Category Archives: Carrefour

Friday 4th August 2023 – AFTER ALL OF YESTERDAY’S …

… exertions, today followed pretty much the same pattern.

Although there wasn’t the same number of sound files on the dictaphone, it wasn’t far off. And I reckon that had I gone to bed last night at 23:00 as normal instead of … errr … 01:30 this morning, who knows how many there might have been?

When the alarm went off this morning I was actually in a record shop somewhere discussing a Wishbone Ash album with someone. Consequently it took me a few seconds to find my feet.

When the second alarm went off at 07:05 I was actually on my feet – but only just. And the shower that I had after my medication did little to revive me.

Just as last week, I was on the bus early, on the grounds that the sooner I go, the quicker I come back – rather like Tommy Handley’s Ali Oup and “I go – I come back”.

At Carrefour I did a little shopping and then for some reason had to wait quite a while for the bus. I’ve no idea why he took so long to come back this morning.

Back here I had a little accident. Having cleaned out a pepper ready for freezing, I dropped one of the freezer drawers on the floor. I ended up having to clean it, repair it and repack it And then I could sit down and have my cheese on toast and coffee.

There had been plenty of post in my letterbox. The most important letter was that the Physical Re-education Centre that contacted me by phone a couple of weeks ago has offered me 20 – yes, TWENTY sessions, starting in mid-October.

It seems that they are taking this nerve problem seriously. What with that and the hospital visit at the end of the month, who knows?

Also in the post was the acknowledgement of my application for a disabled person’s permit. They told me that I had sent in everything that they needed and I can expect a reply “within four months”. We shall see.

For a change, I managed to avoid falling asleep this afternoon, not that I actually felt like doing all that much. But eventually I had a listen to the dictaphone – piles and piles of it. I had a dream last night. I can’t remember very much about it but I remember that it was full of a lot of people watching it who were coming out of profanities. I had to post some kind of notice requesting everyone to mind their language as there were young children in the vicinity listening to all of it.

There was also the story of a whaler out of Dundee that ran onto rocks and sank as it was coming into the harbour. The crew took to the boats and came ashore but they must have been on an island because there was still no way to reach Dundee. They had to wait to be rescued. There were all kinds of accusations flying around. I was captain of the whaler so I had one of my crew discreetly count the number of people who were with us. He said “between 18 and 26”. That was not what I wanted to know. I was hoping that he’d give me an exact number so I’d know first of all how many we’d had starting out, how many had made it ashore and how many had subsequently been able to go ashore somewhere else. There was an old mariner on this island who was extremely critical of what we’d done. He was very domineering and told us to sit down even though we could see a ship coming in the distance. He told us to sit and watch television while we awaited rescue. I said that I wasn’t interested in watching anything on television. he made some kind of dismissive remark about that. My story was that the chart was deficient but he seemed to think that it was my fault completely, the sinking of the ship. I was looking forward to the subsequent examination where I could put forward my points of view.

Here we were on this island awaiting rescue and we came across a pile of railway carriages for the London Underground. That invited a lot of comment as to what they might be doing there in this rural outpost somewhere along the shore near Dundee. One thing though was that I was sure that looking at the men who had been saved I didn’t really recognise anyone who’d started out on the trip. They could have been different people for all I know

And then someone wanted to work out some kind of survey where any kind of activity took place on the island compared to life on there as normal. I told him to clear off and said that as far as I was concerned no-one was having anything to do with him and this particular survey. What with all of that, it must have been a quite interesting night on that island near Dundee.

And on another island in the middle of the Atlantic there were about 20 children. What they were doing was to play some kind of game with them to see how many could identify the places that were involved with many of the early explorers’ voyages around the world, like the Canary Islands and the Azores, Lanzarote, islands like that situated off the coast of Europe and North West Africa.

I was in a music shop last night. I’d bought a Wishbone Ash album years ago but I’d never got round to actually playing it. When I did, the tracks didn’t correspond with what was on the running order list. I did some research and found that it’s the wrong album that’s been pressed on the CD. The label was for the CD box but the album on the disc was a different one. I went back to the record shop to tell them about it and see what they could do, not that with all this immense lapse of time I expected them to do anything. I was in the middle of talking to them when the alarm went off.

There was some other stuff too but you don’t really want to know about that right now.

As I mentioned yesterday I spent some time on the radio programme that I started yesterday. Another pile of notes have been written and I can finish it off tomorrow. Then I can dictate the notes tomorrow night and if I’m lucky I can prepare two radio programmes on Sunday.

It’ll be a busy day on Sunday because I have some fruit buns to bake. I’ve almost run out of those.

Finally I spent some time tracking down some more stuff about Muskrat Falls. I managed to find not only the agreement that was signed between the Newfoundland and Labrador Government and the Innu community in 2011, I managed to find out how, why and when it all went pear-shaped.

Peter Penashue, the leader of the Innu community at Sheshatshiu, the Innu settlement whose tribal hunting grounds were most affected made an impassioned speech setting out the community’s grievances and the reasons for the blockade of the site.

Basically, there was some kind of profit-sharing agreement proposed in which the Innu community would be paid a percentage of the resale of the electricity generated.

However with massive cost and timescale overruns and structural failures, and much of the electricity being siphoned off by the residents of the Provincial capital in Newfoundland, something that has added millions and millions of dollars to the costs, even the most optimistic estimates reckon that there will be no profit generated for at least 30 years.

That’s assuming that nothing else goes wrong (and what are the odds on that?) of course. And by that time all of the people who were expected to profit from the development will have received nothing.

In the meantime, their hunting grounds and traditional way of life will have been destroyed.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on our first trip to Labrador before there was any sign of development, we saw moose a-plenty, and even bear. Since the development began, we’ve seen just one moose and that’s your lot. In 2017 we didn’t see anything at all.

Tea tonight was salad and chips with some of the falafel that I bought the other day. It was quite nice too, but then again that falafel is a proprietary brand rather than a generic one.

Back here I actually fell asleep for 15 minutes which was disappointing – I was hoping that I could keep going all day having gone “over the hump” this afternoon. But now that I’ve finished my notes I’m off to bed.

Shopping tomorrow, but I don’t want all that much. But supplies of coffee are beginning to run low so I’ll be on the lookout for a coffee sale. They haven’t had one for a while so they must be due for one. It’ll probably be the week after I’ve bought some at full price.

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Friday 28th July 2023 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about what was going to happen this afternoon.

Flat out on my chair, not once but twice, and for quite a while too.

But really that was no surprise the way that things are right now.

As it happens, I’d had a good night’s sleep for a change too. In bed early and I can’t remember very much of anything at all until the alarm went off.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I went and had a shower to clean myself up and make myself look pretty ready for my bus to the town

It was early when I went out too. I decided that the sooner I start the sooner I finish and so I was on the bus at 09:10. I just went to the little Carrefour and then came straight back. I didn’t really want to hand around and I didn’t want to buy very much anyway.

Back here I made myself some coffee and cheese on toast and then came back in here where I crashed out – for the first time.

And in between then and crashing out later on, I was out in Canada back in 2017.

Out on the Trans-Labrador Highway I went to visit my favourite spot on Otter Brook, a tributary of the Eagle River, and then dealt with the knotty problem of the Labrador Border Dispute

The border between Labrador and Québec wasn’t officially delineated until 1927 and while Québec is quite happy to incorporate into its territory a couple of areas of land that it never claimed, it refuses to acknowledge the territory that was awarded to Labrador that Labrador didn’t claim.

Of course, the reason why Labrador never claimed that territory was because it didn’t need to – the border in that area having been decided by a Letter Patent of 1876 – but we mustn’t let facts get in the way of a good Qhébecois rant, of course.

As well as that, I’ve been exploring a couple or peri-Arctic meadows.

When William Munn proposed in 1914 that the Norse voyagers’ settlement was in Newfoundland he was ridiculed by many people. In the Norse sagas they talk about meadows and grassland and taking cattle with them to feed on the grass.

“As if that is ever going to be likely in the region of Newfoundland and Labrador” was the cry.

