… horrible day today, I really have.
All my energy has completely gone and I feel totally washed out. It’s like in LORD OF THE RINGS when Bilbo Baggins says that he feels "like butter that has been spread over too much bread."
These days I am actually quite tired all the time but I could feel it coming on last night when I said that I didn’t have the energy to go to bed. And I meant it too – the effort to haul myself out of my chair here was far too much.
But eventually I made the short transition to bed and once I fell asleep, which wasn’t straight away, I slept until 09:45
After the medication I came in here and listened to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. There was some kind of dream going on where I was in my Welsh class and we were being asked questions about botany like “is a geneste the flowering head of some kind of plant?” Of course, what do I know about plants? But there was a continual aroma of coffee during this dream and I actually awoke at one point in the middle of the night and began to look around for my coffee mug.
Then there was some kind of discussion about the position of ships, where they were moored in the harbour. The captain of the port was sending out all kinds of instructions to all kinds of captains. One on particular was proving to be rather complicated and couldn’t understand a few issues arising out of it. The recipient was certainly not telling him the situation. In the end he went down to look. It was like a new road on a housing estate with all these raised kerbs propped up in concrete until the tarmac came etc. He couldn’t find the particular ship. In the end he had to approach the captain of the ship again. The captain of the ship reminded him that the ship is in actual fact registered to him (the captain of the port) so everything that is being received is being received on his account. That was it’s not actually gone into the public domain to this particular guy but should all be in the captain of the port’s own personal mailbox
There was something else that we had a property to let in London, a room. I’d put an advert in a newspaper but every time someone rang I was always busy doing something else. As a result we were having an endless stream of messages on the answerphone but I really couldn’t stop what I was doing to go to answer them. There were some people dictating “War and Peace” practically down the answerphone about their own apartment needs etc. I wished that I had just 5 minutes where I could actually get on and arrange a couple of interviews and have the apartment shown to the World and find a taker for it but at this rate that’s never going to happen.
And that’s the story of my life, isn’t it? always trying to find that elusive 5 minutes to do things
Finally there was also something happening in a log cabin in the wilds of Texas. Some drifter had turned up and the guys who lived there let him lodge with them for a while. They worked out that he obviously had some kind of money etc so they set an ambush for him, to try to trap him in a corner of the cabin where they could attack him. He was well aware of what was going on and managed to escape the trap but couldn’t exit the cabin so installed himself in a corner with a pile of crockery and glass bottles etc as ammunition, trying to hold them off. An old black servant of these 4 guys took his side too. In the meantime there was a wooden shack in the vicinity being used as a bar. It was rather notorious for all kinds of different things. Right at that moment a group of 4 Texas Rangers on motorcycles turned up. They stormed into the bar and began to harass the patrons and insist on searching the premises.
Once I’d finished that I turned my attention to my festive breakfast, beans on toast, mushrooms, sausage, hash browns and mushroom pâté on toast, with really hot strong coffee. But that didn’t awaken me much.
There was time for a good wash and clean-up ready for my taxi, but it came quite late today and I missed half of my ergotherapy session.
It’s not as if I mind going to the Centre de Re-education but what I do mind is how they arrange it. If it were one course straight after another straight after another, that would be fine but today there was half an hour between ergotherapy and physiotherapy, and then45 minutes wait for the doctor.
And they aren’t keeping me on after the end of January which is a shame but the doctor wrote out a prescription for physiotherapy at home.
The taxi came on time and back here, my cleaner came round for her Christmas present and a few other goodies to distribute around the people in the building.
But once more I had to smile at Rosemary. She’s clearly not used to having a cat around the house.
"How’s your cake?"
"Myrtille approves"
"How do you mean?"
"I came downstairs the other morning and noticed a large cat-sized bite missing from the cake"
She still puts Myrtille outside at night, but it won’t be long before she is sleeping on the bed.
When Nerina and I had 4 cats, we weren’t ever given the choice. We had a cat flap so they could come and go as they liked, and even if we closed the bedroom door, Tuppence, my old black cat, knew how to open it and in no time at all there would be 6 of us on or in the bed.
Each of the cats had its own place on the bed and if you rolled over in the middle of the night you’d have a claw in your leg and "this is MY place".
Sleeping is when a cat feels most vulnerable so they tend to sleep in a big heap where there are many bodies to protect each other from predators. It’s quite flattering in a way to think that you have been accepted in that way as part of a heap of cats, as a protector and to be protected.
Tea was much better tonight. I remembered how to cook veg in my electric steamer and it worked to perfection. And the Christmas pudding was once again excellent.
Liz reckons that I could cut the Wellington into slices and freeze it (assuming that I have room in the freezer)
As for the crumbly cake, she thinks that I might have over-baked it. That’s entirely possible and a plausible suggestion. I’m cooking with a cheap table-top oven and everything is pretty much hit-and-miss with it.
The irony is that in Caliburn is a proper built-in oven and even the unit to take it, but there’s no chance whatever of that ever coming upstairs. I made it upstairs a little easier today but I wouldn’t it I had to bring anything with me
But that’s about the only thing that is easier. The rest of it is becoming just one weary, dreary trudge onwards to whatever destiny awaits me and there are times when I really ask myself why I’m bothering.
The nurse will be here tomorrow and the new treatment starts. And I shudder to think about that.
The hospital and I have different goals. Their aim is to keep me alive for as long as possible and the longer they do, the more successful they are.
But that’s at a dreadful cost to my quality of life.
There’s no way whatever that I’m going to cling on desperately to life by my fingertips going through all kinds of indignities and humiliations just for the sake of it.
When in the middle of a course of treatment I told them that I was stopping in order to go to the High Arctic for 4 months they were horrified. "You could die if you do that!" they exclaimed.
The truth is that I’m going to die anyway, and if I had the choice, I’d rather be out in a place like Etah, 700 miles from the North Pole where we reached in September 2018 and drop dead then and there rather than 5 years later having spent all those years surrounded by my own indignities.
But I can see that I’m becoming all maudlin and depressing again. I’d better clear off before you lot all start to slash your wrists or something.
Let’s hope that tomorrow is a better day and that I feel more like it. Right now I feel like nothing on earth. And probably look like it too
"Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?"