Tag Archives: vegan christmas cake

Sunday 10th December 2023 – MY VEGAN CHRISTMAS CAKE …

… now has some icing on it.

It’s not exactly the prettiest Christmas cake that you’ll ever see, but it looks much more like a Christmas cake this year than the one that I made two years ago, which looked more like Quatermass’s Experiment.

A great big thanks to Liz who dived deep into her memory and came up with a recipe for vegan royal icing using chick pea liquid, which I just happened to have, having made some hummus the other day.

And to Sean too who suggested that I treat the icing as if I was plastering a wall and do it in several thin layers. But I have to be honest and say that it does look rather like my plastering efforts used to before I discovered the trick of using a lump of wood thoroughly soaked in water.

Also in the photo is the batch of fruit buns that I made this afternoon for the next couple of weeks, and don’t they look much better these days than they used to when I was just setting out with my baking experiments?

Last week I’d used the last of the pizza dough that I had in the freezer so I made another batch. 2 lumps are in the freezer and I used the third to make a pizza tonight, which you can also see in the photo.

All of that effort today has worn me out, which is no surprise seeing as I had another turbulent night.

Being a Saturday night I was in bed late and didn’t have a great deal of sleep. By 10:00 I was up and about having my medication.

First thing that I did afterwards was to transcribe the piles of stuff on the dictaphone from the night. We started off with a Paul Temple mystery but no sooner had it started than my feet became tangled with each other and the elastic strap that I wear around my ankles. I awoke rather suddenly and quickly before anything had happened

Then there was a series of car races. One of the competitors found himself in hot water because his car had been mis-described. It had been described as one particular model when in fact it was a different one that was 10cm longer so maybe more powerful. This caused quite an uproar with various people commenting on how such a thing like this shouldn’t ever arise, how important it is for the correct details to be presented and what they would do in similar kinds of circumstances etc.

Later on I was up to my ears in work. It was about 04:00. The specimens had to go to the laboratory and normally I would take them but at the moment a girl was going to take them. She’d be here at any time. As well as having everything out I had pastry half-rolled out on a laboratory desk etc. I was generally thinking that I’d be hours late. She turned up. Today’s subject was a red pepper. It took me ages to find a pen and some kind of ad-hoc envelope in which to fit it. Then I had to tell her about the other things that needed doing, for example, when you are sending in blood tests of families, if there are more than 2 children you have to send in the blood tests of at least 2 of them and not distinguish whether they were masculine or feminine children. This list went on for hours. In the end all I could find was some kind of paper pochette in which to put the red pepper. I imagined that by the time she organises herself with this and whatever else she has to do, the laboratory will have closed at 04:00 and that would have been it. She’d have been too late.

There was also some story about a really expensive diamond. It begins in the Republic of Kyrgyzstan when the Khan gave the diamond to his daughter. Following the invasion by the Russian colonialists in the 19th Century it was lost. It turned up later in a European auction house in comparatively modern times. On one instance it fell into my hands. I had the task of not only trying to keep it safe from marauding pillagers but to make sure that it was handed back to the current Government of Kyrgyzstan. I was beset by all kinds of perils etc in an effort to move this stone to where it ought to go. I was really like something out of a James Bond novel. Unfortunately in the middle of dictating the notes I awoke and the whole lot of everything that was left evaporated away out of my head.

Did I dictate the dream about the precious stone from Kyrgyzstan? … "yes you did" – ed … but I fell asleep after I’d dictated it and had a visit from a couple of people who were looking for the stone. I set a trap for them, caught them and began to interrogate them about what they’d been doing, who they were doing it for and the reasons why they were here etc.

And later still I was taking my exam for my French citizenship. I came to the part about different Provinces, different peoples, different lifestyles. Of course I ended up writing reams of stuff about it, most of which was totally unnecessary for the article. With Cécile we’d created some kind of life as a couple living in her house. That was something comparatively new for me but as usual, most of the stuff that I wrote was pages and pages long and gave no advice to anyone really (just like what I used to write for our old “Radio Anglais” programmes). And then I awoke.

There was a story about medals in World War II. One particular medal was illustrated by 2 brothers who flew for the RAF as night fighter crew during the opening period of the Blitz in a 2-seater Defiant. They were on their way to Buckingham Palace to receive their medals before flying home to Ireland at the end of their engagement. Something happened to the ‘plane and they both baled out … "as is any rear gunner could ever bale out of a Defiant. It’s practically impossible" – ed. One of them, his ‘chute failed to open correctly and he was killed when he hit the ground. His parachute ripped on a tree and you could still see a morsel of parachute in the tree if you were to look carefully. The second brother, his parachute opened but he fell into the sea and was drowned before he could be rescued.

Finally we were working in the stores, bringing out piles of stuff for a huge project that was taking place. Suddenly, halfway through, we had word that the project was cancelled. It was coming up to weekend and everything needed to be put back, which meant that we would be hours late going home. My partner and I shrugged our shoulders and made a start. The other people in the building, including Jon Pertwee and the girl attached to him, didn’t seem to want to start, being too busy messing around and teasing each other. I knew exactly what would happen – the moment that I finished packing away my things I’d be called into putting away their things. I decided that I’d slow down to a crawl. The conversation carried on about all the bad habits of Pertwee and how this girl had even brought him a cup of coffee in bed once at 08:00. He’d given her a kiss that had upset her but she took it in her stride. Nothing whatever was being put away. People began to remark about Pertwee preparing things for his own tidying-up at the weekend. I had a look and there were tons of wires and cables etc out on my side of the warehouse lying around here. If they disappeared overnight I’d be the one who’d be in trouble. While it was very interesting and enlightening listening to all this banter that was going on, I was beginning to have a few serious misgivings about things that were happening and things that would be happening. It didn’t look at all healthy to me.

With all of that going on I must really stop listening to the Navy Lark on Old-Time Radio before going to bed.

After lunch I made a start on the radio programme, the notes for which I dictated before going to bed. And I’m right – I AM losing the co-ordination between my eyes, my brain and my mouth. I suppose that as this cancer marches on through my body, more and more things like this will happen.

Halfway through, I knocked off for a while and went to the kitchen for my baking session.

There’s no doubt whatever that my new FOOD PROCESSOR really is the business. It’s also nice to have a set of reliable kitchen scales, which made life so much easier too.

Even though the bearings burned out on the grinder on the old whizzer set that I had, the rest of it still works and it whipped up the chick pea juice and icing perfectly. Having the correct equipment really does make life so much easier.

For almost four hours I’d been on my feet working without a break. At about 19:00 I sat down for the first time and by 19:01 I was well away with the fairies.

The vegan pizza was delicious as usual, and so now that I’ve finished my notes I’ll check my cake again, have a nice hot drink and then go to bed.

Tomorrow I have to tidy up as the ergotherapist is coming round. Mind you, if she sees me living in chaos and disorder it might be a good thing because it might mean that I’ll qualify for more assistance.

Actually, I’m trying to avoid having any extra help. Past experience shows that if people start to let themselves go, they keep on going. I’m intending to keep on fighting and do as much for myself as I possibly can.

My autonomy is quite important and I want to hang onto it. I’m not quite ready yet to be helped into my grave by anyone.

Tuesday 5th December 2023 – IN ANSWER TO …

… the thousands … "well, maybe not thousands" – ed … of requests, here’s a photo of my weekend’s efforts.

On the left is the figgy pudding and on the right is the Christmas cake. You can see where the edges of the cake were stuck to the baking tin but once the cake is covered with marzipan and icing no-one will notice.

Marzipanning and icing are planned for this coming weekend so now is the time to send me a few handy hints. After the debâcle last time, I’ll remember to put the cake in the fridge before I ice it. Icing a warm cake produces some rather interesting and artistic results.

In the background is my box of ginger and orange biscuits. And believe me – they do taste as nice as they look.

Thinking on, I should have stuck a couple of fruit buns in the photo too. There are a couple floating around in one of the biscuit tins.

Anyway, I ended up going to bed reasonably early last night and awoke again at some kind of ridiculous time. But at least the person with the hatpin didn’t come back.

Although I did drift off back to sleep, Zero didn’t come to visit me. And neither did Castor nor TOTGA. But the sleep did me some kind of good.

When the alarm went off I staggered into the kitchen for my medication and my half-litre of flat water flavoured with a dash of orange juice. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve run out of C02

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I had a photo and was trying to identify the subject and the folder in which it belonged. I was strolling through the directory that seemed to me to be the correct one looking at all the photos but just couldn’t identify the subject at all by doing that. I began to wonder whether it might have been from another folder but at the moment there was still some stuff in the first folder to wade through so I just ploughed on regardless but still couldn’t find it

Later on I was back in the same dream looking again through a pile of photos when just at that moment the alarm went off. We all had to leave. There was a girl missing. When I looked up I could see the small girl way up somehow on a pile of tubing that had been arranged like a scaffolding. She’d somehow climbed up there but was unable to descend. One of the boys in the room took it upon himself to climb up there and rescue her. At first I didn’t understand what he was trying to do so I tried to stop him but then it suddenly occurred to me what he was doing so I let him on his way and helped him as much as I could.

And then I was working for an express bus company last night. I was given a job to go from London to Swansea Docks and Carmarthen. When I was going through the paperwork there was a woman there talking about Swansea Docks. I found out that she was going on the same route as me with a bus but to Swansea Docks and Llanelli. We were due to leave at about the same time so we decided to travel together as far as Swansea Docks because I didn’t know where the pick-up point there was. We talked about Gloucester Services – what time we’d arrive, how long we should stop. I made the remark that I’d have to let Zero down again. She asked “what do you mean?”. I replied “this is the 13th consecutive time that I’ve promised to pick Zero up and my working schedule has been changed so I’m not going to be able to do it”. The woman asked “what did she say?”. I replied “she doesn’t know yet. We’ve only just had the work schedule. Someone else will have to pick her up”. We set out to pick up our vehicles, across a very busy main road. She was nattering away about her husband and tyres etc. We reached the place to pick up our vehicles. They were 2 mark I Cortina estates. I thought “this can’t possibly be correct, this”.

After I’d slipped back into oblivion later on I had exactly the same dream again, word for word.

