… the dictaphone this morning.

Mind you, that’s not really any surprise, because if you don’t go to sleep, you can’t dream, can you?

Yes, last night was a proper nuit blanche, and it was a shame because, eschewing all luxuries, including food, I’d finished my notes at some kind of respectable time and was in bed fairly early, looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

Instead, I tourné en ronde – “tossed and turned” in my bed for hour after hour, at times in total despair, because I know what “no sleep last night” means for this afternoon at dialysis when I want to watch a football match, or tonight when I come home, or tomorrow morning when my new Welsh class begins – so if there are no notes for tonight when you log in to look, you’ll know why.

However, the time was not totally wasted. I began to plot the next few chapters of my book, and before I’d finished, I’d not only finished this book in my head but written the following two too. So no time is ever wasted.

As well as that, I’m going to claim an “early start” because when the alarm should have gone off at 06:29 (but it didn’t because I’d switched it off), I’d been at my desk working for a good fifteen minutes. It’s a shame that I’m still wheezing and coughing because I would otherwise have got up much earlier and dictated a pile of radio notes. If I’m going to be going to hospital for any length of time, I’ll need to be as up-to-date as possible because dictating in a hospital bed is totally impossible.

Eventually, I heard signs of life in the kitchen as if coffee was being made so I went in to join everyone and had a hot, strong coffee put into my sweaty little mitt. My friend and I chatted for a while, and eventually, Isabelle the Nurse turned up. the Hound of the Baskervilles hardly moved a muscle, but he wagged his tail and let Isabelle stroke him before she attended to me.

Then, before leaving, she made another fuss of him because she’s off tonight on her week off and she won’t see him for a few months.

Once she’d left, the Hound of the Baskervilles had his breakfast and dragged his master off for walkies. I had a good wash and scrub up, and also a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon at dialysis. Then I went to make my breakfast.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1870. Yet again, the Club is managing to steer clear of controversy. Their criticism of another member’s viewpoint is usually expressed in a very good-natured way that doesn’t really cause offence. If I come across a good example, I’ll post it on here for you to see.

When I came back in here, I had the next radio programme to review before I sent it off to be added into the stream for the weekend. I can’t remember what I did after that, but there was still some time to watch a bit of the Colwyn Bay v Connah’s Quay Nomads match from Saturday in the JD Cymru League, played before yet another four-figure crowd, mostly from Colwyn Bay because the Nomads don’t even have their own ground (they share with Y Fflint), never mind any support.

It’s a fact that the crowds that watch two of Wales’s leading clubs (TNS and Connah’s Quay Nomads) have an appallingly low level of attendance at home, whereas even Trefynnon, hopelessly adrift at the foot of the table, have managed a gate of four figures this season.

My friend nipped out for his lunch at the local canteen while I looked after His Nibs. He whined for his master, but he soon stopped when his Auntie Cleaner came to fix my anaesthetic. She made a real fuss of him, which he enjoyed immensely.

When his master returned from dinner, my cleaner sorted my out arm and helped me pack. It was a beautiful afternoon too, so after she left, we all went outside to wait, the Hound of the Baskervilles hiding in the shade under a bush. He didn’t even want to lie in his favourite bus shelter in case any of his girlfriends from the local high school across the car park came past.

So we waited. And waited. And waited. Yes, people, this is when the whole day went off the rails.

Having been used this last few weeks when Mrs Dinosaur was here to be picked up twenty minutes early, today was the day when we all caught up and the taxi was half an hour late. The church clock in the walled town was striking 13:30 when she hove into view. It’s not anything that I ever complain about, though. Being terminally ill, I have a service that drives me to my medical appointments … "of which there are thousands" – ed … anywhere in the country and it’s free. I wouldn’t have service like this in any other country in the World.

So we shot off as if the Fear of God was upon us for … ohhh … all of a mile and a half before we came up behind a tractor with a full load of straw on it travelling at 25 kph if it was lucky.

We followed it for a couple of miles, and all the time, I was thinking “why is she going this way?”.

The tractor turned off eventually, and so my driver put her foot down, to run almost immediately to a road barricade.

"Ohh God, yes! They’ve closed the main road for roadworks!" she exclaimed. Well, I know they have, and it will be closed until at least the 31st of December too, which was why I was puzzled.

We ourselves had to take a quick diversion and in the end drove down the road to Champeaux and cut across to the main Avranches road a little further down. Despite all of the setbacks along the way, this was pretty good going. And as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … since I’ve been travelling with this company, I’m seeing parts of Normandy that I never knew existed.

