes that have occurred there. Few trees have left more indelible impressions on young memories."

It beats me how he knows about “the romantic scenes that have occurred there”. Surely he hasn’t been spying on what goes on there in a dirty raincoat and binoculars? Perish the thought, hey?

After I’d finished my breakfast, I came in here to carry on working for a while.

The first task was to review the radio programme that will be broadcast this weekend and make sure that it’s good. And it is, too. There are one or two new groups and musicians featuring in it this week to give it an air of something different.

And that reminds me. If you don’t know how to listen to my programme, it’s broadcast HERE ON FRIDAYS AND SATURDAYS at 21:00 CET (20:00 UK Time and 15:00 in Montréal and Toronto). And if you miss the broadcasts, there are PODCASTS HERE

After the radio, it was the Welsh homework. We had to write an essay about the plans of a new supermarket to be built in a small rural town, write about the background, the arguments for, the arguments against and what we think. And as usual, whenever I have to write an essay, I fall foul of the word count before I’ve really got going. That has been my bane ever since primary school and, let’s be honest, I’m not likely to change now at my age.

This all took me up to midday when it was time to drop everything and head into the kitchen for my disgusting drink and my midday medication, after which I began to prepare for going to dialysis. My faithful cleaner turned up too, to apply the anaesthetic to my arm, not that it does much good really.

After she’d left to go and have her butties before going back out to work, I took the cottage pie out of the oven … "something that our hero had forgotten to do this morning" – ed … covered it with clingfilm and made some space for it in the fridge. It smelt just as nice and delicious as it did while it was cooking.

Yes, tonight I’ll give it a try and see what it’s like, but I’m going to have to work out a way of freezing some of it because there’s far too much to eat in one or two meals. You can’t just slop it into a plastic bag like you can do with a curry or a chilli. Answers on a postcard to …

While I was waiting for the taxi, I adopted the usual position of folding up over the table with my head resting on my arms, but I was rudely interrupted by the doorbell announcing the arrival of the taxi, ten minutes early. And it was “rudely” too. It took me a minute or two to work out where I was and what was going on.

Once I was in the taxi, we had to go to Sartilly for someone else. With the road closed at La Havaudière, we usually go down the road between St. Pair sur Mer and Champeaux, and turn off at Lezeaux Le Carrière to rejoin the main road. However, this driver took me along the coast as far as Carolles and then cut across country to Sartilly. It’s a much nicer road than the Champeaux road, that’s for sure, but it’s a much longer way around, and as a result, I was late for dialysis.

Arriving after 14:00 is one thing, but my nurse, the new young girl with the pet rabbit, was already waiting. There was a lot of preparatory work to do at first, but I was up and running by 14:30, and there are times when it’s been later than that when I’ve arrived early.

And bizarrely, the first puncture hurt a little, but the second didn’t hurt at all, and that’s the one that usually causes all the problems.

Once I was up and running, I had a footfest again. I watched the rest of the Hwlffordd v Caernarfon game, spending most of the time wondering what had happened to the technical skills of both teams as they slugged it out in a midfield maul.

However, I do know why Hwlffordd are stuck low down the table even if they have one of the meanest defences in the league. Whereas TNS have scored 44 goals, Caernarfon 37 and even Trefynnon, propping up the table by a mile, have scored 12, Hwlffordd have scored just 8 and that is simply not good enough.

Mind you, they added one goal to the total at the weekend against Caernarfon, but Caernarfon scored two and that was that, although the penalty awarded for the first goal was … errr … rather dubious, even though it was verified on VAR.

Afterwards, we had Penybont v Y Barri down at Bridgend in front of a big four-figure crowd, the sixth biggest of the season. However, I didn’t finish it all, and so you’ll have to wait for Thursday night for a report on that.

But it’s really strange. Five, ten, fifteen and more years ago, the league was struggling to have one four-figure crowd per season. These days, it’s having at least one four-figure crowd per week somewhere – usually at Caernarfon, Colwyn Bay and Penybont – and it’s rumoured that Connah’s Quay Nomads are pushing the boat out to drag in a four-figure crowd for the local derby at Y Fflint shortly.

And Bangor City in the second division have had two crowds of over four figures, and there was a third at Holyhead when Bangor were the visitors. Things are definitely looking up.

My foot fest was interrupted by the arrival of a doctor – not, unfortunately, Emilie the Cute Consultant. He asked me how I was feeling and I replied moyen, or “average”, so he asked me what I meant, so I replied “not good but not bad”. So he asked me “is there anything else I can do for you?” but I replied “no”. That was the depth of his examination.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … he doesn’t seem to be interested in his job, and I often get the impression that he’d much rather be elsewhere.

The snacks have changed at dialysis today too. I no longer have my coffee and orange juice. The coffee is still there, but the only other thing that I can have is a fruit purée. I suppose that I’ll have to make the best of that. Still, it’s all free, so I have no grounds to complain or to moan about it.

When the session was ended, which made a change to arrive at this point and not have the session cut short, the young nurse with the rabbit unplugged me quite quickly, but I had to wait for the taxi driver. But it didn’t matter. It was one of my favourite drivers and she’s taken me to Paris a few times. Travelling with her is “exciting” to say the least, so I know that we wouldn’t take long to be home.

There were two other people from another place nearby who needed collecting, and start as we mean to go on – at the roundabout at the end of the road, she shot round it, cutting up another couple of cars while she was at it, and I was home by 18:40, which makes a nice change.

My faithful cleaner helped me back into the apartment and stuck a disgusting drink into my hand when I sat down. After she left, I helped myself to a small plateful of my cottage pie, made with real cottages, and it really is delicious. There’s no doubt at all about that. I shall definitely make a permanent note of that recipe.

Back in here, I came to write out the notes for today, but before I’d made much progress, I’d fallen asleep. When I awoke, I took myself off the bed after I’d posted on line what I’d written, and I’ll finish the rest tomorrow. What kind of failure am I?

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about word counts for essays … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of a very old limerick that had done the rounds long before I every heard it –
"There was a young man from Japan
Who could never make limericks scan.
He said ‘my old bean
I know just what you mean
But I always try to fit as many words into the last line as I possibly can."

LIVE: Sunday 11th October 2026 – AT LONG LAST …

Leave a Reply

… Microsoft has enabled the toolbar at the bottom of your screen in Windows 11 to be moved, as was the case with most other previous versions of Windows. Now I can move mine to the right of the screen where it belongs, and I can press on and work properly.

And having done that, I can push on … "and push off too" – ed … and deal with today’s notes, which I hope that I can complete before fatigue overwhelms me.

But the latter is the most likely, because although Sunday is supposed to be a Day of Rest, I haven’t stopped all day today, not even for a minute, despite this “Day of Rest” thing.

Last night, I was in bed at some silly time of night. As I said yesterday, although I intended to be in bed early, I ended up crashing out while riding the porcelain horse, and that set me back quite a while.

However, once in bed, I managed to go to sleep fairly quickly, and although I awoke a couple of times during the night, it wasn’t for very long.

It was Isabelle the Nurse who awoke me, steaming into the bedroom to deal with my feet and legs. She admired my “space” quilt and pillow covers and asked me if I was celebrating the return of the French female astronaut to earth the other day.

After she left, I tried to go back to sleep, but it was quite pointless, so by 09:30 I was fully dressed and in the kitchen. The first task was to make some croissants, so I set to work. And I found some apricot jam, so before I folded the pastry over, I put a spoonful of apricot jam in each.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Our author is still talking about the famous trees of Herefordshire, and he quotes a letter written by Sir Edward Harley, owner of Brampton Bryan Park in Herefordshire, written on 3rd September 1658, in the middle of one of the strongest storms to ever ravage the country, and round about the time that Oliver Cromwell died.

He tells us that "I wish the devil had taken him any other way than through my Park, for, not content with doing me all the mischief he could while alive, he has knocked over some of my finest trees in his progress downwards."

As well as that, in the book this unnamed “commissioner” writes about the hillfort called Croft Ambrey near Aymestrey. He credits it as being the site built by “King Ambrosius”, but if “King Ambrosius really did exist at all, apart from in the imagination of Gildas, he existed round about 450 – 550 AD, which was the crucial period of the defence of the Marcher areas of Cymru against the Anglo-Saxons.

However, later excavations on Croft Ambrey show that the hillfort was built about 1000 years earlier, round about 600 BC. It was quite a common Victorian misconception to think that hillforts date from the time of the Anglo-Saxon versus Britons period, and we have encountered this idea before in one of the other books that we read a while back.

Back in here later, I carried on with the notes from yesterday, and it was long after 13:00 when they finally went on line. Where on earth has the time gone? Things weren’t helped, I have to say, by my falling asleep for a while as I was typing.

The next job was to transcribe the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night.

I was with a girl last night. I don’t know who she was, but we’d been going out with each other for a short while. We’d heard some news about a friend of ours who worked in some kind of block of flats who was falling behind on his course because he wasn’t being given the ability to study where he was living. There was too much noise and too many people, and someone who already lived in that building was removed from the university not so long ago. We were being a bit careful about what we did, obviously, but we were trying to think of a way to solve this guy’s problems. Then there came the news at midday that a well-known college in Jersey, where many people go to study, had closed its doors, which was quite a surprise. There were all these students stranded on the island with no money and no way to go home. I, for one, started a fund, raising money on the internet to bring these people home, but we were having great fun imagining the situation in Jersey at the moment – all these people just having come would just have to go again, the roads would quieten down and the towns would quieten down. Someone had taken a few photos of the area, including my apartment, so that in due course, they could do some computer mock-ups and seats, and some kind of superimposed figures to make jokes. I tried to give my girlfriend a hug, but she was not in the hug-giving mood because her friends, who were in danger of losing their position to study, and I could understand exactly what they meant. It meant everyone calming down and diffusing to these kinds of organisations to make a start themselves.

Well, we start off with having a girlfriend, and that’s a novelty, to be sure. However, she won’t let me hug her at the end, and that’s much more like how things end up with me. Interestingly, my family doesn’t turn up to drop a spanner into the works, as they usually do at times like this. That’s some kind of good news, at least.

As for the rest of the dream, when we were at university, we had many people write to us and complain about the inability to study due to too many other distractions, and we proposed a raft of different solutions – working in the public library, going to bed early and then getting up early to work, before everyone else in the house gets up.

And the college collapsing, leaving hundreds if not thousands of people stranded a long way from home, reminds me of something, but I can’t think what it is.

I’ve just dreamt that the alarm went off and I got out of bed and went for a good wash and dressed myself. When I was sitting at the desk with the computer wondering what to do I found that I’d just woken up in bed, still in my nightclothes, so I don’t know what happened there.

This second dream was really so realistic that it did actually feel as if I had woken up and gone to change my clothes, etc. I really didn’t understand at first how come I was still in bed with my night attire. It certainly wasn’t a “phantom alarm” because whatever alarm it was didn’t manage to awaken the real “me”.

After that, we had football. And what a day it must have been for my two Scottish clubs.

Firstly, Greenock Morton were away at Arbroath. And being at the bottom of the table with just one draw and no wins, no-one expected very much. Nevertheless, Morton actually scored two goals, the first time that they’ve scored more than one this season. And although the Red Lichties pulled one back later in the game, Morton hung on to record their first win this season, and away from home too.

Then to Annan, where Stranraer were away to Annan Athletic. And for everyone who is claiming that Stranraer’s position at the top of the table is false, they were silenced when the score of this game was flashed up on the screen – Annan Athletic 1, Stranraer 6. And Stranraer were worth it too because they played some really good attacking football, something that has been missing from the club for the last few seasons. It really was a good match.