However the critics failed to take into account a few things – such as

  • There’s plenty of contemporary evidence of cattle in Labrador – the census of 1911 actually counts them
  • When Munn suggested that “maybe the climate in those days was different” he was roundly criticised. “There is no evidence whatever that the climate was different 900 years ago” said various people. That aged well, didn’t it?
  • Any comparison between any two places is merely relative. An agriculturalist from the Temperate Zone might not think much of the peri-Arctic meadows out here in Labrador, but the Norse voyagers came from Greenland and I’ve seen meadows in Greenland, and these meadows here in Labrador are relatively luxurious by comparison

So as well as falling asleep yet again, I had a bash at the dictaphone notes from the night. I was trying to do some tidying up at home (as if that is ever likely to happen). I’d set out to clean the kitchen floor. I’d brushed it and had it ready for the mop. The woman who helped my mother seemed to criticise it so I asked her if it wasn’t good enough. She said it wasn’t so I asked her to point out to me a few things where it was wrong. She pointed to some glue or something on the floor. It turned out that the kids had put sticky labels on the soles of their shoes for some reason. These sticky labels had in time worn off their shoes and stuck to the lino. I had to go through and scrape it all off before I could wash the floor. While I was washing it with the mop I went and rubbed the damp mop over my bedding too thinking that this would clean it and make it really nice. Everyone looked at me strangely but I carried on doing it. On one occasion I didn’t even squeeze the mop after I’d dipped it in the bucket of water before giving the bedclothes a good scrub with the mop. My mother said that my bed would be terribly wet tonight. I told her that it would soon dry. She replied “yes but it will have a strange odour for a while”.

There was another long, rambling dream about being with my niece and her husband, them dealing in cars at night, going up and down into the cellar for things – that was quite complicated and difficult. We were finishing off the erection of a wind turbine at the side of the barn. I was given the job to do that. They had a huge pneumatic drill that had been drilling holes everywhere. It was my job to tighten up the bolts with a big electric impact driver thing. I drove in a couple that I wasn’t very happy with but the final bolt was just spinning round. I eventually managed to fit the proper head on it and drove it straight into the wood. I told my niece’s husband that I wasn’t very happy at all with this mounting. When I stepped back to have a look I could see that it was a really complicated system and there were strains and stresses everywhere there shouldn’t be. The wind turbine itself was actually in the shadow of the house mounted on the wall. I didn’t think that it would be a particularly successful installation. In any case I was thinking that it would come down in the first strong wind. There was lots more to it in this dream. It went on for hours but I can’t remember very much of it now.

At one point we were in Middlewich driving a bus. I’d dropped off a couple of people to go to fetch some chips from somewhere. I went back and parked at the side of a house, just sitting there in a car. 2 people turned up, one waving a pair of drumsticks asking where the others were. I told them that they were in the chip shop. he made some kind of sarcastic comment. There were tons to this dream but I can only remember a fraction of it.

For tea tonight I was planning on having my chips but the potatoes weren’t so good and I hadn’t bought any this morning. So with my salad and quorn nuggets I had a handful of pasta and tomato sauce with some vegan cheese. And that was quite nice as well for a change.

So tonight I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow morning so I suppose that that’s going to be another afternoon crashed out on the chair in the bedroom. I hope that there are some interesting things in the shops to make up for the discomfort.

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Firday 21st July 2023 – I MADE IT …

… back from town this morning.

Actually, going down into town was the easy bit because I went on the bus.

Mind you, I nearly didn’t because just as I was stepping out of the front door I realised that I’d forgotten half of the paperwork that I needed so I had to come back.

These days I can’t move very quickly at all so I was afraid that I’d miss the bus. But luckily I managed to stagger aboard just before she pulled away.

Something else that might have made me miss it was another miserable night. What with the football and everything it was long after midnight when I went to bed and it took me an absolute age to go off to sleep.

Once again, I was up and on my feet before the alarm went off, and after I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages, I went and had a shower to make myself smell nice.

Before leaving for the bus I put the washing machine on the go so that at least I’d have some clean clothes for when I came back. I’m running out of clothes at the moment.

At the Carrefour I forgot the cherry tomatoes but I remembered everything else, and then wandered off to the Post Office to post a couple of letters, one of which was the demand for a disabled parking badge, and to pick up a registered letter.

At the chemist’s the staff were fighting over serving me and I ended up with the girl who lost the bout. She gave me the Aranesp, which cost an arm and a leg as usual, and then I set off for home.

The walk back was agony. It really was. It took me an age and I was exhausted by the time I returned. I had my cheese on toast but regrettably fell asleep almost immediately.

It’s no fun waking up to a cold mug of coffee. I’ve no idea how long I was asleep but it wasn’t five minutes – I’ll tell you that for nothing. It felt like an eternity and at one point I really was contemplating the idea of going to bed.

Anyway, instead I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I was during the night. I was with a friend of mine. We’d gone to some kind of sports hall place to do a job. As we left Crewe to join the motorway there was a policewoman at the top of the motorway exit watching the drivers join the motorway. She shouted “drive safely, watch your speed limits and don’t speed”, something like that. Of course my friend immediately shouted back some kind of comment as he would about “what do you mean? I’m not going fast. What are you saying? What are you implying?”. Of course I could see exactly where this is going so I said “come on mate, let’s get to work” but he still wanted to pick a fight with this policewoman. In the end I managed to organise him and I apologised to the policewoman. The last thing I wanted was for her to chase us down the motorway. So we did what we were doing and it worked quite well. There was a roulette table and a few one-armed bandit things there. He looked at his watch and said “we can spend an hour here and have a play on that”. I’d put all the money safe so I didn’t want to go bringing it out again. I should have put my possessions into some kind of safe but I didn’t fancy the idea of it because there was no lock. Everyone could go in and take the stuff so I kept them on me. I really wanted to go home but he was dead set on staying here wasting his money so I suppose we’ll have to. But I hope that he really is only going to be here for a short while and not spin it out for the rest of the night. I could see that happening quite easily.

Later on there was another group of us who had been out for a walk. I’d ended up with a man and a woman who might have been some friends of mine, I dunno. We met an American couple. The woman-friend of mine had gone off to do something so we were just wandering around when the American couple appeared. They asked if we knew where a certain café was. My friend thought that it was the one around the corner from where we were standing although I thought that it was the one where we had been earlier in the day. We went round the corner to this one and could see that it was a really expensive place. There was nothing special about it. The guy said “let’s walk up to some place or other at the end of the track”. I asked “what about your wife?”. There didn’t seem to be much of a reply. Off we set. It was slowly going dark. We reached the end which was by the water. There was a girl there. For some reason I was asked to take a photo of her so that she could be put on a poster. I had the little Nikon and went to take a photo but for some reason the camera wouldn’t take the photo. It might possibly have been too dark. I took the big Nikon which doesn’t need the light so much and I positioned this girl in the street light at a table in the café so that the light would fall on her to give the best possible view, went to take the camera but found that the battery was flat. This American couple had a bit of a moan to me about all my things etc.

Later on I spent some time back in Canada. I’ve left Cartwright and I’m heading down the Métis Trail back towards the Trans Labrador Highway.

The area around Cartwright and Sandwich Bay in particular is populated by the Métis.

When the early European traders came out here in the 18th and early 19th Century, those employees who opted to stay usually took a native wife, sometimes an Innu but mainly an Inuit. Their descendants are known as Métis

Almost everyone out on the coast is descended from probably about 20 distinct families and it’s interesting to read the Censuses of 100 or so years ago. Each cove or sheltered bay would have its own “family” who would work the salmon fishing, the cod fishing and then go off into the interior trapping during the winter.

Even more strangely, suddenly you’ll find that in a certain location there might be a different family than in the previous Census. Almost inevitably, one family might just have daughters. When she married, she would stay at home and bring her husband to her, and he would inherit his father-in-law’s cove and trap lines

Every now and again you’ll come across a French name – Michelin being one of the most common. For a while there was a trading firm from Montreal – Revillon Frères – out here on the Labrador coast trying to establish a foothold against the Hudson’s Bay Company.

There were also a few merchants from the Channel Islands who tried to establish themselves here but a big bank crash in Jersey in 1873 wiped them out.

The Métis did not have any rights at all until the 1980s. Being the children of native women they were never recognised as Europeans by Law according to the European settlers, and because they were the children of European men, they never acquired the rights of native indigenous people. It wasn’t until Section 35 of the Constitution Act was amended in 1982 that the Métis became recognized as one of Canada’s three Aboriginal peoples and began to receive their rights.

Tea tonight was falafel, chips and salad. Quite delicious but it’s given me stomach ache and I don’t know why.

But now I’m off to bed for a good night’s sleep ready to fight the good fight around the shops tomorrow. But before I go, I’ll leave you with the HIGHLIGHTS OF LAST NIGHT’S FOOTBALL. I hope that you enjoy them as much as everyone else seems to have done.

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Friday 30th June 2023 – THAT WAS THREE HOURS …

… of my life that I’ll never ever get back.

It beats me (well, it doesn’t actually – it’s called “egoism”) why people come to these meetings and spend hours talking about nothing of any use whatsoever. There was even a lengthy discussion that went on and on and on about a Motion AFTER it had been defeated.

In my opinion, such as it is, all these meeting and others of a similar type should be held standing up, outside in a rainstorm. That would succeed in concentrating the minds.

My mind was sufficiently concentrated last night to have been up and about once more long before the alarm went off. But I really did wonder why because my head was spinning around for a good few hours. It really was quite uncomfortable.