Finally I went to look at the new shopping complex near Goodall’s Corner in Shavington. It was dark and I’d had the lights on the car but couldn’t see anything at all so I’d had to increase the brightness of the dashboard lights which increased the brightness outside. I reached where I thought it would be, climbed out of my car and went in. It looked like the door to someone’s house. I wandered round and there was a yellow French pillar box just inside the door so I thought that it must be somewhere around here. I went round and round all these corners until I came to an enormous Post Office with about 2 dozen clerks sitting around. It looked as if there were 1 or 2 members of the public in so I asked if they were closed. She replied that they were. I said “that’s a pity. Could anyone sell me a stamp?”. Someone had a rummage round on the top of a desk and came up with a 1st class stamp

There was some more stuff too but you don’t really want to know about that, especially if you are having your tea.

Once I’d finished that I had a couple of chats on line with a couple of different people and then sat down to revise my Welsh, stopping for a good wash in between seeing as I’m going out.

Armed with a fruit bun and a full pot of black coffee I sat down for the lesson and to my surprise it went quite well.

We were discussing extreme weather today, so I told the class about the time when we were on the trail of Sir John Ross and a group of us walked across Philpot’s Island about 800 miles of so from the North Pole to map the far side in a temperature of minus something ridiculous and we were caught in a blizzard.

My friend Mike who was leading our group decided that this would be a good time to have a yoga session so there we were in a white-out lying on our backs in a snow bank.

What worried me most about that was that you really had to struggle to see your hand in front of your face. We could have come face-to-face with a polar bear and it would have been too late to have done anything about it.

We did have an armed guard with us but his job, so he told us, was that if he saw a polar bear in a confrontation with a human, his job was to shoot the human. "It’s far less paperwork" he said.

Actually, it’s a fallacy to suggest that the best way to survive a polar bear attack is to run faster than the bear. You just have to run faster than one other person in your group. Since my mobility has been … errr … restricted, I’ve been asked on several occasions by Mike and Jerry if I would like to return to the High Arctic and go exploring with them again.

After the lesson the car came to pick me up and take me to the Centre de Re-education.

My ergotherapy session was cancelled again so there were just the two sessions. And Severine told me that she is noticing an improvement in my muscles in my legs. So she must be doing some good somewhere.

In the musculation sessions there was just an old man and me and the therapist had us using our strength (or what we have of strength) against each other with whatever aids they had lying around – things like giant rubber balls, elastic straps and so on.

My upper body strength was better than his but he had more power in his legs.

Severine is probably right about the improvement. Coming back up the stairs later, I could actually lift my left leg high enough without any difficulty and it was the easiest climb back up the stairs that I’ve had for a good while.

Nevertheless, I was still exhausted and crashed out for a while once I sat down.

The radio notes are now finished off ready for dictating and I went for tea- a taco roll with rice and veg.

Before I go to bed tonight I’ll dictate the radio notes and I’ll prepare the programme tomorrow morning. The car will come for me at about 14:30 or so if I’m lucky so it should be finished by then.

And then I want to press on with these photos that I’m supposed to be annotating. It’s taking for ever and it shouldn’t be this complicated.

Right now I’m short of things to fire my enthusiasm which is hardly a surprise given everything that’s going on right now but whatever the answer is, feeling sorry for myself isn’t it. It’s not going to be finished if I just sit here and look at it.

There is the rest of my Christmas cooking too. I need stuffing, of course, but that’s not available over here. I suppose that I could invent something with breadcrumbs, onions, garlic and herbs so I’ll have to find a decent recipe. I have some gram flour somewhere in the kitchen.

And then there are the hash browns. When I’ve made them before, they have been a dismal failure so I need to work on those too ready for Christmas.

Something else that I need to think about is to restart the ginger beer factory that I had running here at one time. I still have the bits missing out of the wall to remind me about how powerful it was.

It actually worked very well until I had to restart Leuven on a monthly basis a couple of years ago. Brewing ginger beer requires constant attention and you can’t leave it fermenting for four days while you are away, as my walls will testify.

A powerful batch, that. Shame I never got to drink any of it.

Monday 4th December 2023 – WHEN THE ALARM …

… went off at 07:00 this morning I was well on my way through preparing the radio programme notes for which I dictated on Saturday night.

The other day when I awoke at something like a ridiculously early time, I ended up going back to sleep and having a pleasant half hour in the company of Zero.

Today though, being awake at 04:30, I couldn’t go back to sleep no matter how hard I tried and in the end round about 05:10 I gave it up as a bad job and arose from the Dead.

Last night I’d actually had an early night for once and I don’t suppose that it took me too long to go off to sleep.

But then I hauled myself out of bed at 05:10 and went for my medication.

Back in here the first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I was being taken somewhere, either on board or off a ship. I was in a wheelchair and like that Brazilian company that I knew, they had 3 groups of numbers and lots of individual ranges in each group. They were checking through one particular group to see if I was in there because I was either leaving or joining the ship. I was dying to go to the bathroom but that wouldn’t make them hurry up this task any quicker and it looked as if I’d be there for ever

Later on I’d been back to visit Alison again. I was with a guy and a couple of his children, girls who were probably aged about 5 and 6. Just a couple of doors away from where Alison was living was a sign about some kind of Theme park of “Enchanted Magic” etc. I often wondered what happened there so seeing as I had 2 small children with me we took ourselves off. Eventually we managed to find the entrance because it wasn’t straightforward. We paid for the entrances – we could either have paid or opened an account which we’d settle on leaving but I preferred to pay as we went round. I went for a glass of water. There were several carafes of water that were in the direct sunlight on the windowsill so I went to look for one that was in the shade. We even talked about staying the night in this place because it was possible and the girls would love it. I happened to mention Alison and the guy said “yes we could even go out for a meal with Alison tonight”. I didn’t know what his plans were and what his intentions were but they were his daughters so I let him decide what was going on.

Finally, some famous travel author or similar was going on a walking tour through the mountains of one of these South Asian republics east of the Caucasus. He was looking for volunteers. In the end I decided after much thought that I’d like to volunteer and was accepted. It was something of a cheat in a sense because we travelled extremely light and had a support vehicle that carried the luggage for us for our overnight stops. We were walking through the foothills of these mountains. It was something of a disappointment in a certain respect because if we wanted to follow his exact route and stop exactly where he wanted it was great but if we saw something that was a little off the beaten track that interested us, he wouldn’t stop. We would either have to go ourselves and then run after him, which was complicated, or else ignore it. It happened to me on a couple of occasions, things that I would otherwise have stopped to photograph were left behind. We suddenly came round a bend in the track and came across some headstones. Most of them were American Army headstones from 1977 but a couple were American Army headstones from 1844, in the days before there was really an American Army of course. We could understand the 1977 ones but the earlier ones were a complete puzzle. I was determined to photograph them even if it led to an argument. In the end he set off and I took out my camera to photograph them but somehow a load of mud had come onto the lens. No matter how I tried I couldn’t clean the mud off the lens. I was there for ages trying to do this and he was going further and further away.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that having dreams about camera failures was something that happened quite often at one time in the recent past but we’ve not had one for a while.

Armed with a mug of instant coffee to fire up my enthusiasm I made a start on the radio programme that I mentioned. And once I’d added in the final track and the speech it over-ran by 3.6 seconds. But that didn’t take too long to edit down

Then I took myself off to look at the results of my labours yesterday.

One lesson that I learnt was that I should have lined my cake tin with baking paper before putting in the contents. When I sprung the hinge it left a few lumps stuck to the side.

Not that anyone will notice once it has the marzipan and icing on it of course. And in any case, I’ve made it to eat, not to look at.

Another lesson that I learnt was that my pudding steamer doesn’t make a perfect seal and I hadn’t wrapped up the pudding sufficiently. Steam get everywhere, into the smallest gaps, and my pudding looked rather damper than I would have liked.

In the end, I put the oven on low for an hour and gently dried the pudding inside it. Now it looks much more like a Christmas pudding.

That’s one of the (many) reasons why I keep these notes. You’ve probably noticed that there’s an index with keywords for each entry and there’s an *.sql database that controls all of the keywords.

So next year, I can just search the database for “Christmas Pudding” and call up all of the notes that I’ve made on the subject, read them to find out how I could have done better, and hopefully improve on everything next time.

With a memory like mine, you’ve no idea how much of a necessity it is.

One thing that I can say, however, is that the Christmas Cake is delicious. Those bits that stuck to the side of the tin didn’t go to waste. They made a nice breakfast.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent, when I haven’t been sleeping off my early start, finishing off the tidying up from yesterday and then sorting out the music for the next radio programme that I’ll be preparing.

The music took longer than it might have done because the programme will be broadcast on Rinus Gerritsen’s birthday. As far as I can tell, he never sang the lead on any of Golden Earring’s songs and he only wrote one or two of them.

With it being his birthday I ought to include something. It took me an age to identify a track that he wrote on his own, and even longer to actually find it and convert it for radio.

When I moved to Brussels and started running again, I had a huge cassette tape with all kinds of Golden Earring tracks that were the right speed for my running, but can I find it?

When I started running again here at night after Covid began, I think that I ran to the accompaniment of the Dead March.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg – just as good as ever. And there’s stuffing left for a taco roll tomorrow and probably to go into a leftover curry on Wednesday.

But we’ve hit a crisis in that my gas cylinder is empty, so no more sparkling water for me. Cylinders are available on line of course, but you have to pay the full whack, not just the exchange refill. And I can’t ask my cleaner to struggle back on foot from LeClerc with a refill

Tomorrow there’s the Welsh class and if the car comes for me, the Centre de Re-education. There are three sessions organised for me so I’ll be fit for nothing when I return.

If I have the chance, I’ll finish off writing the notes for this radio programme. After I’d finally sorted out the music I wrote half of them so it won’t take me long to finish them.

But right now I’m off to bed. I still haven’t recovered from my early start and I need to be on form tomorrow. But coming back up the stairs after three sessions at the Centre de Re-education will finish me off for good.

Sunday 3rd December 2023 – IF MY CHRISTMAS …

… cake tastes as nice as did the bits that bubbled over the top of the cake tin onto the base of the oven, I shall be extremely pleased. It was phenomenal!

And yes, Liz, “bubbled over”.

Trying to bake a cake with no self-raising flour or eggs and just using sodium bicarbonate and red wine vinegar to produce a chemical reaction is very much a hit-and-miss process.

The last time I tried, when I made my bread-and-butter pudding, it exploded in my face, presumably because it was insufficiently cooled and mixed before I added the vinegar, but today it went perfectly and I was so impressed

But I was also so tired too.