Later on, I had the homemade bread to make, but earlier, my chatbot had found a really good vegan cottage pie recipe, made with real cottages, so while I was waiting for the dough to rise and all of that, I made the cottage pie, and it went into the oven after the bread had cooked.

But latterly, I had Rosemary on the internet. She was stuck with her computer and wanted me to help her. So in between dealing with stuff in the oven, I was helping her. But I was running back and to between the kitchen and here, and I was absolutely exhausted.

As well as that, I was also talking to two of my friends on line.

But now that all of that is finished, I can turn my attention to my notes, and they are now finished too. With just a few more things to check, and then I’m going to bed, ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed …

One of my friends above is a retired doctor, and so, before I go, seeing as we have been talking about doctors … "well, one of us has" – ed … he was telling me that he had one of his patients come into his surgery with a lovely “shiner”, or black eye.
"How did this happen?" my friend asked.
"My wife had given me a slice of shepherd’s pie for tea last night."
"But how did this black eye happen?"
"Well, when the shepherd came in and saw me eating a slice of his pie, he wasn’t very happy."

LIVE: Saturday 10th October 2026 – I REALLY MUST …

Leave a Reply

… pull out of these dramatic sleeps that I seem to be having. They really can’t keep going on like this because they are devastating my life right now and I don’t seem to be able to snap out of them. It wouldn’t be so bad if I were having them in bed where I can enjoy them, but that seems to be the only place where I don’t have them.

The other night, for example, falling asleep while riding the porcelain horse – that really is the nadir of all of this, isn’t it?

Anyway, I eventually went to sleep last night, not straight away like I was hoping. And once I’d fallen asleep, I didn’t stay that way for long. I was soon awake, although I have no idea at what time. It seemed as if I was tossing and turning for hours. I went through the Welsh course question book in my head while trying to go back to sleep, hoping that I could answer the verbal questions from Head Office when they arrive, but no-one at all contacted me with the questions … "and that sounds like a dream too" – ed ….

When the alarm went off, I had to struggle to leave the bed as usual, but once I was up, I dragged myself to the front door to unlock it for when Isabelle the Nurse arrives.

The next stop was the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up, and even a shave in case Emilie the Cute Consultant comes to see me today at dialysis.

Back in here, I carried on with writing up the notes from yesterday, and although I made good and rapid progress … "which makes a change" – ed … I hadn’t quite finished when Isabelle the Nurse put in an appearance. We had a little chat about nothing in particular, and after she left, I could make my breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

“Famous Trees” is still the topic of conversation today, but there’s nothing of any special interest in there, although the author of the report is trying to identify historical storm damage to some of the oldest trees. He seems to be quite confident in identifying damage as far back as the early-mid seventeenth century and has suspicions of damage even further back than that. But, of course, nothing is proven.

Back in here after breakfast, I finished the notes from yesterday and they went on line. Now I was free to attack the dictaphone notes.

I dreamed that I was walking again without crutches. I had some kind of dramatic improvement over one evening. I’d stayed behind at school one evening to see a few Shakespeare plays being rehearsed. I walked out of there and walked downtown. By now, it was morning, and I really fancied some croissants but I carried on walking and I crossed the river into the town centre. I saw two people eating croissants that made me jealous, that kind of thing, and I can’t remember now. I can’t remember now – it’s just gone. Yes – that’s right – we were in a DIY shop, and I was looking at the greenhouses with the plants in them and tried to price up the greenhouses when one of the servers came up to me and said “you’re our squash expert, aren’t you?”. “Well,” I replied. “Not really”, so he sent a man over to me carrying a small racket, with the strings being replaced by a wooden lattice-type of work. He asked me if this would be any good for playing squash. I replied “no” and pointed him to where the squash rackets were. Then it came down to when we came to the entrance to that shop and we walked past a plate with free croissants on it for the morning, so I helped myself to one and so did someone else, then a third person, and we chatted about that, but I can’t remember now what happened after that.

There’s no doubt in this dream that when I was walking away from the Shakespeare plays and across the river into the town centre that I was in Nantwich, so it must have been my old grammar school where the rehearsals were taking place.

And it’s a big surprise to me that I was watching the play rehearsals. It’s hard enough to persuade me to go to watch a real play, never mind some rehearsals. The theatre – or plays, at least – is simply not my thing at all.

And at one time, I used to play a lot of squash and was even on a squash ladder … "but not very high up" – ed … in a local club in Crewe, but I certainly wouldn’t call myself an expert. When I was living in a van, it used to be how I’d manage to shower regularly. But finding me in a DIY shop was an everyday situation, and there even was one in Montlucon, “Brico Depot”, that used to open at 07:30, and they did have free coffee and croissants for the early arrivals.

The next task was to have a quick look at my e-mails. And I do mean “quick” because there wasn’t very much time. I was amazed at how long it actually took to finish everything off.

And there was an e-mail from Grahame, who had seen my notes yesterday on the two oak trees, “Adam” and “Eve”. Eve was the famous hollow oak at Moreton-on-Lugg, Herefordshire. Struck by lightning in 1839, its shattered upper trunk was later thatched and fitted with a door and stove, serving as the railway station’s booking and stationmaster’s office.

Grahame sent me a photo of “Eve” in its role as station master’s office and booking office at the railway station, where you can clearly see the storm damage and how it has been converted.

If you click on the image, you’ll see a larger … "although not very much larger" – ed … image where you can probably see things in better detail, including the chimney at the rear which is connected to the stove inside the tree trunk, and also the thatched roof that covers the part where the upper part of the tree broke off.

So thank you very much for that, Grahame. And a quick note to all the other regular readers of this rubbish – I’m always pleased to interact with my audience, and “comments” on this blog are now enabled if you have something to say. And if you don’t want to “go public”, there should be a “contact me” feature in the bottom right corner of the screen. Don’t hesitate to use it.

And if you can’t see the “contact me” feature, SEND ME AN EMAIL

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … office, the alarm rang to let me know that it was time to head for the kitchen for my disgusting drink and midday medication. Once I’d done that, I began to sort myself and my things out for dialysis.

My faithful cleaner turned up too to apply the anaesthetic to my arm and to have a little chat about nothing in particular, and after she left, I had my usual crash-out over the table in the dining area while I awaited the taxi.

Properly crashed out, I was beginning to have a lovely dream when the doorbell rang, and the dream evaporated immediately. I thought “blimey, that’s early” and it was too – at 12:50, but it seemed that I’d only been there a minute, not almost thirty minutes.

Today, I was the only passenger, so we arrived early at dialysis. However, so had everyone else, so it was still 14:25, almost fifty minutes after my arrival, when I was finally coupled up. And woe is me! I had one of the two nurses who have been there for centuries but do the barest minimum of work to comply with the regulations rather than going very far out of their way.

Once everything had settled down, I started to have a footfest, something that went right on until bedtime, would you believe?

The first on the agenda was to watch the rest of Llansawel v Colwyn Bay from a week ago. It was 1-0 to Llansawel when I left it, and surprisingly, that’s how it finished up. Despite Colwyn Bay’s superior skill and tactics and their lethal strike force of “perm any three from Jack Kenny, Adam Davies, Jordan Davies and Louis Robles”, they were simply unable to break down the resolute Llansawel defence and their goalkeeper, Will Fuller, even though Llansawel were reduced to ten men after an hour.

That’s definitely three points thrown away by Colwyn Bay as they drop to fifth in the table and Llansawel climb further away from the bottom and are now in eleventh out of sixteen places.

The next match, which I saw in its entirety, was Cardiff Metropolitan v Trefelin. Trefelin, second bottom in the table with no wins and just three draws, and the Met, seventh with six wins and three draws from twelve matches, looked like the kind of game where we would be expecting one-way traffic towards just one goal. However, it was rather different than that.

Whatever Trefelin manager Andy Hill had put in his team’s pre-match cuppa, I’ll have a drink of that myself because it seemed to work wonders. Trefelin came out of the blocks at an alarming rate and took the match straight to the Met.

And after eleven minutes, we had a really controversial moment. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday, I discussed the idea of “let’s play it out from the back, lads” and how I reckoned that it was nothing but nonsense. And we had a lovely example of this today.

The Met were awarded a goal kick, so former Port Vale keeper Arron Davies took it quickly and passed it to one of his defenders who was in the goal area with him. The defender, not realising that his keeper had played the ball, picked it up to find a suitable spot to take the kick. Obviously, a penalty was awarded, from which Trefelin scored.

They scored a second later on, and although the Met pulled one back, Trefelin scored a third with ten minutes to go to make the game secure. And that was a surprising result, to be sure.

The third match was Hwlffordd v Caernarfon, but I didn’t finish that, so I’ll tell you all about it on Monday evening.

Having seen and noted the instruction about “letting him leave at his dry weight”, the nurse, despite my insistence, stopped the procedure ten minutes before the end, and for why I have no idea. Consequently, I left yet again at 200 grammes over my dry weight, and I’m getting totally fed up of this.

It’s as if, at the dialysis clinic, I’m talking to the wall instead of to a doctor and a group of nurses. It’s high time that I did something about it, and I know what I’ll do, but let’s see what happens on Monday.

The taxi arrived as I was making my way to the door and as I was the only passenger, we were here for 18:20. There was that much wind that the driver dropped me off at the back door – he can park alongside that so I only have to take three paces and I’m inside, instead of the twenty-five metres round the front.

My cleaner was waiting and she helped me inside and to my apartment, where once I was sitting down, she stuck a disgusting drink into my sweaty little mitt.

After she left, I found some of those square toasted biscuit things and took a packet – the last one – into my office along with some of that vegan spreading cheese and an orange. I made myself comfortable and watched the live game of Y Fflint v Colwyn Bay. I’d missed the kick-off by half an hour, but there’s a function “start from the beginning” on the streaming site.

It actually was quite a good game, and as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I don’t know why Y Fflint are only third from bottom because they do play some very nice, tidy football and Jack Flint, their goalkeeper, is one of the best in the league.

They conceded a goal in the twenty-sixth minute but that was the extent of the scoring. Colwyn Bay could and should have had a few more, except for Jack Flint, but Y Fflint couldn’t get a shot over the goal line. A really good and lively striker would make a world of difference to this team.

By now, I was thoroughly exhausted as a result of my dialysis session, and although I made my best effort in writing my notes, I’d written about 300 words before sleep finally overwhelmed me. When I awoke, I posted on line what I’d written so far and went to prepare myself for bed. And what should have been an early night turned out not to be so after I’d fallen asleep yet again while riding the porcelain horse.

When I eventually fell into bed, I didn’t even have time to make myself comfortable before I fell asleep, and that was that.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about trees … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone once asked me if I knew how many trees I’d cut down in the forest on my farm in Virlet.
"One thousand three hundred and forty-seven" I replied
"How do you know that kind of figure exactly?" he asked.
"It’s easy" I replied. "I keep a log."

LIVE: Friday 9th October 2026 – YET ANOTHER DAY …

Leave a Reply

… where time seems to have flown by and I’ve hardly accomplished anything of what I wanted to do. I seem to be wasting far more time than is good for me right now.

Last night was rather unfortunate when I fell asleep in the comfy chair and ended up going to bed rather later than intended, with the notes for the day being well-unfinished.

And seeing as we have been talking about unfinished notes before bedtime … "well, one of us has" – ed … these notes will probably be unfinished too, but that’s because there’s a football match on – Cambrian United v Rhydaman – and it doesn’t finish until late.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … err … office, I was in bed later than I wanted to be. and I awoke earlier than I intended. However, there was a good reason for that. I must have been lying on my right shoulder in the wrong place, and I had the most horrible ache in my upper arm. It was really painful.