After the medication I came in here to carry on working but knocked off at 10:00 to stagger outside and catch the bus into town. There was no way that I was going to walk into town.

Having stocked up on a few of the basics I came back on the bus and made myself some coffee and cheese on toast for brunch, and then I started work.

Today I’ve finished my exploration around Cartwright (at long last) and even as we speak I’m heading out in an open boat to go for a walk on what I consider to be the Furdustrandir, the “Wunderstrands” of the Norse sagas and to walk in the footsteps of Vaino Tanner, the Finnish anthropologist

His claim to fame is that during his expedition to the Labrador coast between 1937 and 1939 he made the observation, that has since gone down in history as far as I’m concerned, that

  1. Inuit girls are very keen to marry settlers of European descent
  2. they are the hardest-working of all of the Inuit people (and then goes on to list all of the household tasks that they are expected to do in the home)
  3. they have an extremely sensual nature

I was intrigued to find out how he discovered all of this, particularly the third point, so as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I went to the High Arctic myself in 2018 and 2019 to conduct my own field research into the matter.

There was a pause, for much longer than I was hoping, for this perishing waste of time of a meeting that could have been accomplished in less than an hour had everyone been of a mind to do so, but some people really like to have their money’s worth.

Back here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was down on the farm at one point and decided that I was going to stay here this time. That meant moving a lot of stuff from outside the barn door and moving some stuff around inside the barn so that I could put Caliburn in, then I could sleep in Caliburn and cook outside. It was dark and raining bit I did what I could. Then I went to get into Caliburn. Then I remembered that just before I parked him up I’d changed something over but hadn’t tried to see whether he’d start or not. I got in and turned the key. He took an age to start and when he did he wouldn’t fire up or run normally. he was coughing and spluttering. By this time I actually had him into a field where I planned to turn round. I thought to myself that I’m going to have a devil of a job now trying to move him to the path seeing as he’s not running correctly and I had my things all over the place.

There was also some kind of public meeting taking place with crowds of people. I had to wire up the PA system to broadcast to the hall. We had a row of 4 speakers down each side and 4 speakers either side of a corridor down the middle. It meant running wires to them. A friend of mine was cutting the wires and I was installing them. We reached one point where we’d had to move a few things around and the two wires were about 2 metres short. I had to go back to my friend who was busy talking to some young child and sorting something out for it, and ask him for some cables 2 metres long. He cut them. I thought to myself “should I give him back the old wire or should I just keep it and take it home with me at the end when everyone has gone?”.

I was back in that hall again later, this time in rural Canada. There was a big crowd of people in there whom we’d been investigating. A WPC had disguised herself as a citizen in order to infiltrate the group to find out what the private organisation was all about. One day she didn’t turn up so we went for a closer listen to the people and found out that they were concerned about how interested we were and didn’t seem to have had a hand in removing her.

Finally, there had been some kind of issue in an Army camp where I was. The junior staff was rather insubordinate. One of them had stood up to the Colonel and said something quite offensive to him on the lines of “well, you aren’t in charge of me; I am” which outraged the Colonel. He was fuming about it. he was planning on having everything all toughened up in the camp to re-instill some more discipline. There was much more to it than this but I awoke again with a massive attack of cramp in my left leg. That playing up now is all I need.

Tea tonight was chips and salad with some of the frozen sausage rolls, cooked with the chips in the air fryer. Just one more serving of those and then I’ll have to start on something else. But if I go to Noz tomorrow, which is debatable, they might have some more frozen vegan stuff on offer.

But actually there are plenty of carrot burgers, breaded quorn fillets, sausages and falafel so it’s not as if I’m actually going to be short of anything.

And thinking on, I need to make more space in there because I haven’t had a vegan pie for an absolute age. That thick onion gravy was delicious yesterday and some more of that, with steamed veg, new potatoes and a slice of vegan pie really would be delicious. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

But that’s tomorrow. Right now I’m off to bed and hoping to have a really good sleep. Not that I will, I expect, but I have to keep on trying.

Actually, that’s something at which I’m quite good. A lot of people have said in the past that I’m very trying, which was quite nice of them.

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Friday 23rd June 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… morning today when I’ve been up before the alarm has gone off. And a good while before it too. I’ve no idea what’s happening right now about that.

So having had such an early start I downloaded a couple more programs that I’d overlooked, and then fine-tuned a couple of others.

A few directories that I’d copied back from the back-up drive were rather all over the place so the next task is to go through and tidy them up.

No time like the present, so I cracked on with them. That’s the one thing about doing a clean install is that it gives you an opportunity to tidy things up and eliminate unwanted files and programs. There must be tons of programs that I only ever use once every Preston Guild so they won’t be added back for a while.

And files too. I usually only like to keep on the computer the files that I need on a regular basis but I forget to weed the unused ones out.

Round about 10:15 I suddenly remembered that I needed to go into town so I threw the dirty clothes (of which there was quite a pile) into the washing machine and then staggered off into the wind.

First stop was at the doctor’s – or, rather, the receptionist – to pick up the certificate that the doctor had prepared for me. I can crack on and apply for my disability permit now.

Then I went to Carrefour for a bit of shopping. And amongst the bits and pieces that I bought was another head of broccoli. Ad for two reasons too

  1. I’ve been slowly working my way through the stock just now and it’s going down
  2. there was a lump in there with a nice thick stalk and I fancied some broccoli stalk soup again for lunch

Final stop was the chemist’s. And as soon as she saw me my favourite server said to her colleague “I’ll fetch Monsieur Hall’s stuff”. I’m not sure whether to be flattered that she was so interested, or concerned that people are beginning to recognise me.

Staggering back up the hill was agony yet again and it took me a while to make it to the top of my rock and back home.

But the climb is worth it because I do like my building and my apartment. As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … it’s the first place where I’ve ever felt actually at home.

Back here I blanched the broccoli and then made my soup. I fried an onion in cumin and coriander, added a pile of garlic and then the finely chopped broccoli stalk with a finely diced potato, stirred it all in and then added some of the broccoli water from the blanching along with a stock cube.

While it was doing, I took the washing from the machine and hung it up to dry. I’ll have some clean clothes for a change when they are all done.

When it was sufficiently done I whizzed it all up and ate it with the crusty bread that I’d bought. Totally delicious

Back in the office I almost fell asleep and my coffee almost went cold, but I managed just about to fight it off. And then I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was with my niece’s husband last night cleaning out the kitchens of a couple of elderly people who had died in isolation somewhere in Canada. All of their things and possessions were simply abandoned and we were going through throwing most of it away because it was all old, muddy, sticky, an absolute mess. One thing that we were trying to do was to try to decipher why they had half of this stuff. With no labels we couldn’t see what it was. Even with labels on it was hard for us in modern times to understand the use to which they would have put these products back in the old days. But there was all kinds of things even down to old cough drops and boiled sweets, stuff like that, all disgusting really.

Later on I was being pestered by someone on the internet about something that I’d written. He wrote back with things like “see page so-and-so of this article” and when I looked, it had nothing whatever to do at all with the subject under discussion. I wrote back and told him. He sent back an e-mail saying something like “Oh God there’s obviously been some mistake in the page number or formatting of the book where this paragraph was inserted in here where it shouldn’t be”. Of course I’d heard this trick before so I sent him an equally-dismissive e-mail about that. He sent me a reply back as if he wanted to carry on the fight regardless. I had to sit and compose a mail telling him to basically clear off because he was wasting my time and that of everyone else with his nonsense

And then a whole group of us had been out somewhere and had come back to my house afterwards. The first thing that I did on returning was to switch on the heater. Everyone swarmed in and someone began to cook some breakfast, some bacon. They’d asked what we were going to have to eat but I didn’t really have much of an idea because I didn’t have very much in. Someone found some bacon and began to cook it. They were cooking it in a kind of oven that was like an old toolbox. After a while they complained that it wasn’t cooking correctly, asking me what I was going to do about it. I replied “nothing. It’s nothing to do with me. You don’t cook bacon like that and if you want to cook bacon anyway that’s entirely up to you”. They weren’t very happy about this but I wasn’t very happy about people cooking bacon in my house. I had a few things to do so I thought that I’d wander off in a corner and so them. But with all of this stuff going on in my house I couldn’t really do anything until everyone had left and I wasn’t sure when that was going to be.

Finally we were back in Canada around a camp fire making coffee with one of these plunger coffee makers but I awoke just as it was starting so I can’t think about what that was all about

The rest of the afternoon I’ve been back in Labrador trying to resolve a knotty problem.

At the back of the town of Cartwright is a hill called Flagstaff Hill where it is said that Captain Cartwright installed two cannon after his fishing station was raided by an American pirate.

So everyone says, and so I was having a peruse through his diary to find the date that the cannon were put there and, strange as it is to say it, he doesn’t mention the cannon in his diary at all. In fact he doesn’t even mention the hill.

