Category Archives: nurse

Monday 31st July 2023 – I’M GOING TO STOP …

… discussing my miserable nights because you’re probably just as fed up reading about them as I am having them.

So when the alarm went off I was fast asleep in the bed and it was something of a struggle to crawl out of bed before the second alarm went off.

After the medication I went and had a shower to try to awaken me but that didn’t work very well. After the nurse had been to give me my weekly injection I came back in here.

It took an age for me to come round into the Land of the Living and it was a very late mid-morning coffee. And then I had a listen to the dictaphone.

There were tons of stuff on the dictaphone from the night there too. Someone’s name turned up on my social network, a boy whom I knew from a foreign country when I was at school. We got in touch and agreed to meet. I could recognise him from his photo. He was with some kind of little dog. When they came close to me they suddenly disappeared. I had a walk around this park and couldn’t see them. I walked across the park to the other end and that was when I caught a glimpse of them. I waved and they waved back. Eventually after many attempts we managed to meet up. It turned out this he had stopped to buy a sandwich on his way to meet me and his dog had seen someone with a sandwich and gone haring after it so he’d gone haring after the dog. he wanted to know why I hadn’t written to ask him where he was. I thought “it’s only been like 15 minutes” but something inside told me that it was in fact a couple of years that i’d been wandering around that park. That was a lapse of time that I couldn’t explain

There was something about Zero too last night. My friend from Congleton had had some good luck. She’d had her house up for sale for a considerable amount of time and it had suddenly sold for a much better price than she had anticipated too. She already had another property lined up that she could buy so she didn’t need the money and her doctor was asking her what she planned to do. She could come up with thousands of things. One was to buy a house at Prestatyn where they could go at weekends but would in fact be Zero’s house when she’s a little older. The other doctor thought that a good idea. He also mentioned about her becoming a private patient and having to pay for her medical treatment saying that private patients had so much better treatment than NHS ones etc. He also asked her when she was going to marry again. She made some kind of vague nebulous reply about that.

I can’t remember who I was with in the next one. It wasn’t TOTGA because her name came up in the conversation but it was a girl with whom I used to work who had a good job that involved projects. The thing was that you came up with your own project and this firm would back you and provide you with the resources to do it. She was telling me all about it and how good the other situation was. In fact it might have been someone I used to know quite well, saying how much of a change it was from her previous employment. She said that any kind of project was considered, whether fitting tyres on a car, rock groups practising etc. It’s the sort of thing that had I been able I would have been interested in doing. I had an appointment somewhere else but she was talking away so much about this that I didn’t really want to leave. I wanted to stay to listen to the rest of it even though I was running late. We said that the only way to do a job like this is to go at it 100% give it everything you have and take what opportunities are offered. While this might not suit some people’s mentality it certainly suits others and those are the kind of people who would benefit from some situation like this

Later on we had an old small FIAT saloon, the type that you could load things in through the back window. I was putting some electrical equipment in but knocked the amplifier on the back seat forward into the footwell. As I was locking up the car I told Nerina what I’d done and told her not to let me drive away in the morning like that. She asked why I didn’t do it now. I said that it’s too complicated being in the dark and I can’t see what I’m doing. I might start pulling wires out. She still thought that it would be a good idea to do it now. To be quite honest I was absolutely exhausted. I just really wanted to stop doing it and go to bed but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to explain it as a good reason to Nerina. I was busy finding all kinds of other reasons not to do the job right now.

And finally I was doing some research so I joined an institute. I was in their offices looking through some paperwork. I came across someone’s file. It was a huge front and back piece with hooks on it where you could hang it from a rail with the spine upwards. I took one of these out to have a look at it. It was really just full of notes etc and various items of correspondence, one of which was someone asking around if anyone had an Opel Omega or Corsa that they could take a ride in to see what they were like ready to purchase. Someone scrawled underneath “God, are they asking for a taxi here?”. I had a look through it and went to put it back but I caught my right ankle on a stone on the wall and that caused me to drop to my knees. I don’t know why that happened but I couldn’t stand back up again. And I can’t stand up if I end on my knees either. That’s what’s really stopping me from going very far – the fear of falling over.