The pain was such that I couldn’t go back to sleep, and so I lay there, tossing and turning and suffering. After a few hours of that, I reckoned that I may as well rise up and do some work. However, the alarm at 06:29 beat me to it.

When I awoke, I was absolutely exhausted, and it took me even longer to raise myself from the bed than normal. And somehow, when I was trying to stand up, I must have stubbed my toe on the comfy office chair that I use as an aid to getting up, because when I came back in here later, there was a trail of blood leading out to the front door where I had gone to unlock it and a trail back into the bathroom where I’d gone to sort myself out afterwards.

However, now that I was back in here, the first thing that I did was to attack the notes that I’d left unfinished last night. And I’d almost finished when Isabelle the Nurse came along.

While she sorted out my legs and feet, I talked about the mess at dialysis yesterday, but she didn’t seem to be interested, which was a shame.

After she left, I made my breakfast, and as I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

We’ve now moved on to the interesting trees of Herefordshire, and the speaker, described as “A Commissioner From The Woolhope Club”, talks about the outstanding trees to be found in the county.

He talks about two very large oak trees, known as “Adam” and “Eve” at Moreton-on-Lugg. “Adam” blew down on 7th January 1839, and “Eve”, although she was still standing, lost all of her branches. All that remained was her trunk, completely rotten and hollow inside. And when the Shrewsbury and Hereford Railway was built in 1853, they put a thatched roof on her and a stove inside her, and she was used as a lodging and office for a while by the stationmaster of Moreton-on-Lugg Railway Station.

Back in here, I finished off the notes for yesterday and posted them on line. However, that took much longer than it ought to have done because I kept on drifting off to sleep while I was writing. And not only that but I was back to having these hallucinations again, and when I “came round” and looked at what I’d been writing, I had to wipe it out and start again.

These hallucinations are really interesting, though. They are so real that when I do “come round”, I’m actually looking for whatever it was that was going on. It’s something so weird that it’s difficult to explain.

In the end, I finally managed to finish, and then I attacked the dictaphone notes from the night.

We had some new neighbours – Mr and Mre Murphy they were – and we were at Gainsborough Road. And the first thing – through their letters – we noticed that they were “Mr and Mrs Murphy” and underneath, they put “Religion – In The Coming of Christ”. I thought “what kind of people are these going to be?”. So we didn’t really have a great deal to do with them, but the guy came round once or twice and asked for a little bit of advice about this and that, and I used to give him a thing about it. Then one day, another one of our friends turned up … fell asleep here … but this guy Murphy used to go on about how he was a well-respected member of the community and there was no-one chasing him for debts or anything. Then another one of my friends, who works in the same kind of business, came and told us that he was being chased by several video companies for the quality of the work that he had done and returning the deposits that they had given him, that kind of thing. And then we had a bit of evidence about that because he was doing some electrical work at his house and there was an explosion. He ended up with wires sticking in his heel.

Nothing in this dream seems to relate to anything in real life … "except the falling asleep" – ed … but I did have a chat yesterday with the friend who figured in this dream… "who is not an electrician" – ed … and part of our discussion did concern Gainsborough Road.

Nothing else fits anywhere.

There was also something as well about a friend and me. We were in the underground garage at my place in Belgium. There was a car in there that had been in there for years, covered up in a tarpaulin, but the tarpaulin had come off, and it was an “X” registered Volkswagen Passat underneath there, dark red and all covered in dust. But we’d gone down there to see my latest car, which was some kind of sports car like a Porsche, but not as good as that. It was bright yellow, and I’d paid €350:00 for it. But he was talking to me about parking in Brussels, saying that it’s becoming more and more difficult. Now you need to have an app where you book your parking place ten minutes before you arrive, and then, automatically, it’s paid. I thought that that’s going to be complicated because someone could be taking your place in that time. He told me that you’re better off buying a card to do this outside the city, but once you have it, you can do your shopping inside the city.

This is the same friend from earlier, and he does have a thing about interesting and old cars.

But parking in Brussels has always been impossible, even before apps and all of that. When I was coming in to Brussels after I’d stopped living there, I’d park at one of the shopping centres on the edge of town and take the tram, metro or train (depending upon where I was) into the city.

There was certainly no car, wrapped in a tarpaulin or not, that had been parked in our underground car park for any length of time. But interestingly, I can still see it now, and it had British plates on it.

By now, believe it or not, it was after my disgusting drink and midday medication time, so I went off to fetch them. Then, after a little break, I carried on.

This afternoon, I’ve been researching the music for the radio programme that I’ll be preparing next week. My chatbot has been helping me as usual because, once more, there will be loads of obscure groups and artists featuring, and asking my chatbot to do the research saves me hours of work.

We now have a good collection of music, much of which I’ve already downloaded and reformatted. And while I was at it, I asked the chatbot to review what I’ve written for the one that I’d prepared yesterday, and he made loads of suggestions and corrections.

In the middle of all of this, Rosemary telephoned me for a chat. I’ve no idea how long the chat was because, shame as it is to say it, I fell asleep while I was talking to her and I didn’t awaken until 17:30, by which time she’d become fed up of waiting and had ended the call. And I can’t say that I blame her.

Back in the Land of the Living, I carried on working until teatime, when I went into the kitchen to make my usual sausage, beans with cheese and black pepper with air-fried chips. And, as usual, it was totally delicious, especially when followed by a peach soya yoghurt and a plum.

The time was such that I had to hurry, but I made it back into here just in time for the kick-off of tonight’s football.

The match that I’d chosen was another one between two newly promoted teams, Cambrian United and Rhydaman. The Cam Army are doing reasonably well for a newly promoted team and are currently in lower mid-table, But Rhydaman have been struggling, and we had to wait until they played Trefynnon just now for their first win.

Rhydaman opened the scoring in dramatic fashion. I’ve been urging teams to stop this nonsense of “playing it out from the back” and go for the direct route, causing chaos in the opposition defence, and tonight, Rhydaman’s keeper launched a long kick downfield, the centre-half missed it, his mate in the centre of defence couldn’t quite get his foot on it, and a Rhydaman player ran on to the loose ball and beat the Cambrian keeper.

After that, the game settled down. Rhydaman opted for the “kick and run” tactics, but Cambrian played some really nice, technical football. Nevertheless, they could still be playing this time next year, and they would never break down Rhydaman’s defence, which was outstanding, even after they had their centre-half sent off. Nothing on earth would ever get past that defence, which is surprising seeing how low Rhydaman are in the table.

Anyway, Rhydaman hung on for their second victory, and with that three points, they are catching up with the pack in the lower mid table, something that was looking most unlikely three weeks ago.

When the football finished, I sat down to write out today’s notes, and I was halfway through when I was suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue. I couldn’t go on from there, so I posted on line what I had written so far, but a “to be continued” sticker on it and prepared for bed.

However, when I was sorting myself out for bed, I fell asleep while … errr. riding the porcelain horse, and how embarrassed is that? That will explain how come I was so late going to bed. But here I am, hoping for a good, really long sleep like the other night … "ha ha" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Belgium … "well, one of us has" – ed … a Belgian policemen once stopped a car with five Dutch men in it.
"What kind of car is that?" asks the policeman.
"It’s a Renault Four" replied one of the Dutchmen.
"Exactly" replied the policeman. "One of you will have to get out."
"But the ‘Four’ is the model, not the carrying capacity" says one of the Dutchmen. "Check with your boss!"
The policeman calls up his boss and receives a reply
"Don’t bother me now. I have these three Italians in this Fiat Uno …"

LIVE: Thursday 8th October 2026 – WE HAVE HAD …

Leave a Reply

… another day of disputes down at the dialysis centre, as some people totally fail to understand exactly what “stay connected up until he’s down to the dry weight” really means, and want to shut down the procedure with ten minutes and one hundred and fifty grammes still to go.

“Is it me?” I wonder, or are there really some people who just can’t understand a plain and simple instruction?

My body is a bit like that sometimes. It can’t understand a plain and simple instruction either. All I wanted it to do was to act like the previous night and let me have a really good sleep until the alarm goes off, but no such luck. I was in bed quite late last night and it took me an age to go to sleep as well, but I awoke, probably with the wind, as we had a gale blowing outside, at whatever time it was – I don’t know, but whenever it was, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I just lay there, tossing and turning, until the alarm went off at 06:29.

For once in my life, I was actually up and about quite quickly because I had a lot of things to do. I went to the front door and unlocked it, and then I went into the bathroom to organise myself and have a good scrub up. I even had a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d gone to during the night. Unfortunately, I hadn’t gone very far.

Last night, we were doing something with a couple of teams in the Cymru Premier League or the Cymru North League. I remember that Drenewydd was one of them. What we were doing was trying to work out some kind of either a handicap for the scores or some kind of adjustment in respect of their league positions. But Drenewydd, who were currently third in the table, were not very happy about this, and their manager had all kinds of things to say to us about the situation while we were doing it.

As it happens, Drenewydd are lying third in the Cymru North table. But this dream is, I reckon, all about the forthcoming match on Friday night between Trefynnon, adrift at the foot of the table with the unenviable record of just one point and conceding the most goals so far this season, and TNS, way out front at the top and who have been scoring goals for fun just recently. Their 9-0 thrashing of mid-table Cambrian United the other week must make gruesome reading for Trefynnon.

We’ve had a 9-1 result just recently too, and then there’s this campaign by a “journalist” who wants to open up all of the results that have been censored by some of the leagues due to the extremely heavy defeats that some clubs lower down the pyramid have suffered, despite his “article” six months or so ago deploring the heavy thrashings that some clubs have had and how demoralising and embarrassing it must be, etc., etc.

Isabelle the Nurse worked her way in later and dealt with my legs and feet. I told her about my bad night again and she wasn’t all that much help in helping me find a solution. Maybe there isn’t one. I dunno.

After she left, I made my breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Today, we’re still carrying on with all of the papers that have been read before the club in the year 1870. There have been all sorts of subjects addressed, but right now, we’re reading a speech by an eminent mushroom expert called Elias Magnus Fries from Sweden, one of the people who were mainly responsible for the differentiation and classification of mushroom types.

None of it is controversial, however, and in any case, I don’t know enough about mushrooms to argue.

When I’d finished breakfast, I stayed sitting at the table because I had some important work to do. My chatbot and I started work on a brand new project the other day, but when I tried to open the relevant file yesterday, I couldn’t find it, despite looking and looking.

It turned out that I’d downloaded an upgrade of ChatGPT onto the big desktop machine, and the installation had installed without deleting or overwriting the old installation, and yesterday, I was trying to open the older version. And files made with the new version are not, surprisingly, backwards compatible with the old version, so the old version won’t show them.

So to cut a long story short, when I opened the new version, the file was sitting there as it should be, and so are the old files too, which are forward-compatible with the new version.

Thus yesterday, feeling full of confidence and reassurance … "the fool" – ed … I went to upgrade ChatGPT on the travelling laptop. That was no problem. I made sure that my Windows shortcut was pointing at the new version, which it was, and then clicked to open it.

And guess what? That’s right. The file wasn’t there. And copying the URL link from the chat that was open on the desktop computer into the laptop’s chat window address bar simply produced an error message.

Consequently, Chatbot and I spent two hours trying different things to make it appear, but nothing worked. Not even rubbing this brass lamp that I have in here.

When the alarm went off, I had to stop and prepare myself for dialysis, sort out a disgusting drink and my midday medication. Once I’d done that, I had to prepare the travelling laptop to take with me. My faithful cleaner came along too in order to deal with putting the anaesthetic on my arm.