Not that a really late night had much to do with it, but the fact that all through the night I had the Return Of The Stabbing Pain.

It defies my understanding, all this that goes on with my body. I’ve mentioned in the past … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the fact that at times during the night there’s a stabbing pain in my right foot as if someone is pushing a hatpin into the sole of my foot, and last night it occurred probably almost every 5 minutes

It went on for ages too and when I finally brought myself into the Land of the Living today at about 11:40, it was still going on.

After I’d had the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. A group of resistance fighters of undercover British soldiers had been parachuted into the Occupied Territories to attack the headquarters of a German General. One of the people who worked in that office was a member of the Allied resistance and had been feeding them information. What they did was to make sure that this person made good her escape. Then they walked in and hauled a hand grenade through the door into the other office where the German General would normally work. The hand grenade exploded and there was a cry of agony from in there so they dashed inside. The General’s secretary was there. She’d been very badly injured by the bomb. She staggered out of the room into the office and saw that the office was empty save for these British soldiers. Her first thought was “where’s Madame So-and-so?”. It quickly became clear to her what had happened but no-one in the party of Allied soldiers had the courage to finish her off. 5 minutes later the German General came back in his car with a load of companions who’d been out somewhere. They stepped right into the middle of this carnage, rounded up the soldiers easily and led them away to be shot. During the whole of this dream the British soldiers made absolutely no effort whatever to resist capture and no effort whatever to try to escape or evade.

Several young children, both boys and girls, who had been dancing had come together under the tutelage of a well-known ballerina and were planning to put on a concert. It was called “The Icepedia of Madame Clifford”. She was busily arranging them into groups and teams etc, choreographing dances etc. These children were due to start any day now having their formal tuition in whatever this Madame Clifford wanted to do but just as they began, I awoke.

Later on, a group of 4 or us, 3 girls and me, had been away for a while on a kind-of touring holiday or road trip. As usual there was one girl whom I particularly liked but she was far too busy being friendly with the other 2 girls than she was spending any time alone with me, which was rather disappointing. When we reached the end of our journey there was some kind of issue or confrontation. The girl whom I liked ended up having lost her clothes so she was there basically with all that she had on. I noticed that she was wandering off to the car of one of the other girls so I went over to ask her if she was going to borrow some clothes from her. She replied “no” so I wondered if there was anything that I could do for her or to help her, give her a lift somewhere as she had no clothes, no money etc but she assured me that she’d be OK. I couldn’t actually see how but she was quite adamant. In the end I could hear the 3 girls making up some other kind of plans to meet somewhere on the way home. I felt rather annoyed that I was being left out of everything but I didn’t say anything. I got into my car, and then realised that I was going to be rather short of money for going home. Someone passing by pointed out that one of my tyres had a slow puncture so I wondered how I’d manage to resolve that too. Then the girl pulled up in her car alongside me so I began to talk to her. I had it in my mind to say that I was jealous of the fact that she spent more time with the others than she had with me etc but for some reason I just could not push the words out of my head and out of my mouth to say them. It ended up really unsatisfactory from my point of view. Then the other 2 girls turned up and talked about meeting somewhere in Munich or wherever. I realised that my timetable was going to be really tight and I couldn’t even make it if I was invited. I wondered how these girls were going to do it too. It turned out that they were going to be flying so where was the one with no clothes and no money going to find the money for that? I set off anyway, disappointedly and came to a road junction where there was a car waiting. I waited behind it but it didn’t move. I suddenly realised thet there was no driver in it so I pulled around it, checked that the road junction was clear and began to drive away.

A disabled boy with whom I used to work appeared in a dream somewhere and we talked about my illness. I told him that I had a lot of appointments unofficially registered on 22nd October and I was going to go to the hospital to talk to a few people about how things were going on. We’d been parked in Shavington outside the small parade of shops talking, then he pulled out of the parade without looking and nearly hit another car that was coming our way. Luckily he managed to stop in time but the car carried on driving. We ended up following it for a while then both it and we turned into Chestnut Avenue and began to go down the hill. He’d completely lost the thread of what he’d been saying and told me that that was a problem when his concentration was disturbed. He lost track of just about everything.

And then I was with Alison, Hans and Jackie. We were in Germany somewhere going for a meal. We all piled into one of the cars and someone drove to this restaurant out in the countryside. We went in and the restaurant was actually up some stairs but I struggled up. We eventually managed to find a place to sit. We had quite a good time talking about all kinds of different things. When the bill came mine was €30:06. While I was sorting out my money everyone disappeared. I heard them downstairs. Someone was saying something to Jackie about “shall I run you to the station now?”. That took me by surprise because I understood that we would all be staying together for the weekend. I went downstairs and to my surprise I walked down the stairs without my crutches. We were all milling around in the cloakroom gathering our clothes together. Hans told a joke that made everyone laugh. he said “that was one of Eric’s”. We collected all our coats and set off outside. It was pouring down with rain. Hans made a remark about how lucky we were that we had hats with us. He would be soaked to death walking to the car.

A group of us from the radio had gone to watch Man play in Brussels. The auditorium was packed but I managed to find a little place at the side of one of the mixing tables to put the ZOOM H1 so that it would record the sounds of the group. I wandered off to do something but when I came back there was a family sitting around this table so I went up to tell them that they needed to be very quiet because there was a live microphone recording taking place. They apologised and said that they hadn’t known that it was my seat. They stood up and left. Taking advantage of the empty seat I sat down. I suddenly realised that I hadn’t brought any spare batteries for the Zoom. it it goes flat I’ll be having a real problem. I switched off the machine while the preliminaries were taking place but just them all of the musicians came onstage. I had to switch it on again hurriedly. I’d done it so quickly that I wasn’t sure whether it was on or off. I had the feeling that this was turning into another complete mess. After the first couple of numbers I was chatting to one of the guys from the radio. I told him that if we have issues about space there are only two numbers that are absolutely essential in the recording. I told him of one but I couldn’t remember the name of the second. At that point the dictaphone began to go flat so I gathered up my things and left. After I’d been walking home after 10 minutes I realised first of all that I still had the elastic strap around my ankles and secondly, I didn’t have my crutches. I walked past the street fair and the place where people left food out for the live slugs and fish. I came to a set of steps but I thought that I better hadn’t push my luck too much with these steps without my crutches. I walked the long way round and headed home. I remember thinking that I hope that everything would be fine from now on because if I lose my crutches that’s really the end of everything. I’ve no idea what I’d do then. That was the thought that was worrying me for the rest of the way home.

Something like that actually did happen to me once while I was recording an outside broadcast. The batteries in the ZOOM H8 went flat and the spare batteries were just as dead.

Of course, I haven’t done any outside broadcasts since last Summer before I went to Canada, and for obvious reasons too.

Another reason why I’m exhausted, and probably the most relevant one, is that I’ve been on my feet all afternoon. So much so that my back, my thighs and the muscles in my calves are aching in places where I didn’t even know that I had places.

Firstly, I prepared the mix for the next batch of biscuits. Fresh ginger, fleur d’orange and ground almonds together with the usual spices

And anyone who has been following these pages for any length of time won’t need to be told about what happened just as I was up to my elbows in flour and vegan margarine. For the benefit of new readers, the telephone rang.

There was no other option but to answer it. It was my neighbour, the President of the Residents’ Committee, wanting to know how I was and what happened on Friday so I cleaned myself up and had a good, lengthy chat with her.

She was the one who tipped me the wink about the apartment downstairs. At one of the residents’ meetings the owner of the apartment just happened to mention quite casually that he was thinking about selling up.

She told me and the owner and I had negotiated a price, agreed a deal and I’d paid the deposit to purchase all before he’d even had time to consult an estate agent.

All I have to do now is to wait for the lease to end and the tenant leaves the property, and then I won’t have all these stairs to climb and I can install a proper kitchen and shower. And, it goes without saying, find a cat to adopt me

Of course, the tenant can always leave before the lease expires. “Negotiations are proceeding”.

Next step was to make my Christmas pudding. That was quite straightforward and it was all placed in the steaming container that I’d greased and lined with baking paper. Three hours of steaming in a bain marie to cook it, and seeing as I didn’t have one, I had to invent something.

But that’s now steamed and it’s currently cooling down before I open it to see how it’s looking. And I hope that it works.

Then there was the Christmas cake. That really took some mixing too but I do have to admit that my soaked fruit looked and smelt delicious. Anyway, it all went together, thanks to everything that I’d bought from LeClerc and fitted quite nicely into my moule à charnière.

You’ve no idea how difficult it is to find proper cake tins here in France so when LeClerc had brought in a pile of stuff for a baking sale a couple of years ago I bought two – a large one and a small one that fits into an air fryer.

Yes, I have a cunning plan about that.

Earlier on I’d taken out of the freezer the last of the pizza dough, and while the cake was baking I was busy defrosting and then assembling my pizza.

When I was satisfied that the cake was baked properly I put the pizza in to bake and while it was baking I rolled out the biscuit dough and cut out the biscuits.

Once the pizza was cooked I put the biscuits in the oven and while they were baking I ate the pizza.

So now I have a Christmas Cake, a Christmas pudding, 40 ginger and orange biscuits and a partridge in a pear tree and I’m totally exhausted. I really am.

What I should have done today is to edit a radio programme but I’ve not had time as yet and right now I don’t have the energy to even move. I’ll have a hot drink and then go to bed.

But while I was making my hot drink the phone rang yet again. For several years in the early 1970s I had a girlfriend whom I knew from school. However we ended up going our separate ways, as you do when you’re that kind of age.

In 2006 Liz (not “this” Liz but “that” Liz”) and I were on our way from a meeting of the Disabled Students Group in Bristol (Liz was in charge of Student Support and I was on the Disability Committee) to a University Region 9 Meeting in Newcastle upon Tyne.

We stopped off at a pub in between Shrewsbury and Oswestry for a meal, and who should walk in?

Quite honestly, you could have put her in her school uniform and she would have been exactly as I remembered her – not a single day older.

Since then, we’ve kept in some kind of desultory touch.

So now that I’ve had my hot drink I’m going to go to bed. A good sleep will do me good, as long as I don’t have the person with the hatpin again.

Tuesday 14th December 2021 – LOOK AT THIS!

Here’s my Christmas cake, all finished and almost ready to eat. And doesn’t it look nice?

The icing is a bit hit-and-miss unfortunately as I don’t have a proper palette knife to spread it. And the icing is a little too runny so it’s slowly sliding down to the bottom so every hour or so I have to scrape it back up again.