So we had Zero, TOTGA, Nerina and a few other regulars out there with us last night. It was nice to see so many of our friends. Still no Castor though, which is a shame. In a couple of weeks time it will be four years since our Brief Encounter in Peel Sound and the Coronation Gulf.

So when I’ve not been asleep I’ve been dealing with the next radio programme. The music is sorted out, paired off and much of the text has been written.

From now on I’m going to try to do things in a slightly different way. Usually I leave the very last track until last but in the programme that I’m preparing, the very last track has already been chosen, and for a very good reason too.

Inserting a track and its relevant text into the middle of a programme is quite complicated and takes much more time but I’ve been giving that a great deal of thought in order to find a work-around.

Tea was a stuffed pepper as usual and it was of course quite nice too. Made with fresh carrots too. There was not enough room in the freezer to buy a bulk lot of carrots to freeze so I just bought a couple to see me through until next weekend.

I’ll need to make some space in the freezer for more veg so I reckon that on Thursday I’ll be having mixed veg in cheese sauce. Now that I can buy vegan cheese in good quantities I can have much more of that, and quite right too.

But that’s for Thursday. There are a few more days in between. I’ll wander off to bed and prepare myself for battle tomorrow. Here’s Hoping that it’s a better day.

Monday 24th July 2024 – SO MUCH FOR …

… my plans for today.

Usually there are about 2 or 3 entries on the dictaphone most nights. If I’ve had a particularly restless night there might be as many as 5.

But if you want to know about the kind of night that I had last night, there were actually as many as 10 entries. TEN!

And between 02:18 and 03:50 there were seven of them recorded. That was some night.

On a few occasions too I actually stepped back into dreams where I’d left off. That’s no real surprise I suppose, with a night as mobile as that.

It took me quite an age to go off to sleep too, and then later on I was actually up and about before the alarm went off.

And so, as you can gather, I haven’t been in any kind of condition today to do anything. The only surprise was that I managed to keep awake until 15:30. But once I’d gone, I’d really gone.

However, back to this morning. After the medication I went and had a shower ready for the nurse. She came round later to inject me and then I came back in here and didn’t do very muct at all. It was a real struggle to keep awake and in the end I gave up trying.

later on I had a listen to the dictaphone and that took most of the rest of the day. I went into our kitchen. There was a strange cat in there. All the other cats and kittens were confronting this silver tabby which was doing its best to hide under a piece of cardboard. When I came in it tried to sneak out underneath the cardboard and through a pack of kittens that were trying to fight it. It made its way to the front door but couldn’t work out how to find its way out of the cat flap again so it was cowering in a corner. I couldn’t take a good shot at it because other kittens were around it. In the end I managed to corner it on its own. It hid behind a stuffed giraffe as a gun fighter would do if you tried to draw a gun on him. It looked so interesting and so intelligent this cat so I called my brother to come and see. By the time he arrived the cat had come out from behind the giraffe. I had the door open and was trying to usher it out with my feet. My brother thought that I won’t have many marks for kindness and politeness by doing that. I replied that it’s soon going to go out anyway. After a couple of attempts I managed to put my foot underneath its stomach and heave it out through the open door then close the front door behind it so it couldn’t re-enter. The thought then occurred to me that I hope that the kittens that went outside can work their way through the cat flap to find their way back in otherwise we’ll have problems with that too

TOTGA appeared last night, so hello to TOTGA. She had an audition for a modelling agency so someone was coming round to see her. I spent some time choreographing some dances and had been putting her through them. On the final morning that we were working through them there was so much that still needed to be done that while she was rehearsing I was buzzing around. Someone who was there watching suggested that I was distracting her and getting in her way. My response was first of all that we needed this information and secondly, when she’s taking her exam there will be people getting in her way then. She needs to work out her routine based on the movements of other people anyway. After this discussion I went into the storeroom to try to find something from one of her earlier sessions. She came in, still dancing, saying that she needed to find the heat treatment for a twinge in her muscle. We discussed where that might be, which box it was in. She had to find it but she needed to be quick because the person would b ehere in a minute.