That’s bewildering because he talks about just about everything else, including strange things like how many fish his team caught on certain days.

Something else that I found bizarre in his diary was that he records every little event of what happened the day that the pirates came, including all of the unpleasant details and he lists all of his employees who deserted his post to go with the pirates and concludes with
“A very fine day”,

But apart from that, he makes no mention of the guns so I’m intrigued now to find out more about how they came there..

Tea tonight was a breaded quorn fillet with chips and salad, and quite nice as usual. But there’s not much room in the freezer right now, especially since I bought the broccoli and a couple more peppers, so I shall have to be circumspect at the shops tomorrow.

Rather like when Kenneth Williams told Peter Butterworth “there are people around. We’ll need to be circumspect”
“Oh I was, sir. When I was a child.”

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Friday 16th June 2023 – I’VE BEEN DOWN …

… in town this morning.

Not that I walked, though. I think that I’ve had that for good.

Instead I hopped on the bus with a neighbour who just happened to be waiting.

The bus took me down to the port and I staggered off to the Carrefour where I bought some mushrooms and peppers as well as a bit of bread to make some cheese on toast.

And then back to the bus stop where I met my neighbour who had done her shopping elsewhere, and we came back together on the bus.

It was actually quite nice out there today as well. It was the first time for ages that I’ve felt really warm. There wasn’t much wind about either. In fact it would have been the kind of day where I would normally have gone for a nice long walk. However …

Anyway, during the night I went for a few long walks. Despite my nice, new, clean and fresh bed I don’t think that I spent much time in it.

I was in North America again last night in a fishing community preparing a lot of things ready to go somewhere the following day. By 16:00 I’d finished. I said to the people at the counter that I’d finished. If they would send someone into town to pick up some fishing tackle for me I’d be grateful. They weren’t paying a great deal of attention so I didn’t really say much. Next morning I came in and asked for my stuff. They replied that they didn’t have it. I sighed and said that it was important and I’d told them yesterday etc. They were all extremely apologetic. Then the little girl who hung around there, whether she was someone’s daughter or not I don’t know, skipped into the back and came out with a packet that she handed to me with a big smile on her face. Everyone else began to laugh. I told the girl that she ought to have a good spanking and they all laughed at that. And I had my things

After that I’ve forgotten what I was going to say now with having to mess around with the batteries and dictaphone at some crazy hour of the night. Everything has just slid out of my head but there was something about a woman with a yellow handbag thing on the quay, a handbag having just been on the market. There she was with an enormous one on her shoulder obviously well in advance of everything else around here

We were then back on the subject of these old cars again. I had old cars scattered around here and there over the town. I came to one place where there were 3 or 4 of mine. The first thing that I noticed was that a Volkswagen Beetle that I had there had gone since the last time I was here. The MkII s-type Jag was still there although one of its rear wings was missing. I went round and found the person for whom I was looking, sitting on the terrace outside the building. They gave me the key to go inside. They told me that I needed to go in through the second door but to be careful of the animals and the cow in there that wants to come out. We talked about the cars and what we were going to do, not that I had any real plans but I just said anything. he said that the Jag was looking very sorry. I said “yes, we’ll have to bring it back to my place, take the engine out”. He wanted to know how we were going to do it because for some unknown reason the car wouldn’t tick over. It was going to be complicated to move it and take out the engine. I didn’t really have a clue how I would make it work.

Finally on the way out of Sandbach they’d built this huge new petrol station. It wasn’t open yet but things were progressing rapidly. There were scores of people around there. I knew a lot of them too from Crewe. It seemed that they’d recruited the labour force now and were preparing to open. I went over there, said hello to a few people whom I knew and asked if they could introduce me to the boss. They thought that I was touting for work, which I was. Eventually after much hunting around I found the boss. I explained about my taxis and how we’d be available if ever they needed any here for running the staff around or anything like that. She thought that I only had some plates for working in Crewe but I told her that I had some plates for working in Sandbach which quite surprised her. She said that she’d bear it in mind if anyone ever needed anything

When the alarm went off I was actually already up and about again. I’d awoken with a start at about 06:50 and I’ve no idea why. However it did take me quite a while to gather my wits this morning, not that I have many wits left to gather these days but here we are.

In fact I almost missed the bus into town and had to dash. Well, relatively speaking.

Back here I made my cheese on toast and some strong coffee but regrettably I crashed out and awoke to a mug of cold coffee. That’s what I call “embarrassing”.

This afternoon I’ve been pressing on with my Canada 2017 trip and I’m just leaving the cemetery at Paradise River. I had hoped to have been in Cartwright by now but trying to match up the names on the headstones with the poor handwritten entries in the Censuses is complicated

As well as the Census records I’ve been trawling through George Cartwright’s diary. The influenza epidemic that ravaged the Labrador coast in 1918 was devastating, but Cartwright mentions an outbreak of influenza that occurred in 1778 and an occurrence of smallpox a couple of years earlier that played havoc with the native population

As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … it’s no surprise to anyone that Canada took such strict measures about the Covid rules and regulations when you see what happened in the past in these isolated communities where even today there’s no medical service.

Something else I’ve come across is some kind of diary where people who lived around Sandwich Bay have added little pen-pictures of their lives going back 100 years to the period of the 3 Fs – Fishing, Furs and Forestry that were the mainstay of life on the Labrador coast.

All that has changed dramatically today. Even as late as 1961 there were as many as 161 people living in Paradise River. At the Census in 2021 there were 5.

When I visited the place in 2017 there were 10 inhabitants, and I think that every one of them turned out to watch me drive to the quayside.

Tea tonight was potatoes baked in the air fryer with a salad and some of those vegan nuggets. It was absolutely delicious.

But we’ve hit a tragedy. I finished the very last of my HARRY POTTER COLLECTION of films. That’s a shame because I really enjoyed them. But like most films of that genre, they really only scratched the surface of what could have been something really powerful.

What I’ll probably do for my next teatime film sessions will be the SAINT TRINIANS films. These are of course a completely different kettle of fish.

But they do include some of the funniest lines ever recorded in British traditional comedy, all delivered by Alastair Sim of course
“when girls usually leave school, they find that they are not ready for the big wild world. When our girls leave this school, it’s usually the big wild world that is not ready for them”
and when one of the girls burnt down the school Sim said with exasperation
“there’s far too much arson around in tis school”

They don’t make films like that any more in the modern PC World where everyone is so easily offended and there’s no humour around any more. I’m just not cut out to live in this modern world, I’ll tell you that.

However, that’s tomorrow. I’m going shopping and I’m debating going to Noz after my little accident a fortnight ago. I suppose I really ought to make an effort but it’s probably a lack of confidence after my fall. I was like this after my fall on the boat coming back from Jersey, I seem to recall.

But there’s bound to be a change in my state of health. There’s plenty of room for things to be worse.

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Friday 2nd June 2023 – MY LUNCH TODAY …

… was just as good as last Friday’s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Friday 26th May 2023 – MY LUNCH TODAY …

… was delicious.

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

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

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

And I’ll do that again!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But seriously, who would want a relationship with me?

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

And that got me thinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Friday 19th May 2023 – AT LONG LAST …

… the internet is back up and running, as you might have noticed.

What has apparently happened, as the technician who came round just after lunch told me, was that there was a short-circuit in one of the apartments that had fused the main installation in the building.

They had repaired the installation but the short circuit persisted so they had to disconnect the circuit and gradually reinstate it apartment by apartment until they could find out which one it was.

Of course, it was in one of the apartments that is a “second home” for someone from Paris who wasn’t here so it couldn’t be fixed until they’d contacted the apartment owner and found a keyholder so they could go in, and of course it was in the circuit before mine which meant that I was disconnected while all of this was going on.

Whether that’s the case or not, I don’t know. But it will explain why the connection flickered on a couple of times quite briefly during all of this.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and it’s a real ill wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good. It gave me an opportunity to catch up on a mountain of outstanding work, which isn’t all done but it’s still progress, and also, because the technicians were coming to check my installation, it meant that I had to tidy up the bedroom. I even had the vacuum cleaner going for a while.

And while I was tidying up, I found the missing spare battery for the NIKON D3000 that I lost a long time (as in several years) ago. It had fallen underneath one of my bookcase units.

So how did I celebrate everything? Well, while I was in town this afternoon I treated myself to an ice cream. I felt that I deserved it.

Especially after last night. I was so engrossed in a couple of tasks that it was long after midnight when I finally crawled into bed. And when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was stark out. It was an effort to haul myself up out of bed before the second alarm went off five minutes later.