Maybe overnight it might set in which case it will be fine but let’s hope so.

All that I can say is that considering my first go at icing a large cake like this, I haven’t done too badly although I’m the first to admit that I have a lot to learn about baking a cake.

But in bed last night I wouldn’t have learnt anything because I spent much of the time trying all I could to drop off to sleep.

It must have worked at some point because I was off on my travels at one or two points. I’ve no idea what was happening at first but according to the dictaphone but I was definitely off on my travels with all kinds of animals and horrific things going on there for 10 minutes while I was asleep.

Later on, Matthew was giving a speech on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR last night. Apparently when it comes to unloading a zodiac it’s always the infirm people who leave first and leave the fit people behind so that they can have a better control of the boat and everything that’s going on. But it seemed that someone concealed their illness, let everyone else leave the boat first until there was just him and the driver. Then this guy couldn’t leave the boat – he wasn’t able to. There was only the driver to help him. While the driver was concentrating on dealing with this guy the zodiac was out of control and they risked losing the zodiac as well as the two people on it while all this was happening. He was not impressed at all and gave the audience what amounted to a real dressing down about this kind of behaviour. He insisted that the infirm people should leave the zodiac first and people should accept their responsibilities and accept their limitations and not put the whole party at risk.

Later on a former friend of mine and I were down in the Auvergne last night. We needed some product of something or other so we had to drive back to Stoke on Trent to fetch it. We took some stuff back with us with the idea that we could do some work on his house while we were there. We hadn’t heard anything from his wife so we did it anyway. He drove back and I was a passenger in this sports car thing. The arrangement was that I’d drive back to the Auvergne and he’d be passenger. It was very tiring of course and we had to set a route, like 3 hours for this bit which would normally take 2, etc. It took ages to get back and we arrived in Stoke on Trent and the first thing that we did was to fall into a bed fully clothed and went to sleep. Shortly afterwards, Zero of all people came in. She saw us both and got into bed with us, being very little-girly. She came and snuggled up to me so I snuggled up to her as well.

Yes, not very often at all that I’m lucky enough to snuggle up to Zero during the night, is it? Add to that the events of the other night when I was back at school and things are looking up.

As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I wish that my daylight hours would be as exciting as what goes on during the night.

There was much more going on during the night too but as you are probably eating your meal right now I won’t put you off your food by talking to you about it.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages I sat down to revise my Welsh from last week. Only to find that I’d forgotten most of what I’d learnt. This teflon brain that I have is really getting on my nerves.

There weren’t too many of us in the lesson this morning, considering that it’s the last of the year. And to my surprise, it passed well enough. Revising and preparing an hour or so before the lesson seems to be a good idea.

After lunch, I decided to marzipan the Christmas cake.

With no apricot jam I had to use blackcurrant jam but that seemed to work just fine. I warmed the marzipan in my hands, coated the worktop with flour and then rolled out the marzipan.

It was rolled out rather thin so I built it up with a couple of layers and given half a chance and more marzipan I would have made it thicker. It’s rather thinner than you might expect in a Christmas cake but as I have said earlier, I have a lot to learn.

By now it was time for me to go out and about on my post-prandial perambulations.

First stop was over to the end of the car park to look down onto the beach to see what was going on down there. And seeing as there wasn’t all that much beach on which anything could be going on, I wasn’t expecting very much to be going on at all.

And consequently I wasn’t disappointed. There wasn’t anyone at all down there that I could see this afternoon. There didn’t even seem to be anyone walking around on the promenade at the Plat Gousset either.

Mind yuo, there was something going on right out in the Baie de Granville.

From my vantage point on the cliffs I could see something moving in the raincloud out at sea so I photographed it with the aim of enhancing it when I’m back at home to see if I could find out who it might be.

The colour scheme gave me some kind of clue though. If I had to guess at this range I would have said that it may well be Philcathane.

Anyway, whoever she might be, she was the only thing out there that I could see moving around out at sea.

And it wasn’t just out at sea or on the beach at the Rue du Nord that there was next-to-no activity.

Down at the bench by the Cabanon Vauban there wasn’t a soul either. There were one or two people wandering around on the path down below, but no-one stopping for a rest.

But then there was nothing happening out at sea here, there wasn’t a sunset of any description to admire and the Brittany coast round by Cancale was obscured by clouds. And so I pushed off along the path around to the other side of the headland.

Yesterday I posted a photo of the portable boat lift because it looked as if there had been something going on with it during the day.

So when I arrived at the viewpoint overlooking the chantier naval I could see that they have been doing yet more work on it.

Yesterday it was in grey rust-proof primer but today it’s been painted again and now has its top-coat of a nice off-white. And it really does look nice painted like that.

It can’t be long now until it’s finished and we’re back at work down there. It’s been very quiet over the last couple of months around here with no boats under repair down there.

The last time that I looked, L’Omerta was tied up at the fish processing plant.

She’s not there today though. Moored in her place was one of the smaller trawlers – Chant de Sirenes – “Song of the Mermaids”.

It looks to me as if she’s either unloading her catch right now or loading up a pile of catch boxes because there are some men working in the stern of the boat and there are some others up on the quayside with a pile of boxes that are identical to those in the stern.

Why they are doing it from above I really don’t know. It’s much easier to load up the boat from the level down below.

As I was turning for home I looked round, just in time to see the trawler that we had seen earlier come into harbour.

And there’s no need to do anything to the photo back at the apartment because we can see quite clearly who she is from here.

She is in fact Philcathane, coming back in from a day’s fishing out at sea.

And so I headed for home, surprising a couple of kids aged about 11 or 12 having a crafty cigarette behind a hedge as I walked past.

After a coffee I started to ice my Christmas cake and while it ought to be done better, I’m still reasonably pleased with what I’ve done.

Tea was a curry out of the freezer and now, rather later than intended, I’m off to bed. I’ve a 06:00 start in the morning so I need to make to most of what remains of the night.

Sunday 12th December 2021 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve been overflown by a light aeroplane?

At one time it was regularly every day, day after day, week after week, but we haven’t been so blessed for quite some considerable time.

But not to worry. Today, while I was out and about on my afternoon walk I heard the familiar sound and looking up, I noticed that at long last, someone had taken to the air while I was out and about on my post-prandial perambulation.

And it’s an aeroplane that is well-known to all of us. She’s 50SA – a light aeroplane whose registration number is not recorded in any database that I’ve been able to access so regrettably I can’t tell you anything about her and she won’t have filed a flight plan for me to trace either.

And strangely enough, she wasn’t the only airborne machine that overflew me this afternoon either.

Someone else had their chopper out this afternoon and it overflew me as I walked along the path on top of the headland.

This is a machine that I don’t actually recognise and unfortunately I can’t read her registration number. Black on khaki was never a good colour combination.

She was flashing a strobe light as she flew by overhead and I was lucky enough to capture the flash of the light when I took the photo. And then she cleared off down the Baie de Mont St Michel in the general direction of the Pointe de Carolles.

It was moving much quicker than I did this morning. Although I was awake at about 09:00 – which was a surprise in itself – it was much more like 10:00 when I finally plucked up the courage to crawl out of bed

After the medication and checking my mails and medication, I started work. And me working on a Sunday is an exciting event in itself.

First job was to listen to all three radio programmes that I’ll be posting off on Monday afternoon. There’s the one for next weekend of course, and then my Christmas Eve special, and finally the concert that I’m producing for New Year’s Eve.

And the latter one is a belter, from Boston on New Year’s Eve 1976 and you can find out more about that on new Year’s Eve.

While I was doing that, the first job to be done was to check the recordings that I’d made last night. They were all reasonable so I posted them off to whoever it is who is undertaking to produce them. Ordinarily I would have done that but I have far too much going on anyway as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and in any case, it’s not my project.

Second thing was to edit all of the photos from last night. They are all done so I’ve been playing around with a three-column *.css display in order to show them. This is going to take a day or two to finish because while the display works fine, it needs some tweaking.

And that involves the “PARETO” principle, where the first 80% of the work takes 20% of the effort, and the remaining 20% of the work involves 80% of the effort, and that’s where I’m at right now

The third thing that needed doing was to transcribe the dictaphone notes from last night. The BBC still had squatters in its roof after several years and had finally received a legal ruling that it could evict them. A man and woman set out upstairs to throw these people out because they weren’t expecting any particular trouble from them. One person there was wielding a machete and when the woman tried to put her hand on someone the person with the machete chopped this woman’s thumb off. When I say “upstairs” in Broadcasting House it was something like the attic at my house. It wasn’t anything big or anything like that. There were no more than 3 pr 4 people in there.

Later on we were all moving out of our family home. The family had fallen apart, the parents had separated, all that kind of thing. I found to my surprise that the family home was in my name so I was going to have to sell it and buy somewhere else. My parents – my father had left home a long time ago and my mother, we don’t know what was to become of her and we kids had to fend for ourselves. I wanted to put the house on the market but it was a real mass and would take years to tidy it up. I made a start but no-one else seemed particularly keen. A few people came round to interview us – to find out when was the last time they saw their father. Someone said “1972”. It was all really depressing for everyone. A neighbour asked if she could come round and pick up something. I said “not before 18:00 as I have to go and do shopping after work”. She said that she didn’t think that she could make it them so I said that there’s always another day. She asked about what was happening to all of us. I said “we’ll be OK”. She asked if we were still staying at school. I replied “no, we’re all going to have to go out and work on the island but we’ll manage”.

There were the usual interruptions – like a coffee in the morning and lunch as usual at 13:00. Porridge and toast with yet more coffee.

This afternoon has been really exciting. I’ve made my Christmas cake.

After lunch I started to mix everything, making sure this time that I followed the instructions very carefully. And if it will taste as nice as the mixture did when I sampled some, it will really be delicious. This orange-and-vanilla marinade mix that I made seems to have worked a treat

After it went into the oven I came back in here to sit down where I actually dozed off for 15 minutes. Mixing that cake was hard work, harder than I realised.

Later on, I went out for my afternoon walk as usual.

First port of call was at the wall at the end of the car park where I could look down at what was happening on the beach.

There wasn’t anyone down there this afternoon which is a surprise after all of those people there yesterday in the rainstorm. The weather was much nicer this afternoon (which isn’t, unfortunately, saying much) and there were a few more people out and about.

But not on the beach this afternoon.