Back on the subject of ballet again. This time I had a couple of groups of young toddlers and small children who were being put through their routines. They were extremely interesting, especially one who could barely walk and had one of her front teeth missing. She did a really nice dance. I told her how now it was but I was thinking that it’s such a shame that she couldn’t have waiting another half-hour for that performance because the examiner would have been here and he would have loved to have seen that dance.

I went straight back to sleep and immediately saw the housekeeper or cleaner of the hall where we dance looking totally aghast. I asked her what was the matter. She replied that she had seen the first ever seal killed by another seal. It was that that had upset her.

After that I stepped back into the previous dream again with my ballet class of toddlers. There was a police inspector who was there. For some unknown reason he was in a bad mood. I asked him whether it was because of the lack of preparation on his behalf that was causing the problem or whether there was something else we needed to know

I bet that you didn’t know that I was an ace at the ballet! But actually I had two younger sisters who needed taking to dance class on a Saturday afternoon and when my elder sister started a Saturday job I drew the short straw and I spent many an hour watching what was going on.

That’s why I used to go to watch Port Vale play football in the late 1960s. Our local team played on a Saturday afternoon so I couldn’t go, but the Vale always played on a Friday night. It was actually a good night out, walking back from Burslem to the railway station at Longport late at night, grabbing a bag of chips on the way.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed, there was more trouble later about a kid who wanted someone here to cut off some material for him, a length of dark green and a length of red so that he could wrap them around himself to pretend that he was a school mascot. That way he’d stop being annoyed by these other people at the gate of the school

I was going into Crewe town centre for an interview for a job in a shop. I was having to change my employment because of my illness and needed something less stressful with less travel. I was chatting to a girl when the bus came in. She boarded it. I suddenly realised just as it was about to pull away that it was my bus too so I leapt aboard and just about managed to scramble onto the platform before it took off. I saw the girl so I waved to her. We came into Crewe town centre and I alighted. I thought that I’d go to my brother’s shop for a form for a CV and fill it in to hand in at this other place. It was just after midday so I wondered if he’d be at lunch. I went there and began to climb the steps into his front door

Then I had the first part of that dream again about having to prepare for this meeting or exam whatever it was, finding all my things etc before going out for the bus

I was also giving a lecture on brewing last night. I’d ordered some beer but it hadn’t come so I contacted the brewery. They launched one by catapult. It flew through the air, 8 miles high, this barrel of beer through the sky all the way and dropped to earth in my living room where there was a crowd of people. They denied having received this beer at first but I think that they were teasing me. In the end they gave me a glassful. It had a huge head on it of course. I tasted it and said that it was the most beautiful beer that I’ve ever tasted. I let 1 or 2 other people have a drink. Some girl asked me about the secrets of brewing. I explained that the real secret is in the water. The underlying soils are all on different rocks. The rainfall that percolates through the rocks picks up different minerals depending on the area where it is and what the rocks are. The water that they take to make the beer depends on the area from where it comes, different minerals in the water react in different ways with the yeast and barley and grain etc. That’s why beers are different, because of the minerals in the water. Some ares have really good water for brewing but others don’t. There’s different beers made with different kinds of water. I was impressed that I could give a lecture on brewing and breweries while I was asleep.

Finally, Caliburn and I were on our way back from Virlet to Brussels going the way that we used to go through the mountains. When we left one town heading north it seemed that all the traffic was being diverted over a rough tarmac path through a field. The old road was overgrown with weeds. There were no signs or anything so I carried on down the old road. After about 50 yard all the weeds etc had gone and it was the normal road again. I was travelling down there at a good rate of knots in a rainstorm. It suddenly occurred to me that this isn’t the town that I know where I was entering. There was a steep hill down into the town centre to a T junction where I had to turn left. As I was three quarters of the way down the hill a lorry began to reverse out of a parking space into the road in front of me. I blew the horn and the horn stuck. Eventually the lorry got the message and drove back in so that I could go past. There was a milk float on the corner that was reversing up the hill on my side of the road. He received a horn blast too because I couldn’t go past him because of the road junction. Eventually I had to get out and push the milk float out of the way. He got the message too and drove off the right way this time so that I could reach the bottom of this hill to turn left. There were hordes of people milling around here, so much traffic, the rainstorm. I didn’t recognise anything of this. I didn’t know where I was at all.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper which was really nice but for some reason or other I seem to have lost my appetite again

Anyway, that’s enough for this horrible day. I’m glad that it’s over. I’m going to bed and I’ll start again tomorrow – if I wake up. I really do feel as if I could sleep for a week with no problem whatsoever.

