… very quiet day and not done very much at all.
And that’s hardly surprising when the fitbit showed that it was 16:10 when I finally crawled out of bed this mor … err … afternoon.
Really thought it was 11:10 here where I am but even so it’s an impressively late time for a Saturday.
There are tons of stuff on the dictaphone too but I’ve been so busy doing nothing that I haven’t transcribed them as yet.
What had happened is that this weekend it’s Thanksgiving in Canada so no-one is going into work. This is usually the weekend that I think about going home after spending the late summer/early autumn over here but this year of course everything has changed and I’ve come over here later than usual and not going home quite yet.
So with no-one moving around early in the morning today I hadn’t noticed that time at all. So maybe I ought to switch on the alarm at some point during my stay.
Mind you, I was up and about at some point during the night, but that was for reasons that anyone my age will be able to tell you.
After breakfast Rachel and I had a good chat and then we started to think about our evening meal. She set me off on the path of making a really good sauce for my vegan meatballs while she made a meatloaf. And we ended up with baked potatoes and fresh veg from the garden too.
While I washed up afterwards, Rachel made a pumpkin pie but there’s not a lot in there that would tempt me of course. Adding cream and eggs to a pastry mixture that includes butter s not likely to be anything in which I would have any interest.
Following that we had another long chat with Darren and now I’m going to bed.
What a strange day that was. I’m definitely going to have to set an alarm tomorrow if I’m going to be doing any good. And when I did, I finally managed to transcribe the mountain of notes. We were out with a group of musicians last night. It was basically something about the story of the Byrds that started off doing a couple of concerts and gradually spreading out all over south California, then over California and going from town to town, railway station to railway station, playing music and fighting. There was a lot of fighting in this dream, then running and catching last-minute trains ahead of everyone else who were after them. How they ended up meeting Dave Crosby who they had managed to persuade to join them. At one point I had my electric 6-string guitar but I couldn’t find my acoustic or my mandolin. On one train trip we were chatting, saying that this circuit has taught us quite a lot such as how to travel by train, how to learn to play together, how to learn to fight together etc. Then I tried to play a few chords but for some unknown reason I was playing them wrong. It was really embarrassing in front of all these people that here I was, a music performer and I couldn’t play these basic chords correctly.
We were at school and had gone on a field trip. We found a large rabbit that had died so we were performing an autopsy on it. We started by skinning it. We were surrounded by flies as we were doing it so it was obvious that the rabbit had been dead for some time. We had been asked all kinds of questions about it. It seemed as if it was an old rabbit because there was no sign of disease or injury but they seemed to think that it was only about 2 or 3 years old. Of course they knew better than I did. The idea of me dissecting a rabbit is something particularly strange because it’s something that I would never do in normal circumstances.
I’d been working as a chauffeur again. In the office where I’d been, I’d been letting things go untidy again. The corner round by my seat on this aeroplane was absolutely full of junk that accumulated over the years. I’d been a Prisoner of War for some time before I’d been released. Then I’d had studying to do, exams of all kinds of different things. Consequently I’d hardly set foot in the office since I came back. Things had just been left. One evening after work I went round there and began to tidy it up. I was appalled and astonished at the things that I had there that I was pulling out of this corner by my seat. There was stuff that I didn’t even know that I had that had been sitting there for years. What was going to be a 5-minute job turned out to be a regular marathon. I hadn’t a clue where I was going o put all this stuff, how I was going to move it, where I was going to take it. There was a girl there witting on one of the seats who seemed to be quite interested. I didn’t really want her to become involved in this because it was quite embarrassing to me. But she came round to talk and someone else came round to talk to ask me where I’d been because he hadn’t seen me for ages. I was covered in dust. It was uncomfortable and I was sneezing but I wasn’t having this done. I thought that I’d be here at midnight if these people didn’t go and leave me alone and let me get on with what I’m supposed to be doing. Even so, I still didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be doing and how I would do it all.
And then a policewoman had a job as an undercover spy in a criminal network led by this insane Russian guy. He was in the middle of having a huge row with someone or other on the telephone. She was remembering a few of the words but she was moving her lips while she was trying to remember them. Suddenly this guy’s face mask slipped and he saw her. He immediately went over, completely out of control. These 2 guys there with him took hold of this girl and dragged her into what looked like a shower cubicle. In an absolute fit of rage he charged this shower cubicle. His head went clean through the perspex door. He was stuck and couldn’t extract his head. This woman was absolutely terrified. She was screaming while this guy was foaming at the mouth etc, trying to extract his head from the hole that he had made in this door.
Later on I’d been to the town centre to have my hair cut. I’d parked Caliburn some way out of the town so I had to walk some way with my suitcase back to Caliburn because I was heading off on a voyage. On the way back I collided with a guy whom I knew from school. He was pleased to see me which was a surprise. He invited me to his place of work which was the local Post Office for coffee. I went in and he made me a coffee and said that he’d be back in 5 minutes and wandered off. Some woman whom I also knew from school came in, a German girl. She called me over, that guy was there and my friend from Munich was there. She said “I want to talk to you about something”. First of all she wanted to know where I was born because if I had been born in India or somewhere like that she couldn’t have this discussion with me. I told her and she asked the address but I couldn’t remember it. I never knew it. There was a little discussion about that. Then she started to talk to me in this weird accent that I could hardly understand. In the end I worked out that she’d been speaking to someone whom I knew in France who had been to my property at one time to talk to me about plumbing. She was also talking to me about a guy who lived around the corner on another part of the council estate where we were born who my sister actually fancied as a teenager but who had died at 17. She asked me all kinds of questions about him. Of course I didn’t have a clue about him either. She took me to the garage. There were some boats and everything like that. She was preparing a boat, presumably for us to go out in it. All of this was a huge mystery to me for I was supposed to be on my way to France. I had things to do and had no idea why this meeting had been arranged, why that guy from school and why Hans were in it and all these questions that they were trying to ask me. It was all just so totally confusing especially with her speaking this strange accent that I couldn’t understand
And who knows? I might even manage to put my sooty foot outside as well. I didn’t actually do that today.