There wasn’t anything at all going on in the Baie de Granville this afternoon.

Not a single boat of any description out there as far as I could see. And I could see a little better than I could over the last couple of days and, again, that’s not saying all that much either.

The Ile de Chausey was plainly visible this afternoon even if it was all grey and depressing. We could see the houses out there on the island and that makes a pleasant change too from how things have been just recently.

It was round by here that I took a photo of the light aeroplane that overflew me, and having done that I pushed on along the path.

Out in the Baie de Mont St Michel there was a yacht manoeuvring around.

And that’s the first pleasure boat that we’ve seen out there at sea for a good while too.

It first came to my attention as I was walking down the path and across the car park towards the end of the headland. I’d been hoping to catch some people relaxing on the bench at the end of the headland but once again there wasn’t anyone down there.

No fishermen down there on the rocks either – it’s been a while since we’ve seen any of them either.

From there I walked off along the path on the other side of the headland towards the port.

The sea didn’t look all that rough this afternoon despite the almost-complete absence of sea-going craft so I waited for a few minutes to see what the waves were going to produce, to replace the miserable effort that I’d taken yesterday.

It must have been about 10 minutes that I was standing there waiting for something rather dramatic but in the end I wandered away, somewhat disappointed in what I’d seen.

Mind you, I bet that the person walking on top of the wall was rather pleased that nothing happened.

And as I walked away, further on down the road, I head a tremendous crash against the sea wall.

Luckily I had the camera ready so I was able to take full advantage of the aftermath and took a really good photo of the wave subsequently soaring up over the sea wall.

Back here I made another coffee and spent some time giving a good roll to the pizza dough that I’d taken out of the freezer earlier.

When the pizza dough had risen sufficiently I assembled my pizza and when the time was up on the cake I took it out and put the pizza in.

The cake wasn’t cooked enough on the bottom so I put it back in while I ate my pizza. The pizza was delicious but the bottom of the cake still wasn’t cooked so I put it in without the dish – just on the baking paper.

And that was when I realised that the baking paper isn’t as fireproof as I thought. But at least the bottom is properly cooked now.

So while that’s cooling, I’m going to bed. I have a 06:00 start in the morning to prepare another radio programme for the future and I need to be completely on form for that.

Not that that is ever likely to happen though.

Wednesday 25th December 2019 – MERRY CHRISTMAS …

… to all my readers!

usually in the past I’ve inserted some kind of reference to Crewe Bus Station in here but I stopped doing that a while back because everyone was becoming bored with the same old thing.

But these days, seeing as I have many new readers, especially from the other side of the Atlantic who wouldn’t understand the significance, I reckon I should tell it again.

The most significant place where I saw this written was on the wall of the public convenience in Crewe Bus Station, and I noticed it while I was admiring the … err … unusual artwork on the walls.

In fact it was studying the unusual artwork that helped me gain a good pass in my General Certificate in Education. It went into far more detail and was much more useful than anything I had ever learnt in Biology class at school.

It was also at the Public Conveniences in Crewe Bus Station where I dashed in one evening after a heavy night on the Boddington’s at the Lion and Swan.
“Phew!” I exclaimed. “Just made it!”.
The guy standing next to me had a quick glance and said “Blimey! Can you make me one like it?”

Yes, the old ones are the best, aren’t they?

Anyway, I hope that you had a very good Christmas and that Santa brought you everything that you deserve.

So where was I and what was I doing at midnight then?

The answer is “admiring the sluice out of the inner wet harbour in the port”. Yes, I did say that I was going for a prowl around the town at midnight to see what was happening there.

The tide was well out and as the harbour gates were closed, I walked over the footway on top to the other side of the harbour.

From the footway there was a good view of the boats in the harbour and many of our old friends are there tonight.

From left to right we have Granville and Victor Hugo, the two ferries that run the service to the Channel islands from here, then Aztec Lady in the centre, who we saw for weeks up on blocks in the Chantier Navale just recently.

Nearest the camera in the right foreground, wrapped up in her winter attire, is Charles-Marie.

There is the odd fishing boat or two thrown in for good measure.

My wanderings took me down alongside the harbour.

Across the other side of the water the rue du Port and the old Medieval walled city were looking quite nice.

It’s the kind of view that would make a really good picture postcard view if I could just get the colour balance right.

15 minutes I’d been out before I met my first human.

Walking along the rue Lecampion was I, taking a photo of the street lights, when someone came round the corner towards me. He rattled the handles of a couple of bars in the street (to no avail) and then disappeared up an alleyway and that was that.

As for me, I carried on along the way home and haf-way up the rue des Juifs I encountered my second and third people. As you can see, France is nothing like the UK on Christmas Eve.

Back here, I had an alcohol-free beer out of the stock and then changed the strings on the Ibanez acoustic bass. Happy Christmas to the bass – it could do with some new strings and it sounds so much better now.

On that … err … note I went to bed.

No alarm in the morning, so waking up at 04:00 was not part of the plan. Neither was waking up at 07:00. Or 09:30. 10:45 is a much more realistic time to haul myself out of bed on Christmas Day.

And despite the length of time that I was in the arms of Morpheus, I can only remember some guy standing in s stream having a water-fight with an elephant, and the elephant playfully knocking him over into the water with his trunk a few times. And then the guy walking off down along the stream.

At breakfast we had a crisis. I had my fig roll as an extra, but the jam – well, I hadn’t checked it for ages and it’s one of those jams that doesn’t have anything in it to preserve it once it’s opened.

So it went in the bin and I had to have my fig roll dry.

Once breakfast was over, I turned my attention to more exciting things.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m changing things around in my life just now. I’ve stopped buying fizzy drinks in bottles and I’ve started to make my own soft drinks.

A couple of days ago I started to prepare a lemon and ginger drink and here it is, in the drinks dispenser that I bought the other day from LIDL.

Three lemons and a small ginger root peeled and sliced up really small, and then boiled up in water that just covers them and then an inch over.

After 10 minutes, set to simmer for an hour or so, and the moment it comes off the boil, a couple of tablespoons of honey added.

Left to chill for a coupe of days and then sieve to remove the lumps, add to the drinks dispenser and fill up with water.

Meanwhile, go through the process again with the lemon and ginger that was sieved out. That’ll be ready in a couple of days and after that I’ll try something else.

But it’s very refreshing – and very gingery too! Maybe somewhat less ginger next time.

For the rest of the day I didn’t do very much at all. Just chilled out and chatted to a few people on the internet. It was nice to catch up with friends.

No lunch either. A couple of slices of the fig and raisin bread and a nibble on stuff here and there.

And while I was mooching around, I came across one of our old Christmas Specials from the days when I used to run Radio Anglais.

Liz and I used to have a great laugh doing these and it’s a shame that my health can’t keep up with things now. I could dash off a programme like that in a couple of hours back in those days, but not now!

Somewhat later than usual, I went for my afternoon perambulation around the headland.

And while I was standing on the cliff overlooking the sea admiring the naval craft going by, I fell in with Xavier, one of the people from my new employers and we had a chat for a little while.

And then I pushed on – or pushed off, as the case may be.

The speedboat wasn’t the only thing out there this afternoon enjoying the weather.

Whilst there wasn’t much going on in the way of commercial traffic today, there was a fair bit of pleasure traffic. A couple of yachts, one of which was this one, were sailing around in the Baie de Mont St Michel.

They obligingly posed for me, which was nice of them.

Here’s something that I haven’t noticed before. Well, I have, but I’ve not paid it any attention until today.

At first glance it loks like a rock face, and not just a pretty rock face either. On closer inspection, it looks as if it’s the mouth of a tunnel that’s been bricked up.

And that’s got me all curious. I wonder what it was and where it went. I shall have to look into it.

I’d gone the long way round, in case you hadn’t realised, down the new bit of path and along the old road.

This route brings me out by the Chantier Navale where I could see Spirit of Conrad still stuck up on her ramps, with a fishing boat for company.

One thing that I was hoping to do was to have an update on the former and a description of the work to be carried out on the latter but as you might expect, there was no-one about.

My route took me right into town and then round a couple of back streets before making for home. And depressing as it is to recount, there was absolutely nothing going on at all in town. A few people about, but wandering aimlessly around, like me.

Back here, I carried on doing very little until tea time. And then I attacked the food.

First thing was to cut up some potatoes into cubes, coat them with olive oil and put them in the oven to roast.

Then a seitan slice with gravy put likewise in the oven.

Some veg, including leeks (I like to have a leek with my Christmas meal), and endive and some Brussels sprouts (not Lincolnshire sprouts of course, the sad, pathetic fools), and what is Christmas without Brussels sprouts, cooked properly?

And here you are, one Christmas dinner. Cooked to perfection.

And take my word for it. The meal really was delightful. I enjoyed it very much, as you might expect and I’ll be going back for more.

As for pudding, well of course it should have been Christmas pudding but I was running terribly late.

And in any case, I had something else planned. My Christmas present from Liz and Terry is, as always, a vegan Christmas cake. And so for pudding tonight I had a slice of that.

And that was just as good as it usually is.

It was cold and windy tonight on my somewhat late walk. And no-one around either. I didn’t see a soul.

No photos – it was too cold to go hunting for anything special to photograph – but I did manage my run, even if it was only just.

And with the fitbit showing 93%, I went and did another lap around to reach the 100% marker. At least it’s pushing me onwards, this fitbit.

It’s now 02:55 – no surprise seeing as I had a very long lie-in this morning. I’ve been doing nothing since I came back, and I’ve only just finished writing up my journal.

So now it’s bed time. I wonder what time I’ll wake up tomorrow.

And I hope that you had a good day today.

night old town port de granville harbour manche normandy france

yacht baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france

Sunday 8th December 2019 – I REALLY DON’T KNOW …

… what is happening right now but the clock seems to be running down rather rapidly and I don’t seem to be doing anything at all.

And there’s a huge backlog of work and I just don’t seem to be getting through any of it.

Last night I was up until some ridiculous hour sorting out the day’s photos and videos. Much later than usual, and much later than I hoped, I tottered off to bed.