Monday 17th July 2023 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… miserable day today. I’ve spent most of the afternoon flat out fast asleep on the chair in the office.

What’s even worse about this today is that I haven’t actually done anything or been anywhere. I have difficulty understanding why it would be when I’ve been out for a walk, but crashing out definitively like this when nothing at all is going on is even more of a mystery.

The night was rather turbulent though and I spent a lot of time tossing and turning around. When the alarm went off though I was flat out in the Land of Nod, away on a really interesting voyage but as soon as the alarm went off it evaporated completely and I can remember nothing at all about it.

Staggering out of bed I had my medication and then checked my mails and messages until the nurse arrived.

She gave me my injection and after she left I came in here to see what had been going on during the night. I was on some kind of school expedition to the South Pole. I had to tell everyone about it. When I began to talk the first thing that I noticed was that the chair on which I’d been putting my legs had disappeared so I had nowhere for them to be. I had to have a look and someone had moved them across my cabin to somewhere else

Some children had then gone into a maze and had somehow come between a mother bear and her babies. The Mother bear was naturally upset and was advancing towards the children who were retreating but of course coming closer to the bear cubs. In the end someone lifted up the children and put them on top of the maze so that the bear could go past to its baby. When the bear reached its cub it took the cub in its mouth and jumped up on top of the maze to where the children were. Everyone was fearing the worst but the bear was actually quite polite and pleased and made it known that it was really just thanking people for their consideration in getting out of the way.

When I awoke I found that I’d been doing something with an empty house that we’d taken over on behalf of the University. We’d been brushing out the stuff and cleaning it getting ready for an exhibition of the planets. My colleague went and had STRAWBERRY MOOSE involved, his handling was such as to stop him becoming dirty in case he soiled the seats or something. We had to put everyone into hand pumps to have this job finished because the quarry and doesn’t, or things like that. You never knew what was going to happen next.

And if you can make any sense at all out of that final note then please let me know because I can’t understand it at all.

Much of the day has been spent dealing with paperwork.

With having lost my physiotherapist I need to recruit another one so I have to find the prescription. I gave it to the previous guy but wondered if I’d kept a copy.

Despite having a good search around on the computer I couldn’t find one so I started to go through the paperwork in the Medical folder.

There were tons of stuff in there that I really ought to send off in order to claim my expenses, so I started to sort it all out into date order. Once I’d done that (and that took longer than it ought to have done too) I began to scan it in to the computer.

That’s a project that is going to take a while too. There were the usual breaks for my morning coffee and fruit bun (which is delicious by the way) and lunchtime fruit, and then of course I crashed out definitively for several hours

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper – the last one from out of the freezer. And it cooked really well too, 20 minutes at 160°C in the air fryer.

There’s plenty of stuffing left so it may well be another chili sin carné on Wednesday.

With the bedroom looking like a total tip wit al of these papers floating around, I’m going to bed and leaving everything in a mess.

Tomorrow, if I wake up, I’ll be finishing off my scanning and then maybe submitting my claim for reimbursement. I’ve run out of Aranesp too so I mustn’t forgt on Thursday to phone up the chemist and order some more. That’ll mean that I’ll have to go into town on friday and that will probably do me good.

But I’ll worry about that tomorrow. I have enough to worry about right now.

Monday 10th July 2023 – THE FIRST DAY …

… of our Summer School passed so quickly that I didn’t even notice. I can’t even say whether it was a success or a failure because we didn’t even have time to think.