After she left, I took up my usual position of “slumped over the table with my head resting on my arms” and slowly drifted away into a nice peaceful sleep for what seemed like all of thirty seconds when the doorbell awoke me.

“It can’t be the taxi already, surely?” I thought, but it was. And when I checked the time with the clock on the microwave, it was 12:58. I’d been asleep for over half an hour.

At first, I was the only passenger, but we stopped to pick up our usual Thursday voyager from the Aqua Gym at St. Pair to take to the other side of Avranches. We had a nice drive in the lovely weather … "it’s still summer here" – ed … down to Avranches, where I arrived five minutes early. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until 14:20 that I was plugged in.

When I weighed myself on entry, there was another huge spike in my weight. My calculations were that if I were to stay for four hours with the machine on maximum, it would clear it. The nurses tried to dissuade me, even though they had the doctor’s authority to do it, and in any case I insisted. So we had the “on your own head be it” and they eventually did as I instructed.

There was an injection that I had to have today to boost my immunity system, so my cleaner had fetched it from the chemist the other day, and I took it to the clinic with me. When I saw the doctor (not, unfortunately, Emilie the Cute Consultant), I told her “here’s a little present for you, doctor”. She wasn’t sure whether or not I was being serious, but when she saw the injection, she took it and put it in the fridge.

Once everything was up and running, I settled down to watch a football match from the weekend – Hwlffordd v Y Fflint.

Even though these teams are near the bottom of the table, they usually play some classy, stylish football. However, that certainly wasn’t the case in this match. Y Fflint certainly tried, but their midfield was overrun by the Hwlfforth midfield. Hwlffordd certainly had the better of the play, and even though they had a player sent off three quarters through the game, they still appeared to have too much in the tank for Y Fflint.

That’s how it seemed, anyway, until the ninetieth minute when Y Fflint’s Joe Malkin glanced a header into the Hwlffordd net. Y Fflint hung on until the end of the game to give them a most unexpected victory.

With staying on for four hours, I could see most of a second match, so I chose Llansawel v Colwyn Bay.

This should have been an “away banker”, but it didn’t turn out like that at all. However, I’ll tell you about the game after I’ve finished watching it.

With about ten minutes and one hundred and fifty grammes to go, the nurse came to unplug me. “Why?” I asked.

“We can see that this black line, which shows us how much fluid there is to collect, has grounded out. So now, all we’ll be doing is taking out your normal body fluids”.

“You heard what the doctor said,” I replied. “I can’t leave until I’m down to my dry weight”.

And then we had a big argument about it all. In the end, they telephoned a doctor who basically said “let him do what he wants,” so I stayed.

Even so, I was still 200 grammes over my dry weight when I left, and that was so disappointing because I’ll just have to take it off on Saturday along with everything else that has accumulated. But it really is bad news when I have to fight with these people.

What made things worse was that there were two nurses around my bed while I was being unplugged, and they were talking about me as if I wasn’t there. It was hardly polite, as were some of the comments. Not that I was upset by it, just bewildered as to why it was happening.

The taxi was waiting for me as I came out of the building, and as I was the only passenger, we could go straight home.

When I arrived at … gulp … 19:20, my cleaner was waiting for me to help me into the apartment. That was just as well because as the evening drew on, it was quite cold. And it’s soon going to be jacket-wearing weather in the morning and evening, I reckon.

Once I’d sat down, my faithful cleaner bunged a disgusting drink in my hands so that I didn’t forget, and then went up to her apartment.

After she’d left and I’d drunk my disgusting drink, I went to make my tea – some more of that potato salad that I made the other day with some ordinary salad and a spicy burger. It was a strange meal, but there were bags of protein in it, and that’s what I need.

In here later, I began to write out the notes for the day, but once again, found myself asleep on my cjair later on with my notes only half written. I posted them on-line with a “to be continued” stamp and I’ll finish the rest tomorrow morning.

Before going to bed, I went for a ride on the porcelain horse and at one point, I almost fell off. Then in the bathroom and trying to stand up after sitting on the chair, my hand slipped off the freezer and I smashed my head really hard on the fridge door as I almost fell. I really was in no fit state to be around, so I was glad that I had decided to go to bed. I wasn’t safe anywhere else.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about my cleaner … "well, one of us has" – ed … she told me when I arrived home "there was a report on the TV about a 75 year old guy who was stopped by the police for going at 157 kilometres per hour (about 95 mph) in an area with a 90 kilometre per hour (about 55 mph) limit."
"Really?" I asked. "He was probably afraid that he would be late for his own funeral."

LIVE: Wednesday 7th October 2026 – FOR THE FIRST …

Leave a Reply

… time in ages, and it must really be a long, long time, I’ve actually had a decent, unbroken sleep, and you’ve no idea how much better I’m feeling.

And it might not have been like that either, because once more, I was really late going to bed. I’ve no idea what time, but the last file that was updated on my computer from yesterday was timed at 23:30, so it was certainly after that.

Once in bed, I fell asleep quite quickly. There were no interruptions, no dreams, no phantom alarm calls, no anything, and when the alarm went off and woke me, I was still in the same position as I was when I’d gone to sleep. Nothing had changed at all.

Be that as it may, it still took a good ten minutes or more for me to find the energy and enthusiasm to stand up and head into the living room to unlock the door for Isabelle the Nurse. Having done that, I went into the bathroom to organise myself for the day.

Back in here, there was nothing on the dictaphone, as I said just now, so I found plenty of things for me to do. And it’s just as well, because Isabelle the Nurse was late coming today.

While she was dealing with my legs and feet, she told me about her week off. We’ve had some beautiful weather just now … "although today is cold, grey and wet" – ed … so she spent a day or two relaxing on a sunbed in the garden. And who can blame her?

After she left, I made my usual breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

We’re beginning the summing-up now, with all kinds of papers being read to the members at the 1870 AGM. Every subject is being discussed. And our author here talks about the American Meadow Lark and announces with absolutely no sense of irony whatever, that "This interesting bird was killed by a man when snipe shooting close to the town of Cheltenham, about the year 1840, when it rose from a boggy place. According to the Editor of The Field it is one of only three instances in which this bird is known to have appeared in England, and the first—for the others are recorded by Mr. P. L. Sclater in The Ibis for 1861, one being killed at Thrandeston, in Suffolk, and the other at Walsham, in Norfolk."

Can you imagine today, shooting a bird that rare?

And thanks to Seàn, who saw my note yesterday and sent me some info about the sinking of “Foxhunter” on 6th December 1770 during the great storm –

Foxhunter
Wooden sailing vessel newly built in 1770 for the Liverpool-Dublin packet service.
Captain Butler, Liverpool to Dublin
Wrecked near mouth of Mersey on 6-7 Dec 1770; wreckage driven ashore.
All 21 passengers and 6 crew lost.

On 6 December 1770, a storm from the Southwest struck and continued with violence, with the wind veering Northwest over the next days. Shipping near Liverpool was heavily disrupted with many vessels driven ashore and lost.

Advert 31 July 1770:
The FOX-HUNTER PACKET, A Vessel built on purpose to ply between the Ports of Liverpool and Dublin only, and calculated to accommodate Passengers with the most genteel Conveniences suitable to their Ranks and Qualities, has 11 in the Cabin, besides several in the Steerage, with other Conveniences for taking the Carriages, Horses, and Baggage of any large Family, will sail from Liverpool for Dublin.

Thanks again.

Back in here, I had a few things to do, such as to download some more music that I needed for my radio programme, and then to reformat it all and then re-edit and then remix it. Having done that, I chose the tracks that I needed and then paired and segued them.

That stop was perfect for a disgusting drink break with my midday medication, and also because a friend of mine with whom I’d been talking told me at that very moment, he was off out to the shops.

After lunch, I began to write the notes for the radio programme, and in a mad fit of energy, they are all now written. Just one or two things remain to be done, and then after that, the programme will be finished. That’s a new record time.

After that, I had another good chat online with someone, and then it was time for tea.

Tonight, I had rice with veg and a taco roll filled with a spicy tomato and kidney bean whatever that I found in the freezer, and it might have been a leftover of something that my friend cooked when he was here. Whatever it was, though, it was really nice, and there’s another helping in the freezer for another time.

Back in here, would you believe, I was giving some virtual guitar lessons on the computer. It’s more complicated than you might think, trying to explain something visual and audible to someone by using just a text medium, but in the end, after about an hour and a half, I had her playing an A chord and a D chord.

Next time, we’ll do C, E and G if we have time (which I doubt), but with just those five chords, you can play a great many popular rock songs.

But that’s for another time. Right now, I’ve finished my notes, and when I’ve finished the backing up and the stats, I’m going to go to bed and hope that I’ll have just as good a sleep as I had last night. We shall see.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about guitar lessons … "well, one of us has" – ed … one day, someone ‘phoned me about guitar lessons, so I told him to come round.
When he turned up later, I saw that he had no hands.
"This is crazy" I said. "How on earth can you play guitar with no hnds?"
"It’s not a problem" he replied. "I can play the piano and the violin with no problems."
"How do you manage that?" I asked.
"Well, I’ve always played music by ear."

LIVE: Tuesday 6th October 2026 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

Leave a Reply

… one of those days where I’ve not been able to accomplish much, much to my regret, of course, but I seem to have gone from one interruption to another.

Those interruptions started last night, as I’m sure that you will remember – typing out the notes quite efficiently until I crashed out at the desk, and the worst thing about it was not knowing that I’d crashed out until I awoke.

As I mentioned yesterday, when I awoke, I went more-or-less straight to bed, hoping for a good sleep.

And so I thought, but I had not one, but two phantom alarm calls during the night. The first one was sometime round about 02:30 and I managed to ignore that one pretty much. The second one, round about 04:30, I took much more seriously. I found myself sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for the second alarm. And after a while, when it didn’t come, I checked the time and it was 04:38, so I climbed back into bed.

However, the damage had been done with the call at 02:30. From then on, I was just drifting in and out of sleep. I was definitely asleep at 04:30 or so, but I was awake before the alarm went off at 06:29.

Once again, we had the same old struggle to rise up from the bed and to unlock the front door, but I managed it eventually. And then back into the bathroom to sort myself out, ready for Isabelle the Nurse.

Back in here, I had last night’s notes to finish, so I buckled down and bashed them out, but just before I could put them on line, Isabelle the Nurse arrived. She asked me about my week while she was on her break, so I told her, but that didn’t leave much time for her to tell me about her week.

And she gave me a lecture about dialysis too, saying that I was expecting too much if I wanted things to go as normal every time. There could have been a hundred reasons why it all went wrong and she told me some of them. However, that’s not really the point. The point is that they didn’t tell me about them, so I couldn’t argue about the situation then and there.

After Isabelle the Nurse had left, I made my breakfast and read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Today, they are still discussing the safety concerns relating to the local weather, but something they mentioned caused me to go off on a tangent again and begin to search for the sinking of the Dublin Packet Boat in 1770, with the loss of all hands, without very much success.

Back in here, I finished off the notes and posted them on line, then I began to revise for my Welsh lesson. The revision went really well and I managed to finish the first unit, so I was looking forward to the lesson.

And the lesson went really well too. I did quite well, except for a couple of mistakes that I made, and I was quite happy with my progress. Sad as it is to say it, much as I loved my previous teacher and wished that she was still teaching our year, the current teacher, apart from being really scatty, seems to be more efficient, and I’m learning more with her than I did with her predecessor.

When the lesson was over, I wrote up the notes from the dictaphone last night – and about time too.