There were a few travels during the night too. I’d been on board the ship again that might have been The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour and I’d made friends with three different women and girls. I’d been spending quite a lot of time with them. On the last night we had to leave the shop at about 03:00 and one of the girls – it might have been but I don’t think it was Castor – said something like “why don’t you come down to my room tonight?” Another one of the women had said exactly the same thing to me as well, so I replied that I’d see how things develop. Then she discovered me on the deck of this other girl with my suitcase – quite obvious where I was going so she said “yes will I see you or won’t I?” I said “it’s pretty hard to say. I have to go round to say my goodbyes to people” – pretty non-committal as I had intended. Then we got talking about this third woman She was a flighty type and I hadn’t seen her around that day. “What happened to her?” I asked. “She was supposed to be round her tonight too” “Ohh she got sent home from the tour last night. Didn’t you know?” replied the first woman. “Ahh well” I thought. “That’s why I didn’t see her”. There was another couple on board the ship who talked to me (I had more passengers talk to me in my sleep last night that I did in the whole two months that I was really on board) and they talked about us going dancing. My attention fastened on the girl however so I said I’d see how things develop. But things had obviously developed quite dramatically and quite rapidly after that as I wasn’t allowed to see this girl at all. I was basically shunted off into this corner and it was too late to make arrangements with anyone else. We all filed off the ship, the last day, last morning. I bumped into someone. “Hey, did you hear about such and such a woman” the conversation went. “What happened to her?” “She got sent home” all the usual kind of gossip. We were waiting near a tram stop and I noticed that Castor (so it very likely was Castor earlier) was actually standing at the stop waiting for a tram. I thought it’s our final day and we’re all going. Now that Castor is on her own whould I go over and speak to her, try to make my peace and salvage something of what had all gone wrong. I was debating things – should I or shouldn’t I go over there? In the end I decided that I would. Someone asked “are you coming up to us, Eric?” I said that I’d see how I feel but I have one or two things to organise. I thought that with Castor I could just go for a walk around the town, a chat anything, as long as we were together but that was when I awoke at that particular moment. This was another one of these occasions, of which there have been far too many just recently, where I have been plagued by a wicked kind of indecision during the night and it’s becoming quite a regular pattern. However, the bit about being too late when I finally make up my mind is rather a new twist to this although it does have quite a bit of relevance.
There was also a bit somewhere in here about us on the docks and we had to go to the islands. Some were going to the British islands of course and the trader but I was going to the little offshore island. I can’t remember his name but the girl came out to see me go, found me in the state of a swamp and got the girl Crystal to come and take over the business. Of course they didn’t want you and your party to be there. They wanted the glory that came from the Government but without the other party being there too, and make it happen (anf if you can understand any of that garbled nonsense, please let me know).
Somewhat later I was at some hotel in Germany in a Bavarian type of setting there and had to go to the airport and call a taxi. It needed to be quick and the taxi turned up. I had tons of luggage and the driver was just wedging it into the boot any old how so I had a word with him about that. Then we set off for the airport and then I don’t remember very much about this after that.
Later still I was given my shopping list – a pile of potatoes, at least 10 really thick milk of +10% and coffee. When I came back the barrels of coffee had been arranged like an entrance to the town and this was upsetting one or two people. Someone made the remark that Americans aren’t like this but I said that there is certainly some who are and anyone who has ever read anything I’ve written will know that while I’m pretty much opposed to the USA I’ve always said that when I’ve found Americans on their own I’ve found them very nice, friendly and charming people.

As you can see, it was a very busy night last night. Quite exhausting in fact so it will be no surprise to anyone that when I awoke at 07:30 I simply turned over and went back to bed. 09:45 is much more like it on a Sunday.

By the time that I was wined and dined etc, it was almost 11:00 and the first thing that I did, that I haven’t done for a while, was to back up the computer. I’ve been somewhat lax from that point of view just recently and I can’t afford to make to many errors in this respect.

That took longer than it should have done too so there wasn’t much time left to start yesterday’s blog before I had to go down into town to buy my dejeunette for lunch.

The harbour gates were closed so I could walk that way round on the walkway over the top of the gates and around the harbour.

And I’m glad that I went that way too because while I was standing on the edge of the harbour looking at some of the fishing equipment I fell in with a couple of people of the fisherman-type who clearly knew what they were talking about, so I seized the opportunity to ask them about this equipment that has been puzzling me for quite a while.

And they are indeed shellfish dredgers. They scape them along the sea bed to uproot the shellfish. The shellfish stay in the cage but the silt is washed out.

So having satisfied myself on that score I could move on.

Chausiais is now back in her berth, moored in the inner harbour next to her fellow ship Joly France, so we could say “hello” to her, and then push on to the shops to buy my dejeunette for lunch.

It’s certainly a good idea for me to come out in the morning-ish for my lunchtime dejeunette every day. I need to exercise much more than I do and this is all good for me.

After lunch I carried on with the blog entry – just one of the five or six things that I needed to do today before I did anything else, but ran out of time before I’d even finished that one.

Liz and Terry are leaving in a few days so I’d been invited round there to Roncey for tea. Rather embarrassing because Liz’s birthday present hasn’t arrived yet and neither have their Christmas presents.

But never mind. Off I went into the wind and rain (strangely enugh, coming back with my bread earlier I’d been thinking to myself that the walks seemed to have missed most of the rainstorms just recently, and almost immediately the rain had started up), stopping at LeClerc to fill up with diesel.

And here’s a thing. The diesel that I put in prior to this was put in in March, and the time before that was 8th October last year. And neither of those three fills was filled right up. In a little over 13 months I’ve travelled about 700kms – a far cry from the first two years when I owned Caliburn and did 66,000 kms.

It’s been a good while since I had the chance to have a good chat to Liz and Terry – so much so that it was almost 22:00 by the time that I left. Left with a carrier bag too because not only was there my Christmas present (more of which anon) but the remains of the meal- vegetable wellington with carrots, broccoli and fried parsnips. And apple turnover cake too.

They do look after me, and it’s nice.

So a drive back here and it’s very late and I’ve still not caught up with everything. Yesterday’s blog is still in a “to be continued” state, I’ve not done today’s photographs and, even worse, this week’s project is far from finished and it needs to be done by 09:15 tomorrow morning.

But I can’t do it now because I’m far too tired and I’ll just make mistakes.

Looks as if an early start is on the cards.

Wednesday 2nd January 2019 – IT DIDN’T …

… work out like it ought to have done last night.

I was so engrossed with what I was doing, as well as chatting to a friend in North America, that it was well after 02:00 when I realised the time. So much for my early night.

Nevertheless, despite any kind of temptation, I still had the alarms set for 06:00 etc and I was there or thereabouts when they went off. But as for rising from my stinking pit, well, I wasn’t quite so prompt.

We had the usual morning procedure of course and then after a brief relax with a few things that I intended to do, I set to work.

By the time that lunchtime had come round, I’d written a huge pile of letters, which involved a great deal of research, and printed them out. I’m glad that I had bought my new printer because it was simplicity itself and the printer did well.

But I’ve put the kiss of death upon it because I’ve ordered some spare ink off the internet. That’s enough to kill off any printer.

In fact, I’ve ordered a pile of stuff from the internet just now. A new computer screen as I mentioned, together with a powered USB hub and a keyboard for the new computer. As well as that, I’ve ordered a new 60-litre rucksack for my trips to Leuven and a power converter for the Roland bass cube so that I can restart the bass-playing.

And much to my surprise, by the end of the evening I noticed that some of the stuff was on its way.

After lunch I had a shower and a clean-up, seeing that even I was beginning to notice that I was here. And then I hit the streets – down to the Post Office to post the huge pile of letters that I had written. And it wasn’t easy in the Post Office either as the automatic machine wouldn’t read my bank card.

There was still some coffee left from this morning so I drank that when I returned, along with a slice of my Christmas present from Liz and Terry.

With having had a late night and an early start, I couldn’t keep going and by 18:00 I was stretched out on the bed under the covers. And there I stayed until about 19:30. Definitely feeling the strain, I am.

As a result, tea was rather late. The rest of the falafel from the other day, seeing as it had been hanging around for a few weeks, with pasta, veg and tomato sauce.

Later on this evening, I went out for my evening walk.

The weather outside was really beautiful this evening, even if it was cold out there tonight.

The air was clear though and I could see for miles, all the way down past St Malo and along the Brittany coast.

So how about an early night tonight? This afternoon I made a start on another project and that is going to take a lot of work. But there’s a time limit involved and it’s quite important. Some of the letters that I wrote are in connection with this, but the Lord helps those who help themselves and years of bitter experience have told me that I can’t ever rely on anyone else to do things for me.

And so I need my sleep.

night st helier jersey granville manche normandy france

very blurred night brehal sur mer granville manche normandy france

night donville sur mer granville manche normandy france

Tuesday 1st January 2019 – AND A VERY …

… Happy New Year. Not just from me, but from someone else here in Granville too.

I’m grateful for all of the support and encouragement that everyone has given me over the last year. It’s the kind of thing that has kept me going.

As well as that, I’m also even more grateful to everyone who has given me hospitality over the year during my perambulations around the Northern Hemisphere. I may not have many friends, as I have said … “and on many occasions too” – ed … but those I have are the best friends in the world.

So back to the story.

Having complained about sleep issues for as long as I have, it’s much more exciting to report that today, I left my bed at all of … errr … 11:22. And breakfasting at 12:00 is much more like what I expect to see on a Bank Holiday.

I’d been on my travels during the night too. Into a veg shop in Germany to buy a couple of carrots. I’d pressed the key on the automatic machine and the carrots came down into the scales to be weighed, and then I had to go to the counter to pick them up and pay for them. However, I couldn’t remember the German word for “carrots”. In Flemish it’s wortelen and so I tried that, but the shop assistant didn’t understand me. I pointed to the carrots and she still didn’t understand.

After breakfast, or lunch, or whatever you might call it, I had a task to perform.

There was an upgrade proposed a while ago by my blog host but I put off doing the upgrade. However it was forced upon me and while I was in Leuven I performed the upgrade.

And it’s terrible.

The old interface was a simple text-based interface where I could (and did) add my own handwritten *.html coding which I saved in blocks in my text-ediiting program and which I used for every web site on which I worked.

But this upgrade wants everything done in blocks with the *.html coding incorporated into the site itself, and adding the search indices is next-to-impossible and is the most complicated procedure that I have ever seen – especially on a slow connection.

So while I’ve been trying to figure it out (or find another blog interface that does what I want) I’ve been recording my blog entries in my text editor.

Anyway, I’ve given up. It’s not working, and so I’ll have to go with what I’ve got. And that meant adding 6 days-worth of blog entries and editing the indices manually.

That’s what I’ve been doing today.