There were 10 of us in our class. One of them I know from a previous weekend school but the others are complete strangers. No-one from my own class. I haven’t even met the tutor before.

We spent a lot of time talking about Llewellyn Morris Humphreys, one of the associates of Al Capone and who was believed to be responsible for the St Valentine’s Day massacre.

The lesson finished at 15:30 today, basically because we ran out of things to do. Our tutor was clearly not expecting us to accomplish so much.

And that was just as well because I was exhausted. As expected, I had had a miserable night and ended up taking another painkiller – which is not at all like me but I didn’t really have much choice and I wanted to go to sleep.

When the alarm went off though, I was flat out in bed and had a struggle to leave the bed. And after the nurse came round to inject me I prepared for the Welsh lesson today. But with having a teflon brain, nothing whatever is sticking.

When the lesson was over I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night, because I had been out and about. I was on board a ship going across the Channel. There was a Charity Shop on board but I had to wait until the ship had set sail before I could go to inspect it. It wasn’t particularly much good but I bought a couple of books and 3 or 4 CDs. It came to £31:00. I had a rummage through my pockets but suddenly realised that I had the money in my coat pocket that was on my chair so I went and fetched it. The woman explained that it was expensive. I said “never mind” because there was some stuff in there that I really wanted – a Groundhogs LP and “Dreams” by Klaus Schultze and a few other things. I was quite happy. My real reason for being on board the ship was that I wanted to speak to one of the officers about something that I was trying to do. I was told that he might be on this particular sailing so I’d come on board to see him. It was my plan that as soon as we were in mid-Channel to go along and buttonhole him. Once I’d bought my stuff from the Charity Shop that was where I was heading next but I didn’t know if he would be on board or not. It would be just a case of knocking on the door and finding out.

Later on I had a job to do so I was collecting up all my tools. I’d already been to do the job once but couldn’t find anything of the tools that I needed so I’d collected everything together. before I went to do it again I just made sure that I had what I needed. I could only find the big charger for the heavy duty battery-powered drill. I couldn’t find the drill or any of the batteries or any of the accessories. I was turning everything upside down trying to find them because they ought to be there. They were there half an hour ago. I couldn’t find them at all. I checked but as far as I could see no-one else had borrowed them for anything so I was completely bewildered as to how I’d become separated from them again. Not finding my tools was something that was making this job last 100 times longer than it ought to be.

With plenty of unexpected free time on my hands I ended up repairing the hard drive that failed so spectacularly a couple of weeks ago. After several hours of wandering around in the disk operating software I managed to make it fire up.

And I managed to find the fault too. It’s actually on a part of the drive that was being used to house the operating system so by running the drive as a slave rather than a master, I can make it run after a fashion. There’s a vacant slot in the array drive so I’ve fitted it in there where I can access the data.

It does have a tendency to go to sleep if it’s not being used so I have to start it again but that’s not very important. I can cope with that as long as I can make it work somehow.

While I was at it, I managed to reactivate another old hard drive. This one is a 1TB one that was last used in March 2021 so I’m now trying to think where this one came from. It’s certainly one of mine because I recognise the disk structure and the data but I can’t remember it at all.

With an hour or so to spare I made a start on the next radio programme and I’ll be working on that for half an hour or so every day until it’s complete.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper, a frozen one out of the freezer. I cooked it for 20 minutes at 160°C in the air fryer and it cooked it to perfection.

So now I’m going to bed. And with my leg still suffering from the stabbing pains I don’t know whether I’ll be able to sleep yet again. It’s really rather annoying because these days, the way things are, if it’s not one thing it’s another and I’m rapidly becoming fed up of this.

Monday 3rd July 2023 – I HAD A VISITOR …

… during the night, someone who hasn’t been to visit me for some considerable time.

TOTGA put in an appearance last night for the first time in in absolute age. I can’t remember very much about this but I was going out and someone was coming round. I had to wait for them. There was someone else in the house who might have been one of my sisters making up a pile of accounts. Everything was all in a mess. She’d lost a cheque. A car pulled up. It was my brother. He had a big carpet on the back seat of his car. He came in and said yes, he’d brought some pet stuff that TOTGA had ordered but they’d bunged him for her back wages and he’s had to pay 4/6½d. He was most indignant about this. I wish I knew where TOTGA appeared in this dream but she was certainly there. I certainly saw her and was talking to her but I can’t recall the exact details.