We were in a big city that might even have been London. In fact, it probably was, and we were walking down that street that we walk along quite often in a dream but this time, going the other way, from the city centre out to the suburbs. There were three of us, and we were fooling around a little. One of them wanted to go to use the toilet, but there was nowhere, so in the end we found a pub that was open early in the morning, and he allowed them to go to the bathroom there. I was much more interested in an old car across the road. Eventually, my friends came out and we carried on walking and chatting until, in the end, we came to a café where we thought that we’d go and have a coffee. We went in and sat down at a table and we noticed a couple of kids watching us. Suddenly, one of the kids blurted out something in English, so I mentioned it to Nerina and said that you can’t go anywhere, can you? Anyway, these people came over. She looked at my camera and asked if I was me. I said that I was, and she told me that I’d commented on a photo of hers ages ago, and she said that she was very pleased to see me. We chatted for quite a while, and then they invited us to come on their boat in the river. We began to get ready, but this couple was really strange. She insisted on appeal because, being polite and very well-dressed, but not on her own children. Eventually, we sat on this boat. We thought that we’d been on this boat before, so we wanted to know what else was going to happen. Then they began to put a few films on, and these films were dubious, to say the least, and … fell asleep here …

What a dream that was!

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall a dream a week or two back about Nerina and me being in New York for something to do with her work. This boat was moored on the Hudson River in New York, roughly where we were in the previous dream, although the crew of the British freighter were all for buying the boat and doing some privateering on the way home.

Apart from that, there’s the street in London that we know so well, although not this end. We know much more about the far end, which is presumably in Edmonton somewhere and where we buy our chips and pastries.

But, as usual, the dream is just an example of the kind of nonsense that I can conjure up when I try.

The cleaner turned up next to do her stuff, but she sorted out the bathroom first and then chased me under the shower for my weekly scrub.

Back in here, I did some work on my radio programme, and the music is really taking shape. For the last two or three weeks, I’ve had to search for loads of music that I don’t have to hand, and this week is no different. But as of tomorrow, I’m going to have to crack on if I want to finish it before the weekend.

When teatime came round, I went into the kitchen and made myself some mashed potato with onion, peas and carrots and the last slice of my vegan pie. That was delicious, and I’m going to have to make another one at some point. A slice of that makes a nice, traditional meal.

It was followed by a raspberry soya dessert, and they are quite nice too. I’ll have to order some more of these when they next come round on special offer.

Back in here, Rosemary ‘phoned me. Her external hard drive had arrived, but she wasn’t sure how to use it. We ended up just having a quick chat – a mere 00:53:48 today – and helped her install the external drive and perform her first complete backup. With a bit of luck, God’s help and a bobby, she won’t lose any more files.

Once I’d finished with Rosemary, I could crack on and do the notes for the day, and now, they are finished. There are just the stats and my back-up to perform, and then I can go to bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about alarms … "well, one of us has" – ed … I heard a story that one of my friends had bought a new alarm clock earlier that day.
It had come by post from the Tourettes Society, and we were having a good discussion about it.
At least, we were, until one of my friends said "well, he’s going to be in for a rude awakening tomorrow morning then"

LIVE: Monday 5th October 2026 – I AM REALLY …

Leave a Reply

… convinced that the people at dialysis … "or some of them, anyway" – ed … are pulling my leg or taking the mickey. We’ve had yet another showdown about the length of the sessions.

More of this anon however. Let’s start at the very beginning … "♬ a very good place to start ♬" – ed … and go back to last night. By the time that I’d finished everything and crawled into bed, it was just a few minutes past 23:30. So much for my early night;

And it all went worse after that. I awoke a few hours later – don’t ask me what time – and after that, I didn’t go back to sleep at all. I just lay there, tossing and turning, all through the night.

When the alarm went off, I was still awake, but be that as it may, it was another desperate struggle to rise to my feet. And it wasn’t just a lack of motivation either. I had to wait a good few minutes for the room to stop spinning round before I felt able to stand up.

Having unlocked the front door for the nurse, I headed back into the bathroom to organise myself for dialysis. Except that I forgot to have a shave this morning. Whatever will Emilie the Cute Consultant think of me if she sees me this afternoon at dialysis?

Back in here, there was nothing on the dictaphone from last night, so I went to find myself something else to do. But there wasn’t very long in which to do it because the nurse turned up at 08:04 this morning, and that’s early.

While he was sorting out my legs and feet, he was telling me some more stories about Saturday’s fire in the restaurant in the town centre. Most of it, though, is pure gossip and speculation, so I’m not going to repeat it in a public forum.

After he left, I made breakfast (and my new loaf is wonderful) and while I was eating it, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

We’ve finished talking about fungi now and were discussing extremes of weather. And one example caught my eye – the entry for 1816.

"1816. July was unusually boisterous and wet.
Aug. 31. Accompanied by a fall of rain of nearly three inches in two days. A tremendous gale of wind visited Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, and other northern towns. Much damage done to shipping, and many vessels lost at sea. This was the diastrous harvest time previously mentioned."

This corresponds with the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Sumbawa, in Indonesia, in April 1815, the most powerful volcanic eruption in modern times. It led to 1816 being called “The Year Without a Summer” as crops failed and extremes of weather battered the World.

Back in here later, I had this week’s radio programme to review, and when I was satisfied with it, I sent it off to the studio to be fitted into the stream for broadcasting on Friday and Saturday nights at 21:30.

Having done that, the next item that needed my intervention was my Welsh homework. I called up the page, copied and pasted the questions onto the computer, checked that they were appreciated as being quite the careful and faithful copy, and then began to answer them.

When I’d answered them, I checked with my chatbot to see if I was on the right lines, and once he confirmed that everything was as it should be, I sent them off. That’ll give our tutor something to think about.

There was an interruption when the telephone rang. A neighbour called me to ask if he could come to visit me sometime. We agreed on Wednesday morning at 11:00. Then he telephoned me again five minutes later to say that he’d forgotten about an appointment on Wednesday, so could he come another time? As long as I’m here and I’m not in my Welsh class, he can come when he likes.

But what with neighbours coming to visit, the possibility that I’m going to have a friend here for a week and all of that, I seem to be quite popular these days. I’m not sure why, though. Do I owe you any money?

It’s not as busy, though, as it was last year. I shall have to remind a few more people that it’s open house for whenever they want to come to stay.

When the alarm that reminds me that it’s time to prepare for dialysis went off, I wandered into the kitchen for my disgusting drink and midday medication and then began to pack the travelling laptop to take with me. My cleaner turned up too to sort out the anaesthetic for my arm.

After she left, I waited for the taxi, in my usual “slumped over the kitchen table, head resting on my arms” position. And I began to have a lovely dream and remember saying to myself that I really must remember this, but then the doorbell rang and the whole lot evaporated immediately, and that was that.

At first, I was alone in the car, but then we had to pick up a guy at the hospital as well as my regular companion from Sartilly, as a result of which we were a little late arriving.

Not only that, but several people had arrived together just before me, so I had to wait until 14:25 before I was finally connected up.

My plan was to sit quietly and watch a football match but my dialysis machine had other ideas. It was constantly ringing up errors, and that brought the nurses a-running when the alarm went off. I hardly had any peace at all.

Nevertheless, I did manage to watch Airbus UK Broughton v Trefelin, after a fashion. This game was played between two of the newly promoted sides, and what different sides they were too. Trefelin were more “kick and rush” whereas Airbus played some really good, technical football. The final result, 3-0 to Airbus, wasn’t a surprise to anyone.

It seems to me that Airbus have managed to suss out this Premier League, and while they are never going to win the championship, they have what it takes to avoid relegation, but unless Trefelin can find something magical from somewhere, it’s going to be a long, hard season.

In the middle of all of this, we had a confrontation. One of the doctors … "not, unfortunately, Emilie the Cute Consultant" – ed …came to see me. She asked me how things were, and so I launched into my tirade about the last two sessions and how disappointed I was.

Of course, it wasn’t she who had made the decisions – she wasn’t on duty – so she only knew what was in the records.

First of all, I complained that whatever had gone on had gone on without my knowledge, and I thought that that was shameful. That surprised her because, apparently, every patient has the right to know what’s happening about his treatment.

Secondly, on Thursday, I’d made the decision to come home at the right weight by staying for four hours instead of three, and coming home 700 grammes over my weight, as I did last Thursday, was, in my opinion, a waste of forty-five minutes of my time when I have better things to do at home.

She couldn’t really find an answer to that. One thing that she suggested was that there wasn’t enough time even with four hours to take everything out. They are limiting my extraction to 950 millilitres per hour because of my low blood pressure. But leaving my blood pressure aside, which has been low like this for twenty-odd years, what with everything that’s pumped into me during a session, there were three thousand eight hundred millilitres to take out last Thursday, so that was exactly right – and I realised that the end of the World had come upon us when she – a doctor of medicine – had to use a calculator to divide three thousand eight hundred by four.

After much argument and discussion, we agreed that I should be leaving at my recognised dry weight, even if I have to stay there for a week to do it.

And having made such an agreement, the dialysis breathed its last, ten minutes before the end of the session with 200 grammes still to go, so I was unplugged, under-extracted and overweight. It wasn’t my day, was it?

The taxi was waiting for me when the dialysis was over and I was able to head for home quite quickly, especially as I was the only passenger. However, we ended up being stuck behind a service bus between La Havaudière and the roundabout at the ring road just outside Granville, and the bus was crawling along, stopping to drop off and pick up passengers all the way round and we couldn’t go past.

Eventually, we arrived at chez moi where my faithful cleaner was waiting for me. She helped me into the kitchen, and when I was sitting down on a chair, she stuck a disgusting drink into my hands.

After all of my exertions at dialysis today, I didn’t at all feel like cooking anything, so I grabbed some crackers and some of the cheese spread, and an orange for pudding. And when I went to spread the cheese on my crackers, I found that it had gone off. It’s really not my day, is it?

In the end, I started to write up the notes from the day, and I was pushing on quite well but the next thing that I knew was that it was almost 22:00 and I must have fallen asleep in mid-page at some time previously.

At that point, I was in absolutely no state at all to carry on working, so I posted what I had written, added a “To Be Continued” stamp and went to bed. I’ll finish everything off tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about things breaking down … "well, one of us has" – ed … two young Russian conscripts walk to the Ukraine front line and surrender to the Ukrainians.
"Our lorry has broken down, we’ve no more fuel, and we’ve been abandoned. " they said.
They are consequently taken prisoner, but one of the Ukrainians is a mechanic. "There’s no-one about" he said. "Let’s go and see if we can salvage it."
The Russian prisoners lead the Ukrainian patrol to the lorry, and the mechanic gives it a good examination.
After half an hour, he announces "the fuel pipe has come off and all the fuel has drained away. There’s a hole in the sump that has drained out all the oil, the cam belt has snapped, one of the tyres is punctured, the starter has fallen out and there’s a leak of water in the radiator."
"A leak in the radiator?" asks one of the Russians. "I can’t remember doing that."

LIVE: Sunday 4th October 2026 – YET ANOTHER SUNDAY …

Leave a Reply

… where a late breakfast seems to be the order of the day. Some of these lie ins are really good, especially a few that I’ve had just recently.

And I need a lie-in after the events of last night. For example, it was about 00:30 when I went to bed, and if that’s not late, I don’t know what is. Mind you, it’s a very far cry from the good old days when I’d still be up working at 02:30 and later, and sometimes not going to bed at all.