It was 14:08 when we pulled up at the dialysis clinic – the old non-air-conditioned one – in this stifling heat. All of the nursing auxiliaries had gone off to lunch, so I had to stagger halfway around the building before I found the bed list. I was in bed n°12 today, the farthest single room in the farthest ward away from the front door. They couldn’t make me walk any farther if they tried.

After having to sort myself out on my own as best as I could, the nurses eventually came to plug me in, and it was 14:40 by the time that I was up and running. There wasn’t much to extract today, so I persuaded the nurse to wind it up by 300 grammes to give me a head start on Thursday.

And now, finally, I could now sit back and enjoy a couple of football matches.

At least, so I thought. First of all, the nurses came to do a check on my implant to make sure that it was functioning properly. But this was the day when the machine decided not to function properly, and I had three or four nurses around my bed trying to fix it – not that I was complaining, though.

When it was finally up and running, the test took about fifteen minutes, so there was a good half an hour of my day gone, just like that!

Then the doctor (not Emilie the Cute Consultant, unfortunately) came to see me. They were going to try something at the hôpital de jour – the “day clinic” – a series of drips, to see if it might work. Well, I’m game for trying almost anything, but I know how this will end, because I’ve been through this before, four or five years ago. It didn’t work then, so I bet it won’t work now, but if they think that it might, who am I to argue?

But I’m glad I saw the doctor because when Emilie the Cute Consultant told me on Saturday that my immune system had broken down, it rang a very vague bell in the back of my mind, so over the last day or two I’d been searching through my papers.

And sure enough, there it was. A vaccination card given to me in January 2016 when I’d had my spleen taken out. I remembered them saying that I’d require three vaccinations every five years for the rest of my life, and there were the 2016 injection stamps and the 2021 injection stamps, but nothing for 2026. It looks as if I had forgotten to have the injections in January.

She took the card, looked at it and said that she’d write a prescription, and when I have the injections, bring them down to dialysis and they would do them.

Once she left, I could watch the football, and the first game was Rhydaman v Cearnarfon. It was, unfortunately, men against boys, this match. Rhydaman never ever looked like doing anything at all, and I don’t believe that they put one single sooty foot inside Caernarfon’s penalty area during the entire match.

Some of their players played with guts and spirit, but you need much more than that in a match like this, and a 0-5 result in favour of the Cofis was not an exaggeration.

The next game was the rest of Colwyn Bay v Connah’s Quay Nomads. This turned out to be another candidate for one of the best football matches that I had ever seen and was another credit to the league. Both teams, intent on victory, went at each other right from the start.

They were still at it right at the end too, and the fans certainly had their money’s worth as the Seagulls clawed their way back from 1-0 down to beat the Nomads 2-1, with Jordan Davies scoring one of the best goals that I’d seen for a while too.

There was even time for part of a third match too – Trefelin v Penybont – but I ran out of time and began to pack away my things when the five-minute warning went off on my machine.

At that point, all hell let loose in the main room. One of the elderly patients had fallen into a coma, and all of the nurses in the building, and the doctor, crowded around to try to revive him.

What annoyed me about this, and I don’t want anyone to think that I am heartless at all, was that one of the nurses ran round and switched off everyone’s machines. I’d have been happy for mine to have gone on for another hour and given me an even better start for Thursday.

And it was indeed another hour, and more besides, until they were able to revive this guy and have him transferred across the road to hospital. And then they could sort the rest of us out.

It was my luck, wasn’t it, to have the nurse who goes around apologising for everything, rather like the maid in A ROCKET FULL OF PYE and it becomes overwhelming after five minutes.

Eventually they let me out to find that my poor chauffeur and another passenger had been sitting there for over an hour waiting for me. And it was still scorching hot out there too. I finally made it home for 19:25, and my comité d’acceuil – my welcoming committee – had long since, as Longfellow expressed it, "folded their tents, like the Arabs, and as silently steal away.". The taxi driver had to help me into the apartment.

My friend had been cooking, and I had a lovely mashed potato and broccoli bake, followed by fruit cocktail and the last of this batch of sorbet. That means that next time, I can attack my vegan ice cream from Noz with gusto, or with anyone else who happens to be around.

When I’d done the washing up, I came back in here to write up my notes, but I managed to do about a dozen or so lines until I fell asleep. When I awoke a little later, I just crawled into bed and that was that. My notes can wait until tomorrow.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about four-figure crowds at Welsh football … "well, one of us has" – ed … I remember speaking to the FAW’s competitions secretary about the first four-figure crowd – at Cwmbran Town v Inter-Cardiff.

"What was it, exactly?" I asked him.
"Three men and one sheep" he replied.

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