And then later on we were waiting to close down the ovens in this fish-frying place. We had to set the controls to various positions before we could do that but we couldn’t remember what it was. TOTGA didn’t appear so in the end we had to try to decide ourselves what it was from memory. We came up with some kind of contribution to the idea. It meant switching off some of the switches but we had to use a coat hanger but we found that we could do that so we had to wait for TOTGA to arrive. In the meantime one of our party had been detained by the police for some reason. They’d gone and searched through his or her affairs but found nothing but there was this big woman in the luggage. They let her out and she went for a walk around the marshland there that wa sin between the sea and the land.

How nice is that to see a familiar, friendly face again? At least, I’m convinced that I did and it’s such a disappointment that I can’t remember any actual facts about our meeting.

All of that made me feel better than I did yesterday, although to be honest, it couldn’t have been any worse. And particularly because there was a huge pile of stuff on the dictaphone. I must have had a very restless night.

Apart from what I’ve already written about my meeting (or otherwise) with TOTGA, I can’t remember now whether we were going somewhere or going home or setting out on holiday but all my family was there. We had 2 Ford Zephyr Mk IIIs. My father, mother and some of their friends were going in one and we children were going in the other. My youngest sister was driving. We loaded up the car and there was no room for anyone once they were loaded but somehow most people managed to squeeze in. I wanted to wait to make sure that my father and his party had left safely but they took so long trying to get themselves ready that in the end I thought “this isn’t fair on my youngest sister” so I had to leave them. When I returned to the car with my sister in it she was sitting in the back seat behind the driver but was going to drive from that position. I had to sit on her knee while she was doing it. She said “there’ not going to be very much room in here. There’s a little leg adjustment but not very much”. I clambered in anyway. It was so far for my feet to the ground that I wasn’t sitting down anyway. She started the car. I thought that it was a miracle that she could reach the pedals and the gears from here and that she could drive with someone sitting on her lap blocking her view. All the time I didn’t think anything at all about the driver’s seat of the vehicle being empty with no-one in it and the rest of us crammed in like sardines. It was really uncomfortable.

When we were kids, by the way, we did have a Mark III Zephyr 6. We were a big family too so we needed a shoehorn to fit us all in.

But returning to last night I had an appointment at a solicitor’s office at 13:00 but it was cutting things fine because I had a plane at 14:30. I was there at about 12:50. There was a couple of other people waiting. I just waited and waited and waited but no-one ever came out. By now there were quite a few people there waiting. It was 13:50 and I had to go to the bathroom. I explained to one of the other guys “if the solicitor comes out looking for me I’ll be in the bathroom. He’ll have to wait a moment”. It took him a minute to understand what I was saying then I shot off thinking to myself “if I come out it’ll be getting on for 14:00 and I’m just going to have to go. Tough luck on the solicitor and his plans because I have other things to do”.

Later on I was driving down the autoroute and came to some roadworks. Part of the road was blocked off and there was a huge queue to merge into one lane. I thought that I’d stop here and make a sandwich. I took a loaf of bread. It was all dusty and dirty but I spread it with some kind of paste. A workman was walking past. I asked him what was going on but he totally ignored me. I hurled some vulgar abuse at him, got back into my car, cut down the inside of this queue through part of the roadworks to find a gap and join in. There was another car that was extremely upset by this. I told him to cut in behind me but he said no. I told him to grow up and stop being 5 years old. We drove through Monaco. Then I noticed that the MoT Certificate out of the window was missing. He said “didn’t you see it fly out of the window?”. I replied “no I didn’t”. He asked “aren’t you upset that you lost your MoT Certificate”? I replied “quite frankly I couldn’t care less”. That made me thing that the guy had thrown it out of the window in a fit of petulence. I couldn’t be bothered to deal with someone quite like him at the moment so I didn’t really pay much attention. I just carried on driving up the hill out of the city.