During the night, as you might expect, I awoke at some point. I’ve no idea what time it was because I didn’t look. It took quite a while, but I managed to go to sleep later, only to wake up again at 07:40. I definitely went back to sleep at that point because the nurse awoke me when he came in.

He sorted out my legs and feet while I was still in bed, and then I went back to sleep again. When I awoke again, it was 10:35, so I decided that I’d better wake up. As usual, it took me a while to be able to get to my feet, and then I went to sort myself out in the bathroom.

It was 10:55 when I began to prepare my breakfast. I couldn’t be bothered to make croissants but there was some bread left, so I just had some ordinary, normal toast with my porridge, coffee and juice.

While I was eating, I was reading THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Today, our discussion on fungi is continuing. We’re discussing the edible fungi found in the woods and fields, but it’s not much use because they are using all these scientific terms which many people, including me, don’t know, so we don’t really have much of a chance of understanding them.

One interesting fact that I learnt was that the poor rural folk, such as farm labourers in the depths of darkest rural Herefordshire are so poorly paid that they only ever eat bacon. One of the guys in the Naturalists Club reckons “how their diet would be greatly improved” by adding a few slices of edible mushrooms to their diet. That’s fair enough, but you need to talk to these people in language that they understand, not in scientific language.

Back in here, there were a few things to check, and then I had the dictaphone notes to transcribe.

This was a weird dream, and I’d forgotten most of it when I reached for the dictaphone, but one thing was that it was someone’s birthday in Crewe. We’d been invited, or, rather, I’d been invited because I knew the person, and Nerina could come too. I had to find a birthday present for that person, so we went for a wander in the town, but, as usual, there were far too many distractions. Nerina wasn’t living with me any more, so she was buying things for her new place where she was living, and she was going round and round in circles with these things, not making up her mind, not buying anything, buying this, thinking that, and it led to some kind of complications in the house where we were staying because of organising this birthday present and organising some shopping, and we found that we were going nowhere and doing nothing. I wanted to crack on, and we could have had a lift to this party too if we’d been ready with a birthday present. And then we started talking about Nerina’s birthday and Christmas present. She said that she didn’t want anything at all, and I couldn’t think of what to buy her either. In the end, there was a train back from Stafford where we were, going back to Creze. I thought that if we went there, we could dump these things and go back to catch the train to where we were going, but Nerina couldn’t even make up her mind about wanting to go on the train to home. She had other plans, and I thought that I didn’t know what these plans were. But there’s more of this dream that’s missing, and I’m certain that it went on all night practically.

Nerina is making more and more of a regular appearance in my dreams these days. Not that I mind, because I did ask her to share my life with me. But it’s not like Nerina to dither around like this. Usually, she’d make up her mind quite quickly and decisively.

And notice that we were at Stafford railway station. I’ve only ever caught a train from there twice – once when I was sixteen or so and I’d been for a walk around Stafford one Friday night, and the second time was coming back from Birmingham after a “certain meeting”, and that’s another story that the World is not yet ready to hear.

Also, we’re flitting about from pillar to post, and so is this birthday bash. Trying to keep synchronised with time and place in a dream seems to be almost impossible.

This dream wasn’t recorded, but it was something else that was going round in my head when I awoke. I was in need of a new laptop for some reason, so a friend and I set out to buy one. We went to a department store that had an electrical department, but the shop was crowded with people and we had to fight our way through into the electrical department at the back. When we were finally served, they didn’t really show me any laptops but a kind of strange machine that was a laptop with some kind of box like a desktop computer. I asked them how they figured that this machine was portable, but they didn’t come up with an answer. They had loads of bits and pieces from dismantled desktop and laptop computers on shelves ready for sale, so I was at a loss as to why they didn’t assemble a few computers themselves and sell them on.

This seems to be pretty relevant, concerning the new Lenovo laptop and desktop that I bought earlier in the year, and the parts on the shelves remind me of the computer shop in Brussels where I used to buy my computer equipment and bits and pieces.

And funnily enough, later on in the day Rosemary telephoned me to tell me that her laptop computer has failed and wanted to know which new laptop I recommended. I told her about this refurbishment company that sells on Amazon and how I was happy with the Lenovo desktop and Lenovo laptop that I’d bought earlier in the year.

In fact, Rosemary phoned me up twice. The first one was only a short chat today – just 01:00:40 – and later on, it was a mere 00:16:10. We are definitely losing our touch.

Later on, I watched the football. The first match was Stranraer vs a strong Edinburgh City. This game seemed to go from one end to the other, but while there were plenty of shots at goal, surprisingly, there wasn’t one on target and neither goalkeeper had a save to make. It finished 0-0, which is no surprise.

However, as Clyde had beaten Elgin City quite comprehensively, Stranraer have found themselves at the top of the table this weekend, and this is quite unexpected considering where they were at this stage last season.

The next game was Greenock Morton v Raith Rovers, and that ended up 2-1 to Raith. Despite having sacked their manager … "and about time, too" – ed … earlier in the week, the first half was as dire as anything A Murray’s team has ever produced.

However, I don’t know what they put in the teapot for the half-time cuppa but I wouldn’t mind a drink of that myself. It was a different team that came out in the second half and they tore Raith to shreds. However, they couldn’t make their domination count for anything.

Nevertheless, if they play like they did in the second half of this game from now on until the end of the season, they’ll be well up the table and out of danger.

There wasn’t much time to do much else, because at 16:30 I went to make my bread for next week.

It went together really well today and has risen up like a lift. It looks wonderful, and I’ll tell you tomorrow how it tastes after I’ve had my toast for breakfast.

While I was waiting, I was rueing the passing of time doing nothing, so I washed and then cut up some potatoes into small cubes. And then with a big helping of peas, some mint and some parsley, I steamed them in my vegetable steamer in the microwave.

They turned out to be really nice, so I covered them with my vegan salad cream and put them in a glass container in the fridge.

When I’d finished making my bread, I made a small salad with lettuce, tomatoes, mushrooms, cucumbers, olives and kidney beans (for the protein), then added a couple of spoonsful of the potatoes and peas. That made a really nice, simple meal for tonight, and there’s plenty left for later.

Now back in here, I’ve finished my notes, and there are a couple of things left to do and then I’m off to bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about mushrooms … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone asked the fungi expert of the Woolhope Naturalists Club which mushrooms were not able to be eaten.
The expert replied "none of them. You can eat every single kind of mushroom that you find"
"Really?"
"Absolutely" replied the expert. "And with some mushrooms, just one on its own will be enough to feed you for the rest of your life."

LIVE: Saturday 3rd October 2026 – ANOTHER MYSTERIOUS AFTERNOON …

Leave a Reply

… in dialysis today. But I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that I’m going to do my best not to fall asleep in dialysis again so that I can keep my eye on what’s going on behind the scenes.

Another thing on which I wish that I could keep an eye on is what’s going on with my sleeping patterns. Anyone who checked my blog between about 22:00 and midnight and then went to check it later will be bound to be confused by what they read.

Round about 21:30, I fell asleep in the chair here, and when I awoke at about 22:00, I just posted on line what I’d written to date and added a “TO BE CONTINUED” sticker to it.

Before I fell into bed, though, I went for a ride on the porcelain horse, and when I came back in here, I found that I was wide awake somehow, so I finished off the blog, overwrote the “TO BE CONTINUED” sticker and posted the completed entry on line.

And then I fell into bed and went straight to sleep.

At some point during the night, I awoke again and was tossing and turning around for what seemed like an eternity, trying to go to sleep, but without any success. But I must have managed it at some point because I was dead to the World when the alarm went off at 06:29.

We had the usual struggle with ourselves to leave the bed, and then I went into the bathroom to sort myself out. While I was there, I had a good scrub up and a shave, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis.

Then I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out what went on during the night.

There had been something in the news about adoptions. There was a family from Preston who had adopted a boy from a Preston children’s home, and a couple of other people who had done the same thing too. There was even someone who had taken an abandoned child from a children’s home with a view to adopting him, and escaping to Vietnam. That had me thinking about whether, as a single man, I could adopt a child too. So I went away from here and had a think about it and then went back to the office to talk to them. It was only later on that I realised that I was living in a one-bedroomed apartment, so if I did adopt a child, then where would it sleep?

There’s certainly some mileage in this dream. Some “friends of friends” have recently adopted a child from a local children’s home, and that’s what has probably inspired this dream. And then adopted child and Vietnam has a story behind it too, but it’s another story that the World is not yet ready to hear.

As for adopting a child, I’m quite ready, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, to adopting a cat, preferably a female cat. And it’s true that I only have a one-bedroom apartment, so adopting a child would be out of the question, even if I were not ill.

Then I was at work, and it was a Sunday morning and there was plenty of overtime to be done to clear some arrears. I went in and there were quite a few other people in as well. There was a guy sitting next to me, and suddenly, a pile of people’s files turned up on my desk, so I asked him if they were his, and he said that they were, so I put them onto his desk somewhere and began to make myself comfortable. A girl came in extremely late, and everyone cheered her, so she came out with some story about having been locked in somewhere over the weekend, and how would we have liked it? We said that, well, we were certain that we could have rolled up our sleeves, done something and swam to somewhere. I began to look at everything on my desk, and it was a complete and utter shambles, so what I had in mind was to leave quietly on Friday and not go back to the office.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that these dreams of being in work after my retirement date and threatening to walk out without notice used to be a regular occurrence, but they seem to have died off a while back. However, as I said the other day, they are slowly making a comeback.

And the untidiness of mine in the office is nothing new at all. I was always like that, wherever I was and whatever I was doing.

We’d gone skiing somewhere in one of these big resorts. The car that we used was one of these big Transcontinental Vauxhall estates. There were five of us in this car, and the amount of stuff we’d brought with us was astonishing. After we’d packed, for example, I found my old ski boots and all kinds of things like that, so when we arrived in a town near the border to be inspected by the police, we were fully loaded and it took quite a while. I found later that we’d brought all the books with us from home, all that kind of thing. We went skiing, and then we decided to put our chalet up for sale. Someone in the town responded immediately, so we had to do a lot of clearing up and tidying up before we could let him in. When we let him in, he was big and he was active, bouncing around, and we were busy trying to put our ski things away and stack these books somewhere. We ended up stacking them against the wall next to the fireplace. I found a camera that didn’t work because the batteries were flat in it, all kinds of things like that, and getting them into my bag was going to be complicated. Someone came up to my girlfriend and asked me about the car. Before we were leaving, someone else came up to us and asked about the car. My girlfriend didn’t know much about it, so I told him. He said that he was really impressed with the amount of luggage we had in there. He cancelled an order for a new car so that he could buy one of these Transcontinental Vauxhall Estates.

In case you’ve forgotten what a Transcontinental Vauxhall estate looks like, there’s one HERE. It’s the beige one, SPU903M. Strangely enough, of all the cars that I’ve ever owned, I’ve never ever had a Vauxhall. The closest I ever came to one was having a Bedford CA van for a short while.

However, in the past, we never went to any fashionable ski resort, except that I went once with an Italian girl to a ski resort in Italy. Most of the time, we went to the unfashionable ones, although when I was driving coaches and we had no work for a few months after Christmas, I’d go to ski resorts in Eastern Europe such as Romania and Bulgaria. I even took Percy Penguin with me once.

The nurse turned up as usual, and while he was dealing with my legs and feet, he gave me the same warning as my cleaner did yesterday about the festival down in the port and how it was total chaos.

After he left, I made my breakfast and read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Today, we had another little chat about geology, and then we returned to fungi, with a discussion about fairy rings. Maybe the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine would have been interested in joining in the discussion. It’s a shame that the subject wasn’t “fairy boots”, otherwise it would have given me a good opportunity to drag Lee “I’m a prostitute” Pottymouth into the discussion. He’s not put in an appearance in these pages in an age.