Mind you, after the distance that I travelled durning the night, I was surprised that I made it back in time for the alarm. At one point I was living with a group of Mexicans from 100 or so years ago, the time of the Revolution. We were living on the margins. We weren’t actually revolutionaries or criminals. I can’t remember most of this but there was one part where we were in a cave and there was some kind of event taking place concerning someone who had made a promise that he’d pay to have his wine crop blessed and fruitful but hadn’t done so. And so they held him to submitting his youngest daughter, who was 10, to be sacrificed. He had to fill in all this form to state about her etc and that he was willing for her to go and that he recognised that he was in default for not having thanked whoever it was properly for promoting the fruitfulness of his crops

Did I mention the story … “no you didn’t” – ed … about the 2 girls who had tried to buy some wine from an off-licence to get a teacher at school into trouble? The server recognised them and wouldn’t sell it to them. He had his revenge quite accidentally. It was the school outing and he’d forgotten to tell the parents of one of these girls. She hadn’t gone to school that day – she was paying truant. She thought that everyone else would be at school and cover for her but of course not being there on a day when there were so few students her absence was noticed and someone complained to her parents. When this all came out, the shopkeeper had forgotten to tell the parents about the trip as well, he said “don’t forget that I remember you from the day when you were in my shop so be careful not to make a fuss. You can see why karma has caught up with you”.

And then I had to go to meet someone in the centre of London so Aunt Mary had given me a book, an ancient book about Civil Engineering that she wanted to sell and have some money. All of the booksellers were around Angel Bridge Railway Station. I arrived at the Metro and the guy in the ticket office saw me coming. He had a ticket all ready. I asked for a return too but he replied “no. This is a weekend ticket and you can use it any time like but you’ll have to hurry. The train is in”. I took the ticket, paid for it and dashed downstairs but missed the train, found that I was on the wrong platform, walk back up halfway and enquire of the guard or look at the sign to find myself on the correct platform ready to go. But there was something else in this dream about someone being pregnant. They were discussing the pregnancy and talking about gifts that they should buy. One of the girls was very upset that someone else had been chosen to buy the nappies etc because she said that she didn’t have all that much money. That would have been an ideal present for her bearing in mind her shortage of money.

And we’ve had quite a few dreams when I’ve been wandering around the Underground in London, haven’t we?

Finally I had to go to do some research on Emerson Lake and Palmer. I found someone who had some information on them who lived in London so I went down. She was a bus conductor on the buses. Rummaging around in her office I came across a book that was an assembly of photocopied press cuttings going back all the way to 1967, news articles and everything. It was an absolute goldmine and I was enthralled reading it. It mentioned a whole load of clubs and places in London that you could see from the window of this woman’s house. I was there making notes. When she came up onto the top deck of the bus to show someone some damage that needed to be repaired I told her about the book and told her that on no account was she to let it out of her sight. It’s something that she really ought to keep for posterity. When I finished I was going back downstairs to her house. They were talking about a car going for an MoT. I thought “I’m not doing anything this afternoon so I can take it”. I put the book in my rucksack hoping that no-one noticed and went round to see about this car. It turned out to be a pedal car for children. I thought “this is strange” but I’d already offered now so I’ll have to go. I asked her where I’d go. She replied “turn out of here, go up the hill to the roundabout and it’s the 5th street on the right down there”. I was trying to make a mental note of this but it sounded like more than 5 minutes away but I was already committed now so I’d have to go and do it. This book of press cuttings is a little gold mine. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, especially in a dream.

After the medication I came here and slowly unwound myself and then attacked another project. A while ago I’d found the soundtrack of an obscure German rock band that had performed at one of the Hawkfests some time ago.

Back in those days technology wasn’t what it is today and this was full of holes from a worn recording tape. Using the techniques that I’d been practising just recently about “cutting in” pieces of music from elsewhere in the track, I set about repairing the holes. It wasn’t easy, but I managed in the end to make something quite presentable and you’d never find the joins. Even I was impressed.

There was a break for coffee and a fruit bun and I do have to say that the fruit buns that I made in the week are excellent. And as for the biscuits, that I have yet to mention, they have really worked and are even better than the chocolate ones that I made a while back

By now it wasn’t far off lunchtime so seeing as I was expecting visitors I started to prepare for a shower but bang on the dot Rosemary rang me for one of our marathon chats.

Just as she finished, Christian from the radio came round for the radio programme that will be broadcast this weekend. We had a drink and chat, and he told me about a local musician who is looking for a bassist. That piqued my interest, as you can imagine. It’s quite lonely here sitting in my bedroom playing with myself.

As soon as he left, the technician came round and checked that everything was working properly, and once he’d gone I could finally have my shower.

It was a painful walk into town to find some mushrooms for my salad tonight, and whet there were were pretty grim. Mind you they had some of those small peppers so I bought a couple for future use.

Next stop was the estate agent to drop off this paperwork, and then the long painful walk back up the hill to home, punctuated by a call at the new ice cream parlour that’s just opened

Back here I cleaned the peppers and put them in the freezer, and finally the physiotherapist turned up. His “marathon session” turned out to be 20 minutes but he had me working quite hard. I was glad when he left and I could have my hot chocolate and delicious ginger oatmeal biscuits.

And then , regrettably, I crashed out for about an hour.

Liz awoke me and we had a chat on the internet (now that I have an internet on which to chat) for a while and then I ended up with a late tea. Chips and mini sausage rolls cooked in the air fryer with a salad.

The mini sausage rolls are starting to run out now so I’m going to have to search for a vegan savoury stuffing so that I can make my own. Puff pastry is quite time-consuming and difficult to make so I might have to by a roll of ready-made stuff and use that.

So shopping to morrow, so I’d better have an early night. I’ll pop into Noz and see what there is there on offer. I could do with a change of diet. I’m still wading my way through the asparagus tips that they had but there are bound to be other exciting things.

Mustn’t forget the vegan yoghurt either. I’ve run out of that and it makes a lovely addition to my leftover curries. Things are definitely looking up around here.

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Saturday 22nd April 2023 – I HAVE SEEN …

… some of the best, most exciting football over the last week or so that I have seen for the whole of my life. And I’ve seen plenty of matches in the past.

When you desperately need to win in order to have any chance at all of avoiding relegation and you go 1-0 down after 60 seconds to A GOAL LIKE THIS then you know that you are right up against it.

But then YOU EQUALISE only to find that you GO BEHIND AGAIN just a few minutes later.

And the game drifts on into the second half and you are 2-1 down, only for the MOST EXTRAORDINARY THING to happen. I’m surprised that the crossbar was still intact after Sam Litchfield’s header.

So deep into stoppage time with just seconds left to play. You couldn’t write A FINISH LIKE THIS because no-one would believe it. What a way to avoid relegation!

As I said the other day, I’ve really found out what it means to be gripping the edge of your seat tightly as events have unfolded.

But you have to feel sorry for Y Fflint. They have played some good football at times and I liked what I saw but silly errors at the back have been their undoing all season. And they just couldn’t get the ball forward often enough to Simmonds and Akpa-Akpro to counter the mistakes in defence.

While we’re talking about mistakes … “well, one of us is” – ed … I’m not sure what mistakes I made this morning but when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was sitting at my desk drinking coffee and dictating radio notes.

In fact I’d been awake since 04:20 and I gave up going back to sleep an hour later, and that was that.

Making the most of the peace and quiet at that time of the morning I dictated no fewer than three sets of radio notes and they are all loaded up. And in between everything else that happened I made a complete radio programme. That means that I can have a day off on Monday.

A lot of things did actually happen today. At 09:15 I nipped out into town on my crutches and ended up at the Carrefour supermarket in the town centre. I bought some mushrooms and they also had a net of those small-sized peppers, 2 for €0:99 that I like for making my stuffed peppers.

Even though there’s a pepper still in the freezer I bought a net of peppers because at LeClerc these days they only seem to have giant ones and I’m not an American.

The walk back up the hill was tiring and it took a while to make it home. But a strong coffee and some cheese on toast done in the air fryer soon revived me.

Next stop was to transcribe the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. There were several bits and pieces last night as if they came out of a Harry Potter film. One part was a group of kids in a room shouting abuse at another group of kids walking past. Across the road was a religious group from a local church who thought that the abuse was directed at them. They complained to the headmaster so there was an identity parade to identify the culprits. Everyone was wearing false glasses and moustaches etc to try to hide from this Christian group

Later on one of the adults burst into one of the kids’ dormitories saying something like “just come here a moment to do this” waking everyone up and was met with a torrent of abuse including from me for I was fast asleep. It awoke me with a start too.

Later still one of the cleaning staff stole Harry Potter’s ring and that was complicated.

By the way, can you guess which film I’m watching at the moment while I eat my evening meal?

After the football I finished off the radio programme but that took much longer than it ought to have done because the early start to the day caught up with me during the late afternoon, as I thought that it might.

Tea tonight was a really delicious burger on a bun with chips from the air fryer and a lovely salad. As I’ve said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … my diet these days is showing a vast improvement.