Finally I was driving through the Auvergne on the back road from Evaux les Bains. In front of me was another vehicle. We came to the steep zigzag drop all the way down to the moulin there. Somehow I managed to go in front of them when I took a very steep short-cut. I reached the bottom of the hill first and drove through into the town. Then I had to go back up the hill. By now I was pushing a chair but it wouldn’t go in a straight line up the hill. The other 2 people walked past me dragging their chairs and made it look so easy. I couldn’t understand why I was pushing mine and it was so difficult. There had been 2 other people in this line of us coming down the hill. I thought that if I carry on at this speed they’ll eventually catch up with me and then can help me back up the hill again. They didn’t come so I’d no idea what had actually happened to them. I was making a real load of difficulty for myself trying to go back up the hill with this wiring harness abd this chair.

Yes, last night, apart from seeing TOTGA, I spent an awful lot of time out on the road.

And even despite all of that I was still up and about before the alarm went off too, and after everything that happened yesterday, the difficulty that I had last night of going to sleep and all of the travels that I’d been on during the night, that was even more astonishing.

It has to be said though that I wasn’t in much of a mood to do much work today which was a shame. The nurse came and injected me, and we made arrangements to have my blood test on Thursday morning. I can’t eat or drink anything before he comes so I hope that he’ll come early.

One thing that I’ve been doing this morning is to hunt down a huge pile of documents that I need. There’s a School of Music in a neighbouring commune and it’s taken over some premises here in Granville.

There’s a proposal to have some kind of musicians’ workshop where interested people can congregate to discuss things, have some kind of technical education and even form some kind of unofficial orchestra with choirs and classical music.

And it didn’t escape my notice that in the small print there was a section for “electric guitar, bass guitar, piano and drums”. That is something into which I ought to be looking.

But the amount of paperwork that I needed to fill in was astonishing. For example, I had to read 13 pages of “behaviour in the school” and sign a form to say that I had done so. Lots of stuff like that.

All of that inspired me to have a good session on the guitar too in order to flex my muscles and make sure that I’ll be in some kind of shape if I am lucky enough to be invited for an interview. I won’t know until the end of August.

The rest of the time I’ve been in Canada walking around on the Furdustrandir about to inspect the cemetery of the abandoned settlement of North River. It’s another settlement that was devastated by the influenza epidemic of 1918 and a credible source suggests that half of the village died in November and December 1918.

And we had a disaster tonight cooking the tea. We had a stuffed pepper as usual but when I put my pyrex dish in the sink it cracked. That was pretty dismal because that was exactly the right size of bowl for the air fryer.

The stuffed pepper was nice though, cooked exactly right after 20 minutes at 160°C.

Tomorrow I’m going to do some Welsh revision, restart my radio work and go to count graves in the cemetery at North River.

But that’s after I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I hope. But if TOTGA comes to see me again, or if Zero or Castor put in an appearance, I shan’t complain at all.

Monday 26th June 2023 – IT LOOKS AS IF …

… I might have to be going off on my travels again.

How I’m going to manage it, I really have no idea, but it’s something that I’ll need to work out and plan. It’s not going to be easy.

Especially when I will have to navigate myself to the depths of darkest Michigan at the end of November.

My niece’s second daughter has announced today that she will be marrying her boyfriend and she would like me to be there. That’s really nice of her and I appreciate the invitation very much.

What I can do, if I make it, is to kill several birds with one stone. I could fly to Ottawa to see my cousin, and then drive from there to Michigan by going north.

That would mean crossing into the USA at Bob Seger’s MACKINAW CITY – especially the site of Michilimackinac, the border fort that saw endless conrontations between the French and the native Americans, then the French and British, then the British and the native Americans and finally the Anglo-Canadians and the Euro-Americans.

However all of this is theoretic because at the moment I can’t even walk to the front door of the apartment without hanging on to bits of furniture.

None of the foregoing prevented me from rising from my stinking pit before the alarm went off again this morning. I was wide awake by 06:30 despite not going to bed until somewhat later than usual.