At last, I could open my Christmas present from Liz and Terry. And now that you can see it in all of its glory, you can see that it was well-worth waiting for.

And it really is delicious too.

This evening we had football. Welsh Premier League basement clash between Carmarthen and Llanelli. Carmarthen aren’t that good but they ran rings round Llanelli who looked determined to shoot themselves in the foot.

Some of Llanelli’s defending was suicidal. They just couldn’t get the ball out of their own defence and tried to play the ball around, losing possession on several occasions in desperate positions. Carmarthen won 2-0 – both goals coming from Llanelli mistakes.

On this showing, Llanelli look well-and-truly doomed and we’re only half-way through the season. And depending who comes up from tier two in the south next season, Carmarthen need to start to think about what they intend to do.

Tea was a vegan burger with a pile of veg and gravy. Totally delicious, as was the endive that I had as a treat.

Outside tonight for my walk, and there was no-one around at all. I didn’t see a soul.

That was quite a surprise because despite the cold, it was a really beautiful, clear, starry night.

There was some cloud pretty high up in the sky over St Malo, and the reflection of the streetlights was magnificent. The town of Cancale, over there across the bay, was nicely illuminated too.

Back to work tomorrow – I have such a lot to do. So I won’t be hanging around too long. An early night is beckoning and if I’m lucky I might just make it too.

Friday 5th January 2018 – USELESS LOAD OF BANKERS!

I actually managed to struggle into town this morning.

And it’s just as well that I did too.

my early night didn’t work out as well as it ought to have done because I was wide awake at 05:00. Never mind the former times when the alarm used to go off at 06:00 (and it will again, starting next week) – by 06:00 I was sitting on the sofa having had my medication.

After breakfast, I had a shower and a good clean up, and then spent a good hour or two collecting all of the paperwork that I needed. And I’ glad that I did too because I had a nasty surprise.

But never mind that for a moment. First stop was the Police Station to complete the paperwork about my missing wallet. He had a grouch and a growl because, in his opinion, the work that they had done in Paris was bidon. But at least I now have a temporary driving licence so that I can legally use Caliburn.

And then we went to the Bank ready for a battle.

My bank cards are ready so I picked them up. And I paid a bill that need to be paid, and then battle commenced.

I shan’t bore you with all of the details. But a brief recap is that when I moved here, I went into the bank to open an account here, to close down my account in Pionsat, and to transfer all of my payments to the new account.

And then we’ve had the long sorry story of how everything seems to have gone wrong – a relentless stream of failures and incidents that have shaken my faith in the bank.

But today was the final straw. It seems that they haven’t closed the accounts in Pionsat at all, all of my payments have been paid in duplicate and I’ve been paying bank charges on two accounts that I don’t use.

Anyway I left them busily repainting the woodwork where the paint had blistered off in the heat. They are going to sort it out, so they say, but we’ll just wait until the next disaster. The Credit Agricole here in Granville is like lurching from one catastrophe to another, and my finances are catastrophic enough without any help from my useless load of Bankers.

But the most telling part of all of this was the question “who dealt with your affairs? Was it Madame xxxxx?”
Well, as a matter of fact it was. And having heard one or two stories, I’m not surprised that her name cropped up without any prompting.

Next stop was the Post Office to renew the redirection of my mail. That’s important because of my driving licence issues, more of which anon.

And here we had the delightful, typical Post Office scene of a crowd of people waiting in a queue while no less than THREE assistants dealt with one customer.

Everyone was fuming so I turned to the woman behind me
Our hero – “typical Civil Servants. No idea whatever about the Real WOrld. They should be made to take 6 months unpaid leave every five years and come and scratch around for a living like the rest of us and see what it’s like to live in the Real WOrld”
Woman behind me – “I’m a Civil Servant”.

Final port of call was at the Driving School.

To apply for a replacement driving licence on line, I nedd a special kind of certified official photograph and I had no idea where to obtain one. They would know, of course.

And indeed they did. So next time that I’m out on the town I can pay a visit.

When I returned home Liz was on line so we had a chat, and then it was lunchtime.

After lunch I did some tidying up and even had the vacuum cleaner out for a while. And I’ve made a few plans about organising myself better. If that works, I’ll be amazed because it’s never worked before. But all of this time spent hunting down paperwork is totally absurd.

Havng had a little (well, more than a little) snooze and an hour or so on the bass, I made tea. Baked potatoes and beans with cheese. And my vegan cheese slices will melt if I break them up and put them with the beans in the microwave.

And for pudding, some of Liz’s Christmas cake.

To finish off the day, I’ve been for a walk. It was slow and painful but I did it. So I’m hoping that I’ll have a decent night’s sleep tonight.

Final word must go to my former colleague and friend Anne-Marie. She joined the EU the same time that I did and we went round together for a while, even going on a skiing trip together for a week in Bulgaria. I’ve heard on the grapevine that she received her long-service medal from work the other daY.

Sp hats off to her.

Monday 25th December 2017 – MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE

If you’ve made it this far then you are all doing very well and I’m impressed. I’m also grateful that you’ve kept on reading. It’s something to help your turkey slide down the digestive tract.

As for me, last night I almost fell asleep in the middle of watching a film. So I crawled myself off to bed. And aftr an hour or so I awoke and started to have another one of these nuit blanches. Strangely enough I didn’t feel at al bad about it – and that’s a change.

Somewhere during the night I did drop off, and went off on one of my rambles. And we had a couple of strange people either making their acting debuts or first appearances for a considerable length of time.

I was back running my taxis again. And on Saturday mornings when I was having a lie-in the telephone was manned by Wendy (wherever did she spring from?) and Simon came in for a couple of hours to deal with breakdowns and do a little mechanical work. I’d been assembling a kind of breakdown kit and even cobbled together an old Jeep Patriot kitted out with emergency stuff for him. BUt when I came downstairs he hadn’t come in to work. So I rang him to ask where he was, and he gave me a list of things that he’d been doing instead. Clearly he had no intention of coming in to work again. So I explained that he was free to go if he liked, but I would have appreciated a little notice so that I could have made other arrangement.
I was also in Canada during the night. I’d booked a room in a motel and they knew that I didn’t intend to arive until the small hours. And so I turned up at about 03:00, was given the key to the room looking forward to crashing out in it straight away – and it was filthy; Hadn’t been cleaned for a month and someone had even tried to light a fire in it, leaving cinders and charred wood all over the place. Even worse than that Motel 6 in North Virginia.

Although I woke up on several occasions during the night, it was at about 09:30 when I arose from my bed. And after my medication I sent out a whole stream of cheery greetings to people on the internet.

One or two of the sites on my social networking were running a couple of quizzes so I passed a very entertaining morning, punctuated only by a pause for breakfast.

The paté that I had bought for Christmas lunch – it wasn’t mushroom paté at all. I’d made a mistake. I remembered that they had none, so I had bought garlic and fine herb paté instead. Nevertheless, it was equally delicious on hot buttered toast, and I ate rather a large amount of it.

I’m glad that I had bought that toaster when I first moved in here.

Apart from that, I’ve nibbled some biscuits, some clementines, some swets and a bar of chocolate-covered marzipan.

Pride of place goes, though, without saying, to the Christmas cake.

I don’t have many friends, but those that I have are the best in the wld – quality before quantity of course – and Liz has done me proud once again this year.

Her Christmas cake is absolutely delicious. Each year it gets better and better. So good health to you, Liz.

I’ve braved the hurricanes and been out for my two walks this afternoon – and merited my two mugs of home-made hot chocolate. More than you will ever know in fact because at one point in the proceedings I was actually running down the street chasing after my hat that had Gone With The Wind. That was totally unexpected – I haven’t really run for anything for over two years and didn’t know that I still could.

Mind you, the way that I’m out of breath, I’m not sure that I can.

Final word tonight must go on the perfidy of the internet.

You’ll remember that my web browser did a real mega-upgrade at the start of the month and dumped a pile of developers and their add-ons, including my much-loved *.ftp add-on.

And how I was left high and dry without a *.ftp program for a whole three and a half weeks.

And how I spent all afternoon in a relentless (and untimately successful) attempt to program my web server?

So today, a group of developers has launched an ultra-slimmed-down web browser using the Open Source code of the browser that dropped them, and many of the dropped code modules seamed straight in. I gave it a try and my *.ftp module was picked up immediately.

It’s called Waterfox and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s the fastest browser that I’ve ever seen. No bells, no whistles, just what I want.

There will probably be a few problems to overcome but as long as it handles my file uploads seamlessly like it seems to be doing, it will be fine by me.