When breakfast was finished, I had a few things to do, after which I intended to work on reformating the music that I’d downloaded the other day. However, in the end, I ended up having an on line discussion with someone about music that went on for quite a while, discussing mainly folk-rock songs.

And when the chat finished, I was so fired up that for the first time in a couple of years, I picked up the acoustic guitar and played CAREY by Joni Mitchell and MOONAGE DAYDREAM (I don’t know why) by David Bowie. I was surprised how much I’d forgotten, and also how much it hurt afterwards.

At midday, I went into the kitchen for my disgusting drink and midday medication, and then I began to make myself ready for dialysis. My faithful cleaner turned up too to put the anaesthetic on my arm too.

After she left, I hunched up over the table and let myself relax, with my head resting on my forearms. I was once again just about to drift off into a really nice dream when the doorbell rang. I looked at the time and it was 12:58 – I’d been away with the fairies … "although not in any manner that would excite comment from the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine" – ed … for just over half an hour.

There was no one else to pick up en route so we arrived at dialysis a few minutes early, despite the chaos around the port today. However, it made no difference because there was a queue of people in front of me, and it took until 14:25 to be plugged in.

Once everything was up and running, I had to wait until 15:30 for the football to kick off so I found one or two other things to do while I was waiting. However, I must have crashed out somewhere along the line because I awoke with a start at 15:27, just three minutes before kick-off.

The match that I’d chosen today was the basement clash between Rhydaman and Trefynnon. This was a real six-pointer, as both sides had yet to record a victory, and they needed to start winning soon, as the rest of the table was cutting them adrift.

As you might expect, this was another game played at a hundred miles per hour with both teams going at it hammer and tongs. And its opening was certainly dramatic – Johnny Evans missed a sitter of a free header when surely it must have been easier to score, and then straight from the goal kick, Trefynnon roared up the field and scored to go in front.

Then we had goals disallowed for offside, balls hitting the post or being cleared off the line, until Johnny Evans, in the fortieth minute, scored with a delightful lob from outside the penalty area, right over the head of the Trefynnon goalkeeper.

It went from bad to worse for Trefynnon when in the fifty-sixth minute, Rhydaman scored a second goal to take the lead. From then on, Trefynnon threw everything they had at the Rhydaman defence, but to no avail and Rhydaman took all of the points.

That was a shame because I thought that Trefynnon had the better of the play, but they are deep in it now after that.

And spare a thought for Cambrian United. For the second away match in succession, they conceded nine goals. And they are one of the better promoted teams too.

This was when I noticed something rather bizarre. When I’d begun to watch the football, there were fourteen minutes after the final whistle before the end of the session. However, despite there being over fourteen minutes of stoppage time in this game, there was still half an hour to go, and I wasn’t finished until 17:55.

From 14:25 to 17:55 is three and a half hours, not the three hours that I’m supposed to have, and when I weighed myself later, I was still four hudred grams over my dry weight. Mind you, I did notice that the chief doctor, he who doesn’t like me chatting up the nurses, was on duty again today. He spoke to several people in the ward, but kept well clear of my bed.

When I was outside, I had to wait a few minutes for the taxi but I was once more the only passenger. Nevertheless, it was 19:15 when I finally arrived home.

My cleaner was waiting for me, sitting on her mushroom outside, and she helped me into the house and gave me another disgusting drink.

After she had left, I made myself a small plate of pasta and veg tossed in olive oil, garlic, black pepper and vegan cheese. And delicious it was too, especially as it was followed by a peach yoghurt.

Back in here, I had things to do, and then write up my notes. Now when I’ve checked the stats and backed up the computer, I’ll be off to bed. It’s horrendously late tonight … "or this morning" – ed … but I don’t care. I’m aiming for a lie in tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about people sitting on mushrooms and other bizarre things … "well, one of us has" – ed … a man walked into a doctor’s surgery and began to speak to another man sitting there.
"Why are you here?" he asked.
"I have the biggest piles the World has ever seen" he replied.
"Is that why you’re sitting on that giant bean cushion?" he asked.
The man replied "look more closely."

LIVE: Friday 2nd October 2026 – EVEN THOUGH I’VE …

Leave a Reply

… wasted a lot of time today, I’ve been remarkably productive. I’m not sure how I’ve managed that, but one thing that I’ve noticed is that today seems to have gone much more slowly than the other days just recently.

But last night, try as I might to go to bed early, it still ended up round about 23:00 when I crawled into bed. And then, I remembered a kind-of-nighttime mantra from a couple of years ago that helped me go to sleep. I started to recount it and I was asleep long before I’d finished it. I shall have to try it again and see if it still works or if I went to sleep by pure chance.

Whatever it was, it didn’t work for long because I was awake again at some point, I’ve no idea when. I lay awake for ages, looking at the signs for all of the closed lumber companies in Luxembourg (I don’t know where they came in), and I may well have been awake when the alarm went off.

It took even longer than usual to rise up this morning, and I really was seriously having thoughts of going to bed again. However, I pushed the idea right out of my mind and struggled off to the bathroom to sort myself out for the day.

Back in here, there were several issues that cropped up. The first one was, as usual, to transcribe the dictaphone notes.

There had been something in the news about adoptions. There was a family from Preston who had adopted a boy from a Preston children’s home and so had a couple of other people. There was even someone who had taken an abandoned child from a children’s home with a view to adopting him, and then escaping to Vietnam. That had me thinking about whether, as a single man, I could adopt a child too. So I went away from here and had a think about it and then went back to the office to talk to them. It was only later on that I realised that I was living in a one-bedroomed apartment, so if I were to adopt a child, then where would it sleep?

This dream is surprisingly current. A friend of a friend of mine and his wife have just adopted a small boy, and the “child” and “Vietnam” do have a certain ring about them too. But I was more interested in adopting a cat, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … and the apartment only having one bedroom is perfectly true too.

Then I was in work, and it was a Sunday morning, and there was plenty of overtime to be done to clear some arrears. I went in and there were quite a few other people in as well. There was a guy sitting next to me, and suddenly, a pile of people’s files turned up on my desk, so I asked him if they were his and he said that they were, so I put them onto his desk somewhere and began to make myself comfortable. A girl came in extremely late, and everyone cheered her, so she came out with some story about having been locked in somewhere over the weekend, and how would we have liked it? We said that, well, we were certain that we could have rolled up our sleeves, done something and swam to somewhere. I began to look at everything on my desk, and it was a complete and utter shambles, so what I had in mind was to leave quietly on Friday and not go back to the office.

A one time, this used to be a regular occurrence, thinking about walking out on a job because of the loss of amenities, the build-up of work and the fact that I was well past retirement age.

And strangely enough, when I was typing out the notes for this second dream, I suddenly remembered a lot more about it, such as –

In this office, I also had a second desk and it looked even more chaotic than the first. I went over to it to try to put everything in order, but first, I had to go back to the other desk because my dictaphone, which had been playing some music, suddenly began to bellow it out at full volume, so I had to quieten it down to a whisper, and I brought it back with me. This second desk was really chaotic, and I began to try to tidy it up but that proved to be a hopeless task. That just reinforced my decision to abandon my post. But on looking behind my chair, I saw my giant red toolbox, really heavy, and a huge bag of clothes with another suit ready to go into it, and plenty more things too that were important, and I thought “however am I going to take all of these things out with me by Friday without anyone noticing?”.

The logistics of retiring seem to be quite difficult in this dream, that’s for sure.

By now, the nurse had arrived to fix my legs and feet. He’d read about the seafood festival that’s taking place in Granville this weekend in the port, and he advised me to tell the taxi driver to take good care of me while we’re out tomorrow because the road by the port will be packed with pedestrians. He’s not going to the festival because he doesn’t like shellfish, etc.

And neither do I, but that’s not the point. I have to go that way to dialysis.

After he left, I could make breakfast and then read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870 while I was waiting.

Today, we’re still discussing fungi and also some biology, and yet another prescient remark turns up, "But on that disputable topic I shall not enter, only remarking that the extinguishment of animal and vegetable life, from meteorological causes, which has probably ever been going on upon the earth’s surface, deserves thoughtful attention, and if it extended no further than the drying up of numerous ponds in a country subjected to a continued amount of increased temperature, is a remarkable fact in Natural History."

So here’s another suggestion of global warming in the 1870s, although, of course, they didn’t call it that. And he notices the effect that it’s having on animal and vegetable life.

After breakfast, I came back in here to fight another wave of spam attacks. As you probably will have read, Chrome 154 and Linux seem to be the latest combination to be broken in a spam attack, and I’m having hits to my sites from all corners of the World with this combination of browser and operating system. It makes me wonder what else the bug is doing to the computers that are hosting it while it’s trying to attack everyone else’s. I can’t urge you enough to abandon Chrome until Google can sort it out.

Having done that, then I wrote the notes for the rock concert on which I’d been working, and they are now ready for dictating, along with the hundreds of others. I involved my friendly neighbourhood chatbot in this too, doing all the research for me and he came up with some wonderful anecdotes that he’d found hidden deep down in the depths of the internet. Having the chatbot involved by doing my research is saving me hours, and he’s doing it better than ever I could do it.

There was the usual disgusting drink break for the midday medication, and then my faithful cleaner turned up to do her stuff. One of the things that she did was to wash the windows, and that’s much better now. So much so that much more sun came in through the windows in the late afternoon and I had one of them open for a while to take advantage of it. She also found for me, at long last, a six-pack of plain soya yoghurt that I use in cooking. I can only find twelve-packs, and they’ll go off long before I’ve used them all.

After she left, I had a look at the radio programme that will follow the one that I’ve just prepared. I found that I needed quite a bit of music, so I went off on a search, and by the time that I was ready for tea, I’d found everything that I needed – or near enough anyway.

Tea tonight was, as usual, sausage beans with cheese and black pepper and air-fried chips, followed by another one of those posh soya yoghurts. Everything was cooked to perfection, and it was all really good.

So now, I’m off to bed again, ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed …

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the office … "well, one of us has" – ed … a friend of mine worked in a place that had a “take your daughter to work” day, so he took his eight-year-old daughter.
After she’d been there for an hour, she suddenly burst into tears. All of her dad’s colleagues gathered round her and tried to cheer her up.
Eventually someone asked her what was the matter, and she replied "daddy said that he worked with a bunch of clowns and I haven’t seen one yet!"

LIVE: Thursday 1st October 2026 – WHAT A TOTAL …

Leave a Reply

… disaster this afternoon at dialysis was. Anything that could have possibly gone wrong did so, and in spades too.

Not that it was much better last night. It was almost midnight when I finally made my way into bed, and six hours and thirty minutes isn’t a long time in which to do very much, even if you go to sleep straight away, as I did. I wondered actually whether I would at first, with a streaming head cold and coughing, fit to awaken the dead, but a menthol and eucalyptus sweet cleared everything up long enough for me to drop off.

Not that I was asleep for long. Once more, I awoke at some kind of strange, early hour and couldn’t go back to sleep for ages. Whether I did at all is a debateable point – I was definitely awake when the alarm went off at 06:29.

As usual, it was quite a struggle to raise myself to my feet, unlock the front door and than head to the bathroom. There, I had a good wash and scrub up as well as a shave too, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone but to my dismay, there was nothing on it. That was rather disappointing.

Instead, there were plenty of other things to keep me busy until the nurse arrived. Today, we were discussing faults and shortcomings in the dialysis system, not that we’ll ever put it right ourselves sitting here.