And while we’re on the subject of burgers … “well, one of us is” – ed … when I was at Aldi they had some cheap hamburger presses for sale so I bought one. For only €2:99 they do three sizes and that’s fine by me because I’m collecting a few recipes these days for things like not only burgers but hash browns and so on. A hamburger press doing different sizes is just what I want.

And while I remember, in the cookery sale at Noz yesterday they had some ready-ground nut power so I bought 300 grammes of it. Nutburgers will now be back on the menu in early course. I have some gram flour in a jar somewhere and I’d buy more oats if I only would remember.

But all that’s for another time. I’ve just finished another marathon phone call to Rosemary and despite my sleep this afternoon I’m pretty tired so I’m off to bed.

Nothing to do tomorrow as I have some biscuits and some fruit bread left and there’s some pizza dough in the freezer too. But I’m sure that I can find plenty of things to do to keep me out of mischief. I’m too old for that kind of nonsense these days.

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Wednesday 12th April 2023 – MY HOME-MADE …

… garlic naan was delicious. And what’s even better is that there are two more balls of dough in the freezer for further use for the next batch of leftover curries. And shock! Horror! I didn’t use the air fryer but stuck the naan in the wok to cook when I’d finished cooking the curry.

The leftover curry tonight was even better than usual too. The naan bread recipe called for just half a pot of soya yoghurt so instead of soya cream, I added the remains of the pot to my curry and that definitely gave it a certain je ne sais quoi that it didn’t have before.

The fact is that gradually I’m working on my diet and my meals and I’m having some really good stuff. My diet is improving in leaps and bounds and that can only be good news.

It’s better news that what happened during the night. That’s certainly true. I was late going to bed and when the alarm went off at 07:30 I was already sitting down here working. I’d been up since 06:00 and awake for more than an hour before that. It was quite a dreadful night.

Anyway I went for a shower and then set off to walk to the doctor’s, with both my crutches. I almost had a fall going down the steps to the Place Pelley but I managed to hang on and made it the rest of the way.

The doctor was extremely pleased to see me and he said so. He also said that when he saw me for the first time after I came back from Canada via the hospital he was extremely worried and wasn’t sure at all that I would pull through.

Not the first time that I’ve heard that either. I had a friend once who told me that he had been at death’s door but the hospital pulled him through.

After the doctor threw me out, armed with a pile of prescriptions, I went first to the little Carrefour and then round to the pharmacy. Outside, I met the friendly neighbourhood itinerant street dweller and we had quite a chat.

The chemist has to order in my Aranesp so that’s another trip down into town tomorrow. And I’m slowly warming to the idea of going to Leuven next by train regardless of the struggle through Paris because right now I seem to be managing to walk fairly well, all things considered, on my crutches and I’m hoping for an improvement after my week next week at the hospital.

What underlined that was the walk back home afterwards. I made it all the way back here without having to stop to catch my breath and it’s been an age since I’ve been able to do that. Things are looking up.

While i’d been in town I’d bought a crusty baguette so I made some cheese on toast for a late breakfast, especially now that I can actually buy vegan cheese in the big supermarkets. It’s not just my cooking that’s looking up but the supply of ingredients too.

Tons of stuff on the dictaphone too from during the night despite how short it was. I was driving a taxi last night. I had my little company going but all kinds of issues were going on. I ended up with just one car doing a few bits and pieces here and there. I was fed up with trying to organise everything and do everything. It ended up in Court for some reason or other. It was all very depressing last night.

And then I was in a house with someone. She was going to have a bath. She had left me alone in the living room. I’d seen all of her plants. She had some books on plants.

There was also a dream about a big female cat like Chloe (the cervil). She’d had kittens and one of them wasn’t very well. It had a respiratory issue. She brought the kitten to me to presumably take to the vet. I took the kitten and her too at the same time.

Later on I stepped back into one of these dreams again about a girl whom I’d been dating. Her parents began to accept me as some kind of fixture. She told me that Robert had rung up to talk to me. She thought that this was my father. I explained that this was Percy Penguin’s father. I couldn’t understand why he would want to get in touch with me. Her mother didn’t say very much and wandered away so I talked to this girl who by now had become Percy Penguin. She was saying that she’s being treated much better at home now because she’s been spending more time with them and more time looking after the pets and animals which has made har parents quite grateful. Maybe my new favoured position has something to do with all of that.

When I awoke later on (whatever that’s supposed to mean) I was with this girl again. I don’t know what’s happening here now.

That’s not everything that happened during the night by the way, but you really don’t want to know about the rest of it.

The cleaner came round this afternoon and we had a good chat while I wrote out some notes for one of my radio programmes. But then I crashed out – good and proper too – for at least an hour so I didn’t do as much as I would have liked. But I still managed to find the time to make some dough for the delicious naan bread.

having talked about my curry earlier, I’m just going to do a little more work and then I’ll head for bed. No lie-in tomorrow of course because I’m having a blood test and I have to have had nothing to eat. So right now I’m finishing off the last of the special chocolate that I bought for myself for Easter and then I’ll be going to bed.

But after crashing out like I did today I probably won’t have much of a sleep tonight either. Still, a good walk into town should wear me out enough and I’ll be fit for nothing when the physio comes round on Friday morning.

It’s all go around here, isn’t it?

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Friday 10th February 2023 – WHAT A WONDERFUL …

… tea that was tonight. Burger on a bap with salad and a pile of chips cooked to perfection in the air fryer. I’m really pleased with my air fryer, that’s for sure, and I ought to explore a few more of its capabilities if it’s going to cook stuff as well as it did my chips and, when I added it to the pot, my burger.

And the salad was delicious too. That’s an excellent plan and makes my meals much more exciting.

But I wasn’t very pleased though with last night. I went to bed at a reasonable time but didn’t go off to sleep for ages. I’ve no idea how long I spent tossing and turning because I was afraid to tempt fate by looking. But it seemed like an age.

There was plenty of time though nevertheless to go off on my travels. And I clocked up some distance too. A former friend of mine had bought a Hillman Hunter and wanted it delivering to his house so I said that I would go to do it. I went into Stoke on Trent to find this car and started to push it towards his house. It was comparatively easy to do that, much easier than I thought it would be, especially up the hill. I had to push it on the kerb, the pavement, not on the road which was fine in some places but in others the grass was extremely long. There was that much dirt on the pavement that at some times I had to dig out the pavement and the side of the road so I could keep on pushing the car up the hill. This went on for ages and ages. It was dark and going into the small hours of the following morning. There were one or two people around, someone in an old MkI Cortina with no headlights driving down the hill practising his rallying. Eventually I got to where he was living, in a motel. Pushing the car down the corridor became quite easy. There was a girl there whom at first I thought was Zero but it wasn’t – she was a couple of years older than her. I said “hello” to her anyway. Just as I reached his front door which was of course where I might have expected to find Zero, I suddenly awoke bolt-upright.

And then we were living next door to him. We had an electric car. The gap between our houses was fitted up with a charging cable. It was a split charging cable with different wires coming out of it so if you had a car there to charge up you had to connect up these 8 wires separately. We were out there and a young schoolgirl went past, I don’t know why. Back inside we could hear him and his wife arguing about something or other. I thought “here I am, wide awake in various places and this is another occasion where I’m close to getting to see Zero again but I haven’t actually seen her”. It’s strange that I thought that in my dream because there have been a few times (including a little earlier this evening) where I’ve been on the point of meeting her in a dream and I’ve awoken suddenly. My subconscious is clearly trying to tell me something, and I wish that I knew what it was.

Did I dictate the story about the car rally that we organised? … “No you didn’t” – ed. Once everyone from the office had taken off, we headed off back home to pick up a few things. We encountered a couple of cars on the way back just as we were pulling into our drive. They were looking for something or other in the vicinity. We had a chat with them and gave them a little clue about one of the clues which was going to be difficult if they didn’t stop and think clearly. The guy who always seemed to run the office seemed to be the bossy type even went to the police station to try to persuade them to let him speak to a prisoner in there who had been involved in a car accident earlier that day. He was of the opinion that the clue involving this ironing board was something to do with him and his accident.

Finally, we’d gone skiing to this mountain. When we reached the top, instead of skiing down there was like an escalator covered in snow that took you back down to the bottom of the hill again. Although I was not able physically to ski, I was still bewildered by everyone else going down the hill on this escalator and not actually skiing down. There was someone in a wheelchair whom I thought was brave to reach the top of the mountain anyway and come back down again but I still couldn’t understand why there would be this escalator when all you had to do was to ski down to the bottom. And it’s interesting to see that my mobility issues are now featuring in my nocturnal rambles.

Much of the day has been spent in some kind of desultory fashion writing the notes for my next couple of radio shows. I’ve not been in much of a rush to do it and there have been plenty of distractions along the way. Consequently there are still some to write out before I can dictate them.