Friday 22nd January 2016 – MY LITTLE 3D EMPIRE MADE THE NEWS …

… during the night. Someone was using my 3D Characters and settings to make some kind of party-political broadcasts in the real world. He said that he could name ten or so names of people who were up to no good in society. We of course said “such as?”, but when he replied, he named just three names which just goes to show how much rubbish is being spoken today. We can all think of three people without being prompted and he was trying to impress us with his knowledge and … err … exaggeration.
After this, we had Nerina putting in yet another appearance on our nightly voyages. We were still married, still together and we had a small child of about 18 months. We were both in the offices of the European Union doing something there. We had parked the car in the underground car park and we were on level 25, which was well-underground. We had had a good wander around the building and Nerina had gone off for a coffee in the small coffee bar there. I’d had to do something else and ended up being considerably delayed so I had to run like the wind down the stairs into this cafe but couldn’t see Nerina at all. But who was there was one of a family from Shavington (who on earth were they?), one of three boys, who gave me an estimate for the supply of some champagne and I was taken aback by this because it was one of the other brothers who was dealing with this. He was talking to me as if I knew what was going on, which I didn’t really, and anyway I was more interested in where Nerina might be. Suddenly, he clicked. “Ohh yes, it’s my other brother who should have brought you this, isn’t it? But he’s having to drive the tractor because the third brother is ill, so he’s given all of the paperwork to me”. At this moment, Nerina put in her appearance. She’d been in the ladies’, and on coming out she didn’t see me and so went straight off upstairs. I had to separate myself from these boys who were being quite friendly (and I was enjoying them being friendly too) to go off after Nerina. She had come out on the wrong level on the car park, 2 levels further down, and had to walk back up to the car again. When I caught up with her, we got into the car adnd I asked her what the plan was for the evening. She replied that she intended to go out and get drunk. I could see that she was totally fed up about something.Trying to cheer her up, I asked her to tell me exactly what she wanted really to do. “The weekend is yours!”. By now, Nerina had transformed herself into Liz’s daughter Kit. she was really, realy depressed and I felt like saying “why don’t we wait until Friday and you come up north from London and then we’ll go on to your family home in the North-East. I’ll run you back on Sunday evening”. Somehow, though, I couldn’t make the words come out. Anyway, we ended up going to see some friends of mine who ran a junk shop. There were all kinds of things there in the shop, including a set of ancient scales for weighing a baby. Tomake it work, you put the baby on the scales and thenjumped up and down on the floor to make it vibrate. It was something like an amusement ride for the baby so that was what we were doing with ours. Whilst all of this was going on, I was stroking their young black cat – a really friendly black cat. But then I noticed a really large and fresh flea bite on the cat, just above its eye. didn’t want to stay there after seeing that, especially with the baby there. The child wasn’t to happy about having to leave its game, and Ket was unhappy because I wouldn’t tell her why we need to go. And these people were unhappy too because we were having a good time and I especially enjoyed their company.
I was off to Finland later, with a guy from Stoke on Trent who once was a very good friend of mine. We’d been out in the wilderness and come back down the dusty road to rejoin the main road (something like the road junction at the back of Baie Comeau in Quebec where Highway 389 joins Highway 138). We turned left there and a couple of hundred metres further on, we needed to turn right at another major road junction by a fuel station. There was an enormous – and I do mean enormous – traffic queue here turning right as if there was some kind of road accident or other obstruction blocking the way. We were waiting for hours to move and in the end, we became thoroughly fed up and did a U-turn to go the other way. We found some fuel, because we needed it, and then returned to the road junction. Even though we had been away for ages, we found ourselves right behind exactly the same vehicles – a big silver tanker and a caravan come to mind. They hadn’t moved an inch. However, just as we pulled up behind them, the vehicles all started to move off. We turned round the corner and almost immediately had to stop at some traffic lights. We were in the third lane, with the vehicles that were going to be turning left 100 metres further on (it’s drive-on-the-rght in Finland of course). THis was however the wrong lane – we needed to be right over on the right-hand side of the road. I wound down the window on my side (apaprently I was passenger) and put out my right hand to indicate that we intended to pull out and muscle into the traffic on the inside. When the lights changed and everyone started to move off, there was no-one on the inside of us and no car within 50 yards of us. Plenty of room for us, I thought, so I told him to put his foot down and we can go. He was much more timid than that however, saying that there were too many cars. I would have gone, and so would many others, but the result of all of this hesitation was that we lost our place. There wasn’t room for ages and so we ended up sitting there. He wouldn’t carry on to the left either, do a U-turn up the side road and come back to the main road either so we just sat there, our right-hand indicator on, waiting for a space. And of course, the inevitable happened. A car coming up behind us, seeing the green traffic light, put his foot down, not realising what we were doing, and ploughed straight into the back of us.

So that’s enough travelling for one day, in my opinion. And I don’t know where it all came from either because I had a bad night’s sleep too – not going to sleep until very late and being disturbed by all kinds of things. In fact, when I went downstairs, I crashed out, slumped over the kitchen table until the nurse arrived.

Liz and Terry went off to do the shopping after breakfast, and I carried on building my 3D set for my practical work. You may remember that this course requires me to build a 3D bedroom and fit it out as far as is practical to go so that the occupant of the room can be clearly defined by the objects on view. I’ve worked out a stunner, which I’ll show you in due course. I’ve taken 160 snapshots from different camera angles, with the camera in the ceiling and slowly spiralling down to ground level, and what I need now to find is a free mvoie-maker program to turn them all into a short 10-second film. And my ending is a killer, even though I say it myself.

I’d run out of muesli too, so Liz bought me the stuff that I need, for I make my own. Porridge oats,, corn flakes, all bran, sunflower seeds, almonds, dessicated coconut, trail mix and whatever else happens to be around the house. The best way to start the day (if the blood-man comes on time).

After lunch I sat and vegetated for a while. I really don’t remember too much of what happened. I’m clearly not feeling myself these days which is just as well because it’s a disgusting habit anyway. But to bring me round, not only did Liz make a coffee but we had some more vegan Christmas cake too, and I’m all in favour of that.

I was in bed early too – by 20:30 too. Not one of my better days, this one. I’ve so much to do before Wednesday so I beed to get myself into gear. I’m not going to make any progress at all like this.

Wednesday 30th December 2015 – AND THE ANSWER IS …

… Wrexham.

The question, for the benefit of those of you who did not read yesterday’s rubbish, was “I wonder where I’ll end up during the night?” – which was, of course, last night.

To cut a long story short … "thank you" – ed … I was in Nantwich, Pillory Street to be precise (although it wasn’t Nantwich last night) looking after Laurel and Hardy. I had to make a radio programme about them and so I had the idea of spending a day with them and just letting a tape recorder turn, so that we could crop certain highlights from the recording and make a programme from them. But the producer handed me back the tape recorder telling me that the recorder was no good and we needed to do it again. This was where the idea came in to pile them both into a car and head to Hardy’s birthplace in Wrexham, to encourage him to open out more. But all of this degenerated into something else quite unpleasant, including a scene where a couple of small boys were being chased by a group of larger lads with chain whips – something to do with an issue involving some library books. I wasn’t sorry to wake up while all of this was going on.

This morning after all of the injections and breakfast and so on, we watched the English cricket team quickly wrap up the First Test against South Africa, and then we didn’t do a great deal. I do recall an exciting game of hide-and-seek involving the two kids, Liz and Strawberry Moose, who is a keen participant in these kinds of games.

Another item on the agenda very popular with His Nibs is Story Time. There’s been no lack of that kind of entertainment here this last week or so, and here’s some more.

Everyone is clearly enjoying himself here as you can see. Even Kate, who has drawn the short straw this morning as chief reader.

After lunch, everyone went out for a long walk but I stayed in and carried on with my 3D stuff, not making a great deal of progress. I’m still not up to much unfortunately.

For tea tonight we finished off the leftovers from the last couple of days. But because the children had been especially good and had drawn some lovely pictures of Strawberry Moose, I unveiled the vegan Christmas cake and shared it out amongst the assembled multitudes.

And it will come as no surprise to any of you to learn that it tastes even better than it looks. Liz has really done me proud this Christmas and I am grateful for that.

So now I’m off to bed. A blood test in the morning so I need to be à jeun. It’s a good job that I’m totally stuffed.

But I’ve had news today to the effect that on 4th January I have to go to see the surgeon to discuss the removal of my spleen. On the 12th January I have to see the anaesthetist and sometime in mid-March I have to see the doctor for a post-operation report. This implies that the operation will take place sometime round about the end of January or the beginning of February. And the post-op appointment means that they at least expect me to survive it.

I suppose that that’s good news for me, but not for you lot. There will be loads more of this rubbish to come.

Tuesday 31st December 2013 – THE MOST ASTONISHING THING …

… happened today- so much so that it’s well-worth recording.

I have never ever talked about, much less photographed, the ground floor of this house. And for good reason too. When I bought the place back in 1998 I quickly dumped in there a pile of rubbish and since then the rubbish has been accumulating. Add to that a huge piles of damaged tiles, a couple of large piles of rubble from demolished walls and excavated floors, several bags of cement and plaster, and whatever else you can think of, then it really is a total disgrace.

On top of that, anything that doesn’t have a home anywhere else has been stuck in there to such an extent that moving around in there can definitely be a hazard to one’s health. I did once hear a story about someone who hoarded old newspapers and was crushed to death when a pile collapsed on top of her. Well, believe me, it’s not too far away from that on the ground floor.

Anyway, having said that, I was untangling a pile of cables from the equipment of the “Tower of Power” so that I can put that upstairs in the lean-to when, you’ve guessed it, I had an avalanche.

So that was that. I spent a delightful four hours this morning in the living room sorting out all kinds of stuff. New stuff into the lean-to, old good stuff ditto, plumbing fittings into the water room etc etc. That was followed by a couple of bags of paper waste into the old damaged water butt which will now be a paper receptacle, and a couple of bags of genuine rubbish into the back of Caliburn.

It doesn’t look like much of an improvement, for there’s 15 years’ worth of rubbish in there and I will need more than four hours to move all of that, but you would be surprised at the difference that it has made and now I can boldly go where no man has gone before since at least 1999. If that’s not progress then nothing is.

Another thing was that I had a bad night’s sleep. I was still wide awake at 03:00 and I was back awake again long before 07:30 when the alarm went off. Either there’s a lot of people talking about me, or else it’s my guilty conscience again.

And while it didn’t rain today, it was overcast and miserable with only the occasional glimpses of sun. We had high winds too – not like the high winds of the other day but high winds nevertheless.

After all of my exertions I knocked off for lunch at about 15:00 – late, I know, but I was on a roll – and then crashed out for a while and when I get my hands on the bank clerk from Pionsat ho woke me up with the telephone, he’ll be looking for a new set of teeth too. I was well away.

Tea was roast potatoes, broccoli, carrots, boiled potatoes, leeks, seitan slices, onion and garlic gravy with sprouts done to perfection, all cooked on the wood stove, followed by vegan Christmas Cake and “artisanal” mango-flavoured lemonade.

What more can any man desire (apart from Kate Bush and Jenny Agutter to share it with me)?

So now I’m off work for the next couple of days. And then, who knows? I might even carry on with the tidying up.

-8

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: vegan christmas cake

Sunday 10th December 2023 – MY VEGAN CHRISTMAS CAKE …

Tuesday 5th December 2023 – IN ANSWER TO …

Monday 4th December 2023 – WHEN THE ALARM …

Sunday 3rd December 2023 – IF MY CHRISTMAS …

Tuesday 14th December 2021 – LOOK AT THIS!

Sunday 12th December 2021 – HOW LONG IS IT …

Wednesday 25th December 2019 – MERRY CHRISTMAS …

Sunday 8th December 2019 – I REALLY DON’T KNOW …

Wednesday 2nd January 2019 – IT DIDN’T …

Tuesday 1st January 2019 – AND A VERY …

Friday 5th January 2018 – USELESS LOAD OF BANKERS!

Monday 25th December 2017 – MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE

Friday 22nd January 2016 – MY LITTLE 3D EMPIRE MADE THE NEWS …

Wednesday 30th December 2015 – AND THE ANSWER IS …

Tuesday 31st December 2013 – THE MOST ASTONISHING THING …

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