After he left, I made my breakfast, and while I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

We’ve moved on from fungi and we’re now talking about the fossils of some giant prehistoric prawns, how they caught their prey and all of that. I’m glad that I didn’t live a few million years ago and had to confront one of those.

Back in here, I had a few things to do, and then I looked at my database to see what the programme next week will be all about. And as it happens, it will be a concert. All of the music that I have that belongs here totals one hour, one minute and twenty-nine seconds, and it’s not possible at first glance to cut it down by three minutes to fit in any speech. I had to be rather imaginative and creative, and now I’ve made one minute and forty-seven seconds for a speech, and I can cope with that.

When I’d done all that, there was even time to begin to write out the notes, and my friendly neighbourhood chatbot has even found some nice anecdotes for me to use. There’s no doubt that with enrolling my chatbot as a research assistant, I’m saving hours of time.

When the alarm went off, I headed into the kitchen for my disgusting drink and midday medication, and then began to organise my things for dialysis. My faithful cleaner turned up too to apply my anaesthetic onto my arm and we had a nice chat for a while.

After she left, I slumped over the table in the dining area and let myself disappear into my innermost thoughts, and just as I was beginning to settle into a nice dream, the taxi arrived.

We were ten minutes early setting off but we had to go to Sartilly to pick up another passenger at the old people’s home. He wasn’t ready, so we had to wait almost twenty minutes. As a result, I was late arriving at dialysis and had to wait until 14:20 to be plugged in.

Whatever has happened these last few days, I don’t know, but I seem to have set a new personal record of fluid to be deducted today. Even at four hours, there was only just enough time to eliminate it with the machine going full-tilt. I really don’t know what is happening right now, because nothing really has changed in my food or drink input. Even the energy drink that I had yesterday was in place of the late afternoon’s disgusting drink.

As a result, I persuaded them to make the session four hours and I sat back to watch the football.

Today, it was the rest of Cardiff Metropolitan v Caernarfon. I’d left this match with it being, surprisingly, 1-0 to the Met but I didn’t worry too much about it – especially when the Met had a player sent off after thirty-four minutes.

After that, it was an endless procession of balls into the edge of the Met’s penalty area and Caernarfon did everything they could to score.

That was how the second half went at first, but after an hour, a calamity! On one of their rare breaks upfield, the Met were awarded a penalty, from which they scored to make it 2-0.

After that, Caernafon brought on every attacker they could in the place of several defenders and bombarded the Met penalty area, but they couldn’t get the ball in the net until the eighty-sixth minute, when they made it 2-1. When it came up to ninety minutes, there was eight minutes of stoppage time and it was all one-way traffic, with Caernarfon still unable to find an equaliser until in the very last couple of seconds, Zack Clarke found the net to equalise and break the hearts of the Met.

So much for the legendary, unstoppable firepower of Caernarfon that put nine past Cambrian United last weekend.

That was really what I call a frustrating match, just like a game that I saw of TNS a couple of seasons ago, where they needed to score a goal but spent ninety minutes camped around the opposition penalty area with no-one being brave enough to put a cross into the box.

After that, I had a few things to do to take me up to the end of the session, with the blood pressure alarm ringing every thirty minutes, bringing the nurses running.

And this is where the disasters began. Firstly, I overheard the nurse and the doctor, the chief of the building who doesn’t like me. It seems that he’d told the nurse to diminish the extraction. However, he didn’t have the courage to tell me, which I found deplorable, and now I know why the nurse turned the display panel from facing my bed to facing the other way.

They may as well have left the extraction as it was and shortened the time – as if I have nothing better to do than to spend my time hanging around there and leaving with seven hundred grams extra that will mean that I have to stay there an hour later on Saturday.

At least the taxi was waiting for me when I exited the building, but the bad news is that we had to go across town to the clinic to pick someone else up, and one of the roads was under repair, so we had to go all round the Wrekin to get there.

The driver went to search for the passenger, but there was no trace, no matter where and how hard she looked. In a desperate last throw of the dice, we tried the ophthalmic surgery, and that was where we found her.

However, she had a prescription to be filled, so we had to drive around Avranches until we found a chemist’s that was open and then back round the Wrekin and head for home.

After dropping off our passenger, it was 19:40 when I arrived home, and I don’t think that I’ve ever been as late as that.

My cleaner helped me into the apartment and gave me a disgusting drink. I didn’t feel like cooking at that time, so I grabbed one of the bags of lentil crisps that she bought for me yesterday, and delicious they were too, especially when they were followed by a nice, ripe and juicy plum.

So now, having written my notes, I’ll do what else needs to be done and then I’m off to bed.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about fossils … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone told me that there was a college in Somerset that trained up local people to dig for fossils.
"What are they called?" I asked.
"Arrrrh-chaeologists."

LIVE: 30th September 2026 – I HAVE BEEN …

Leave a Reply

… feeling much more like it today, even if I have crashed out a few times.

But then again, that’s not surprising … "the crashing out, not the feeling much more like it" – ed … because when I finally crawled into bed after finishing my notes, etc., it was after 00:30. And considering that the alarm goes off at 06:29, there’s not much time for sleep.

So I was in bed at 00:30 but it took me quite a while to go off to sleep, which is a change. And then at some ungodly hour, I awoke and couldn’t go back to sleep. I was slipping in and out of this strange kind of situation where I wasn’t really awake and I wasn’t really asleep either.

That gave me an opportunity to continue with my experiments, and sure enough, on most occasions where I dozed off lying on my side, I “awoke” to find myself lying on my back again. All except the final time when I went to sleep on my side and when the alarm sounded, I was still on my side. All that I can say is that I can’t have been asleep for very long at that point.

It took longer than usual this morning to stand up and leave the bedroom, but once I was up and about, I went to unlock the front door and then head into the bathroom to sort myself out.

Back in here, the first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes for yesterday and then today. Yesterday’s notes have been amended and went on line quite quickly, and here are today’s.

I’d been to school, and I’d walked home afterwards. Then the following morning, I went to school again. As I entered the class, there was a huge commotion going on, in that one of the boys was refusing for some reason to do anything that the teacher was saying. In the end, the teacher told him to go and stand outside but he wouldn’t. It took two or three people to put him outside the door. I recognised the teacher – it was one of the guys from FC Pionsat St Hilaire, so I said to him that if this had happened on the football field, it would be a five-match ban. Eventually, the boy was allowed to return to class but he was still being obnoxious. Someone had managed to get hold of his watch and they looked at his appointments. They were all kinds of appointments with silly ideas, silly names and everything. Then we learnt of two girls in Year 6 who were taking a year off school to go to California. We all wondered why they had gone to California and what they were going to do, but they were going to go to school while they were there, so they weren’t going to miss very much in the way of education. It was in all the headlines of the national press, but in the local press, it was a little column stuck on page four. Then I had to look up, and I saw my crutches against the wall. I didn’t put them there, so then I thought that I must have gone home without them and come back this morning without them. I tried to walk a little, and I seemed to be walking normally. I don’t know what happened there, but I remember thinking that this is going to give them a huge surprise at dialysis the next time that I go, when I can simply walk to my bed without any help or assistance at all.

The story of the local newspaper’s reaction to these two girls as compared with the reaction of the national press reminds me of the famous Yokohama earthquake in 1923, when the city was almost completely destroyed and as many as 140,000 people died. The headlines in a local paper in the Midwest USA were "Mr and Mrs (whatever) safe".

The rest of the dream doesn’t mean much to me, but the idea of throwing away my crutches and walking has been the subject of quite a few dreams in the recent past. They stopped at one point, but now, they seem to be back.

The nurse turned up as usual to sort me out, and he didn’t have much to say today. He took my health card and passed it through his little machine so that he could be paid for the month of September. It took him ages to establish a connection, but eventually, he managed it.

After he left, I went to make my breakfast and read some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870.

Today, we are discussing funguses, or ‘funghi’, found on the Longmynd and Clee hills. However, I was sidetracked as usual and ended up on Lord Howe Island with the other 400-odd inhabitants.

It’s a typical South Sea Island in between Australia and New Zealand with lots of endemic, unique fauna and flora that have been studied by scientists ever since the island was discovered.

The island will change dramatically in the coming years as modern ways of doing things and modern technology will overwhelm the nineteenth-century skills of the current generation of islanders.

Back in here, I finished off a few things that needed doing, and then I began to segue the pairs of songs in the radio programme that I’m preparing. They went together really well and on one or two of them, you can’t tell where the join is.

That took me up to lunchtime and my disgusting drink break with my midday medication.

Once that was out of the way, I began to write the notes for the music that I’d been preparing. I’d hoped to write about half of them, because some of the musicians are making their debut and that always takes much longer. But in fact, I managed to write all of them, don’t ask me how. I seemed to have worked really hard today.

And that was despite falling asleep a couple of times along the way. Even a can of one of these energy drinks seemed to have no effect. However, I began to liven up a little as the afternoon rolled on.

My cleaner turned up at one point. She’d been to Leclerc for some ink for her printer and I’d asked her if she could find some onions and if they had any British baked beans.

She’d brought the onions, but as far as she could see, baked beans … "or, at least, British ones" – ed … are definitely not on the menu in Leclerc. But she also found some vegan lentil crisps with much reduced salt and sugar content. She bought two packs of different varieties for me to try to see whether I want some more. We shall see.

There was tea tonight too – I’m definitely feeling better. It was potatoes mashed with spinach and fried in butter, and vegetables (peas, carrots and beans), falafel, onions, garlic and mushrooms. It was totally delicious, especially when it was followed by one of those posh soya yoghurts with fruit at the bottom.

So now, when I’ve finished a few more things, I’ll be off to bed. Later than usual, I suppose, but I’ll just have to make the best of it. I can always sleep at dialysis if they let me.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about mushrooms … "well, one of us has" – ed … in 1938 in Moscow, there was a party given by a general. He invited many other generals and in total, there were seventeen generals there.
They all had lunch too, but in the early afternoon, they were all found dead.
A Russian doctor performed autopsies on a couple of selected corpses, and he could see that they had died of mushroom poisoning, so he blamed the mushroom soup that had been the starter.
After all of the bodies had been taken away, the doctor came to report to Stalin. He said "After I’d performed the autopsies on a couple of the corpses and came to my conclusions, I watched the corpses being taken away, and I noticed that two of them had bullet wounds in the skull."
"That’s probably right" said Stalin
"Why was that?" asked the doctor.
Stalin replied "I’d heard that two of them didn’t want the soup."

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

REVISED IMPORTANT NOTICE

LIVE: Wednesday 14th October 2026 – I HAVE JUST …

LIVE: Tuesday 13th October 2026 – I HAVE JUST …

LIVE: Monday 12th October 2026 – MY COTTAGE PIE …

LIVE: Saturday 10th October 2026 – I REALLY MUST …

LIVE: Friday 9th October 2026 – YET ANOTHER DAY …

LIVE: Thursday 8th October 2026 – WE HAVE HAD …

LIVE: Wednesday 7th October 2026 – FOR THE FIRST …

LIVE: Tuesday 6th October 2026 – IT’S BEEN ANOTHER …

LIVE: Monday 5th October 2026 – I AM REALLY …

LIVE: Sunday 4th October 2026 – YET ANOTHER SUNDAY …

LIVE: Saturday 3rd October 2026 – ANOTHER MYSTERIOUS AFTERNOON …

LIVE: Friday 2nd October 2026 – EVEN THOUGH I’VE …

LIVE: Thursday 1st October 2026 – WHAT A TOTAL …

LIVE: 30th September 2026 – I HAVE BEEN …