But I’ve been having a little think about my radio programmes and how I can change them to make them better (or, at any rate, different) and I have a cunning plan about that on which I’m working in my spare time, whenever that might be.

This afternoon I went into town on the bus. I had some medication to collect from the pharmacy and then there was a little bit of shopping to pick up.

Not all of the medication was there so they had to order it for me and I have to go to pick it up tomorrow. That should be interesting with a bus strike so I’ve been thinking that I might actually try to walk down there on my crutches and hope that one of the few buses running tomorrow might bring me back.

It should be an interesting trip, especially if there are no buses back, and one thing is for sure, and that is that I won’t be trying it with just one crutch. I’ll persevere with two for now and see how I feel after a few more weeks.

What made me think about it was that I actually managed to stride out something like rapidly (or what passes for “rapidly” these days) and I covered a lot of ground at a reasonable turn of speed. I need to keep on pushing myself forward.

When I came back I bumped into yet another neighbour and we had yet another chat. I seem to be quite popular for the moment and I don’t know why.

After my delicious tea I came back in here and promptly fell asleep for half an hour. All of this walking is wearing me out and I imagine that if I do go into town tomorrow on foot, I’ll live to regret that as well.

And so I’d better go and try to have a decent sleep. I certainly need it. And who knows? I might even finally get to meet Zero.

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Friday 3rd February 2023 – IT REALLY WAS A …

… lovely afternoon today. Sunny and once I was out of the wind, quite warm too. It really was a pleasure to be out and about.

With it being Friday today, I needed to go to the supermarket in the town for my fresh fruit and so on. But I’m not sure whether it was worth the effort from that point of view because although I managed to buy a lettuce and some mushrooms they had no bananas, no cucumber and there were a few other things that I wanted that were missing in the shops.

The reason for that though was clear to see. There was a big notice everywhere saying that the shop will be closed on Monday and Tuesday for stocktaking, so I suppose that they didn’t want too much fresh fruit and veg hanging around that they might not have been able to sell.

Hoad I known, I would have gone to one of the other supermarkets in the town centre. There are three altogether. I had plenty of time. But regardless of anything else, I was glad to be out and about in the nice weather.

Before I went to bed last night I was out and about too. I went for a walk up and down the stairs here, without my crutches too. And going down the steps I led with the left leg, to give me an opportunity to bend the right knee. Unfortunately, I couldn’t lead with the right going back up the steps. I’m a long way from there, so far that I doubt that i’ll ever be back.

It was a bad night too, tossing and turning around for quite a while trying in vain to go to sleep. Another night where I didn’t do much except watch the clock go round and round. I did eventually go off to sleep, but for nothing like as much sleep as I would have liked.

There was however enough time for me to go off on a few travels here and there. I started off going to work. I had a great big Audi saloon. I had to take the director or one of the big directors to somewhere in Germany not too far from Berlin. They explained the name of the hotel and the town, and I said that I knew it although I didn’t. When they asked why, I said that because my aunt used to go there because my family is connected with royalty (which they didn’t believe but anyway …). So the next morning I awoke. I was in Shavington. There was a lot of traffic on the road because it was rush hour. I got into the car and started it. I thought that I’d do a lap or two around the block to warm it up but I noticed that it was low on petrol or diesel so I thought that I’d go to the garage on Newcastle Road and fuel it with diesel then come back and we’d be ready to go. I was driving up Chestnut Avenue which was a 4-lane road at the time, in the right-hand lane ready to turn right at the top.

I can’t remember very much about this next bit though but I was creating a 3D figure. The telephone rang so I answered it and said that I’d call them back because I was busy with this thing and hung up. Then I realised who it was and tried to call them back so that I could continue talking to them while I was continuing to work on this 3D figure.

And then I’d bought an apartment in a big house. Rosemary had come along to help me clean it up, the house and the balcony, and do some cleaning up outside in the public areas. We ended up making the place look pretty nice although it could do with a coat of paint inside because I didn’t like the red walls. The communal parts outside were confusing. It was a tiny village with several houses dotted around and what you would think at first was private to this particular house was actually a pathway that led to one of these other buildings. It was extremely confusing to try to work out which was the communal area, which was private to our house and which was private to some other house. While we were standing on the balcony having a look out because it was quite high up we could see loads of old vehicles moving around in the distance. It suddenly occurred to us that there was a vintage vehicle rally in the vicinity that weekend. I told Roemary that I knew where I’d be going to be this weekend.

Later on there was something about one of these American mobsters. He’d been convicted of an offence but there was some kind of public enquiry into his conviction. The FBI was involved in this but the cross-examination of this guy by the FBI was particularly bizarre because it almost amounted to the FBI agent going down on his knees and pleading with this mobster to tell the truth, which I thought was quite a strange way of going about cross-examining someone.

Once again I was up quite quickly when the alarm went off, despite the lack of sleep. And when I’d finished the medication and checked my messages I made a start on continuing the notes for the next round of radio programmes. I didn’t get very far though because Rosemary rang me up and we had another one of our marathon chats.

And she brought me some good news. The sunroof that I’d bought in Canada for that Ford Flex in the Puy de Dôme finally turned up today after several months of dispute and discussion. So that’s now been passed on to whom it may concern.

And the Genz Benz 200-watt bass combo that I’d found on sale for peanuts in a pawn shop in Ottawa turned up with it too. That’s going to have to stay at Rosemary’s for a while until I can go down and rescue it, but at least it’s on this side of the Atlantic and I’ll be back on the road.

It’s nice to have some good news for a change. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

Later on I went out for the bus into town. It was the new bus too, the first time that I’ve travelled on that one. and i’m definitely becoming used to these crutches because I was off the bus, in and out of the supermarket and back at the bus station all in 15 minutes and I had 15 minutes to wait for the bus back home. So I had plenty of time to soak up the sun.

Back here, with still no reply to my reminder to the solicitor handling the sale of this apartment, I filled in all of the forms that I need to organise the transfer of the money and sent them off. But there were a couple of things that need more explanation and I’ll have to sort that out over the weekend. And once I’ve done that, then the ball is firmly in the court of the solicitor.

Tea was a burger on a bap with a pile of salad and some chips that had been fried in the air fryer. It really was delicious – one of the best meals that I’ve cooked. That air fryer really is the business and I ought to experiment more with it to try to have my money’s worth out of it. I’m told that it will bake bread and that might be worth an experiment.

Tomorrow i’ll finish off the notes for the radio programmes and then I really can have a complete day off on Sunday. And won’t that be nice?

High time I had a good rest and relax. Anyone would think that I haven’t done that for ages.

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Friday 27th January 2023 – I HAD ANOTHER …

… lie-in this morning.

But that was completely involuntary and by accident because the alarm failed to go off this morning.

When I checked the mobile phone I found that the battery had gone flat and it had switched off. Further enquiry revealed that what had happened was that the charging plug had somehow become detached from the telephone. With no possibility to repair something like this, that was that.

We aren’t lost though. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few years ago I lost my mobile phone and being totally unable to find it, I bought another one. A few months later, when I was tidying Caliburn looking for something else, I found the ‘phone down underneath the driver’s seat. so it went into a drawer and I forgot all about it.

Today’s events made ne remember where it was so I hunted it down but found, to my dismay, that the SIM card wasn’t the same size. But not to worry – I’ll sort it out later.

The morning was spent working on the notes for the radio programmes that I’ll be doing on Monday and chatting to Liz and Rosemary on the internet. But once the afternoon came round I dressed myself up and went out to catch the bus.

And today I’m very proud of myself in one respect, but not in another. When the bus dropped me off at the Place Godal I set off on my marathon hike to the Orange Telecom shop. That really is quite a walk, only about 400 metres short of the railway station and I was really impressed that I made it all the way there on my crutches.

But not so impressed when I spoke to the assistant at the shop. he took both telephones, took the SIM card out of the one that i’m going to use, peeled off the small adapter that was around it, put the SIM card from the broken ‘phone into the adapter and put that in the other ‘phone.

It was as simple as that and had I noticed that earlier when I was at home this morning, I could have saved myself the walk.

However the walk did me good and it’s made me think a little more about how I might go for broke and try one of these days to walk on my crutches to the railway station. But the last 400 metres is a killer hill, and I bet that the whole route will be a lot more difficult when I have things to carry.

Back down in the town I went to the Carrefour and bought a few bits and pieces, like mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes and the like.

At the bus stop there was a 45-minute wait for the bus and it was cold out there and so I decided that I’d cross over the road and catch the bus in the other direction, round to the terminus at the other end of the line and then rode the bus back. At least it was warm and comfortable on the bus out of the wind.

Just about 45 minutes after I returned home I had to go back out again. The taxi came to pick me up to take me to this nerve specialist. and I’ll tell you now that pumping electricity through me as he did was one of the most painful things that has ever happened to me.

There’s nothing much wrong with my arms but there’s an issue with my left leg. As for my right leg, well, the least said about that the better. It’s quite clear according to him that there’s some serious damage.

He’s going to discuss things with my doctor but he did warn me that I need to pack my suitcase. I suppose that I’ll have to buy a couple of pairs of pyjamas too. Hospital nightwear is pretty depressing and I … errr … don’t actually have any of my own.

After I returned I transcribed the notes of my voyages from last night. I’d just finished work and I needed something for the weekend, which was in Chester, so I set out for Chester. It was such a nice evening so I decided that I would walk. I took a t-shirt, a cagoule, a fleece and another rainproof jacket just in case. The walk as far as the suburbs of Chester was quite uneventful and I quite enjoyed it but as I arrived closer to the city, it went really dark. We suddenly had a torrential downpour of rain. Luckily with the 2 rain jackets that I had and the fleece in between the 2 I kept warm and dry. I was able to walk quite comfortably up to the traffic lights on the edge of the city. Then the rain stopped and it went bright again. I stopped to take off the rain jacket. There were some people coming the other way who started to admire my rain jacket and particularly my yellow fleece, starting to talk to each other about it. They asked me a few questions but for some unknown reason I replied in French. I could see a look of puzzle on their faces as I did so but I didn’t really want to hang around and chat to them because I had a lot to do. I wanted to have it done as quickly as possible because of course it’s a long way to Chester and a long way back if you are walking.

As an aside, I walked back through the night from Chester to where I was living near Audlem a couple of times – all 30 or so miles of it – when the girl whom I was seeing went to College there and I didn’t have a car. It didn’t take me as long as you might think and even once or twice I walked straight to work and did 8 hours before going home to bed. I couldn’t do it now, even if I didn’t have the crutches.

I can’t remember who I was with later on, but it was a married couple. They were my age. It concerned a Ford Granada and there was some work that needed doing on it, the front wheel bearings and a few other bits and pieces. It had been around for a while and the work hadn’t started. I was with the woman who said that she had had a dream last night about her husband who had gone off to do this and that and somethign else. She’d happened to mention the Granada and he replied “oh yes, I’m going to get down to do it starting tomorrow”. He seemed so enthusiastic so she said that that’s possibly a good sign that means that he will. I said “strangely enough, I had a dream about someone working on a Granada too”. Then I told her the story of a friend whom I knew who had a Granada and who had been in the same position. He just wouldn’t start doing the repairs which was something to do with the wheel bearings and the front wings. After so many months he’d just put everything in a box and sold it, including the car, for someone else to do. She was surprised. Next time I went round her husband was there. He said “by the way, I’d done one of those front wheel bearings. It only took me 15 minutes as well”.

Tea tonight was some of these mini sausage rolls with baked potatoes, veg and gravy. They were actually quite delicious. I’ll have to work out a way of ordering some more of these “Green Cuisine” products. Noz has them in on the odd occasion but I’d love to have a more regular supply. It’s not possible to order stuff like this from the UK these days, what with Brexit and all that.

So hopefully tomorrow the alarm will go of and awaken me properly this time. Not that I have too much to do this weekend – do my cleaner’s accounts, do some more work on sorting out how I’m going to pay for this apartment that I’m supposed to be buying and that kind of thing. So I might even finish the notes for these radio programmes.

And having been to the shops this week, I have everything that I need, I reckon, but I really am going to try to go out for a walk more often, even if it isn’t far. Having made it as far as the Orange Mobile place today, I need to keep up the good work and see if I can exercise myself back into some sort of condition.

Only time will tell.

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Friday 20th January 2023 – THAT’S PUT SOMETHING …

… of a hole in my bank account this afternoon.

And that’s just the start of things too. It’ll get much worse than this over the course of the next couple of months.

But that’s for some other time. There are many more things that are much more important going on right now.

Like yet again, I had a lot of trouble struggling out of bed again. Not as late as it has been sometimes just recently, but later than I would have liked.

And I couldn’t hang around too long because I had a taxi coming for me. Thanks to the doctor who issued me with a travel voucher, I had a free taxi this morning to and from this nerve specialist person with whom I had an appointment.

He didn’t give me the electric examination that was organised – he was much more interested in testing my reflexes with some kind of vibrating tuning fork. And sure enough, while I could feel the vibrations in the left leg, I felt nothing at all in the right leg. He seems to think that a hospital intervention might be needed, and so he’s called me back next Friday evening for a full examination and he’ll write an appropriate report.

And, as you might expect, I don’t like the sound of this at all. However, if it means that I might actually be able to regain some of my mobility it might well be worth the suffering.

While I was waiting for my lift back home, one of my neighbours drove past. he stopped for a chat and later on sent me a copy of an interview that a friend of his had carried out with the late lamented David Crosby. That will come in handy for something or other.

Back here I had a nice strong coffee and then had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. As for my first little voyage, you really don’t want to know about it, especially if you are eating your tea right now.

Later on Cardiff City had been relegated to the Welsh 2nd Division. They were playing at home for the 1st match so I went along to see. They had a new entrance to their front of the ground like an archway through into a park. We walked past there and round the top at the end of these houses then back down behind the houses to the pitch. It was basically being played on a public park that was full of timber that had been felled so the game was extremely bizarre watching them playing the ball and trying not to hit these piles of timber. I ended up chatting there to a guy who was telling me about everything that was wrong with Cardiff City and why they were relegated. He could see that they were pleying quite well but lacked any kind of enthusiasm. He said that it was something that the captain needed to organise to bring some enthusiasm and energy into the team.

And then I was in Lesotho of all places with an African guy who was driving some kind of small lorry. We were driving through this mountain pass and came to a small village. There was a policeman there who stepped out in front and stopped the vehicle. It turned out that he only had a 5-figure number on his vehicle which meant that it hadn’t had an overhaul in 5 years so the policeman decided to examine it. I was intrigued by this situation never having seen this kind of thing before. I was asking the policeman all kinds of information about what he was doing and the reasons. Eventually he waved on this guy to drive and I followed on behind on foot. As we came close to a big city I lost him in the traffic. I ended up walking into the centre of town through these parks etc trying to check my internet. One thing that I wanted to do was to log in while I was here so that everyone would know where I was but for some unknown reason the logging-in system on the mobile phone wasn’t working. Apparenty I read somewhere that not every country had adopted this system, which was probably why. Lesotho was one of them. I had to just wander around to try to find a quiet place where I wouldn’t be overlooked and disturbed and have a think about how I was going to do this.

This afternoon I had to go into town. The Belgian Government pays my Belgian Old-Age pension by cheque. And although it might only be €34:00 per month, it’s still something that I can spend and one of the cheques was about to run out of time. Luckily, the bus stops right outside my door here so I don’t have to walk far at all to catch it once I can get downstairs.

The walk at the other end though is quite long and I was interested to see how I would manage on my crutches. It was slow and laborious but I made it in the end and I paid in my cheques. So spend! Spend! Spend!

On the way, I bumped into the homeless guy who wanders around the town and we had a good chat. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen him so we had a lot of things to say to each other.

But back at the bank, I had another reason to be there. I have a project on the go at the moment as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, and this is the moment to put my hand in my pocket. And how long do you think that it takes to transfer money from my savings account to my current account and then to make a bank transfer?

Back here at home on the internet I could do it in a couple of minutes but there’s a delay of a few days if I do that. The transfer needs to be done “on the spot” and done correctly too so I wanted the bank to do it and it took over an hour. And then the bank clerk forgot to give me back my card.

Once I’d recovered my card I went to the Carrefour in the town and did a bit of shopping. Mushrooms for the pizza and the stuffing, some salad and a couple of other things. Much as I would like to buy more, I can’t actually carry it. And if I take my wheeled trolley I can’t use my crutches so I can’t walk very well.

With having been so long at the bank I had a long wait at the bus stop for the bus back home. It was crowded too but I found a seat so I had a comfortable ride.

Back here I made a hot chocolate and then regrettably I crashed out – and for quite a while too. The walk to the bank must have worn me out but at least I have one less thing to worry about.

Tea tonight was my sausage, beans and chips and it was delicious. I really do like my air fryer although I feel that I ought to be doing more with it than I actually do. I shall have to find a recipe book from somewhere to see what vegan meals I can conjure up. There has to be something going on somewhere

So tomorrow I don’t have anything organised that needs doing so I can catch up with the radio programme that I’ve been trying to do for several days. What I can do, I suppose, is to prowl around in cyberspace and see what I need to make things more comfortable for me.

But having spent more today in one swell foop than I have ever spent of my own money in one day than I have spent for some considerable time and with plenty more to go out as well, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to afford anything else.

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