Once I’d had my medication I went for a shower and had a good clean-up ready for the nurse. He came round on time and gave me my injection today. I’m not sure for how long they’ll be doing this because although I sent off the details of my blood test to the hospital at Leuven, they haven’t contacted me yet.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night. I was in New Zealand at one point, which was a surprise because that’s one country that I haven’t ever visited. There was something about a young girl swimmer who was being intimidated by someone. In the end I told her to come and share my apartment so that I could keep an eye on her and protect her if necessary from what was going on. Again there was much more to it than this. We’d been exploring the interior at some point and found everywhere completely muddy and uncomfortable to move around but I can’t remember now what happened about this bit

And later on there was a girl on whom I was very keen who was at University. She was going to the University’s annual meeting which was at Taranto in Italy. I was having a look at the map. I worked out that I could be there by road on Tuesday. I thought to myself that it might be a good idea if I took some time out and we met up. She wasn’t as keen on me as I was on her which I thought was a huge shame. I went round to see her at her house in Crewe – a semi-detached around the Kingsway area. We had a chat and were discussing whether I could take the motorway through Serbia or or drive across it then I’d get to see Belgrade and one or two other places. It was only something like 250 miles so I could do it in an afternoon if I pushed myself. We were chatting away and as I was leaving she gave me a kiss. I thought this really surprising. I set off, thinking that if I joined the motorway, went north and come back down the other motorway is it going to be as quick as driving on the old roads down to the ferry. I was busy working this out in my head and suddenly realised that I didn’t have my cap. I had to run back to the house. She had found it and was coming out of the house to give it to me. She handed it to me. I said something and she replied “well you have to keep your eye on your boyfriend, haven’t you?”. That was the first intimation that I had that maybe her feelings were starting to change. It took me just alittle by surprise. I tok the cap and said “see you on Tuesday. You will take some time out for me, won’t you?”.

And that makes a big change doesn’t it – me ending up by getting the girl. Usually someone from my family wanders along and throws the hammer into the works right at the crucial moment.

Today, while I’ve been sorting through some more of the hard drive I’ve ended up deleting more than 15GB of duplicate files and by my reckoning there is still a ton more to go through. That will keep me out of mischief.

Another thing that I’ve done today is to work out the chords for that song from the other night, SOULFIGHT.

Not for the first time, I have to say. I worked it out a few years ago and wrote them down in my notebook that is in the pocket of my jacket that was hanging up on a hook in a hotel in Calgary the last time that I saw it

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper cooked in the air fryer. A frozen one out of the freezer so I cooked it at 160°C instead of 190°C and for 15 minutes instead of 10 minutes, and it cooked it really well, although another 5 minutes wouldn’t have hurt.

So now I’m off to bed. I have the last Welsh lesson of the year so I want to be on top form. There’s a lot of revision to do so I need to work at it. A good night’s sleep will do me some good although the way things are going that’s not very likely.

Not that I’ll be complaining though if I go for another ramble like last night and I end up getting the girl again.

Monday 19th June 2023 – I’M ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED …

… that when Rosemary came to stay here for a few days a few years ago she installed a camera somewhere in the apartment.

Just when I was sitting down after having my tea tonight she called me on the telephone. And we ended up having another one of our marathon chats putting the World to rights.

Not that whatever we say will make any difference.

Last night in bed didn’t make much of a difference either. Although I was in bed at some kind of realistic time it took me an age to go off to sleep.

Once I did though I was well away with the fairies because when the alarm went off I was a long way away. But would you believe – as soon as I sat upright it completely wiped away everything that had been going on.

After the medication I went and had a shower and a general clean-up because the nurse was coming. The usual one was away today so he sent his deputy.

She’s quite a nice woman and I like her very much. Not only was the injection quite painless, she had no difficulty whatsoever taking my blood sample. And that’s a real surprise judging how things usually go.

For much of the day, whenever I felt in the mood because it wasn’t all that often, I’ve been wandering around Cartwright in Labrador. I’m out of the cemetery and I went to inspect the site of George Cartwright’s house and Samuel Fequet’s trading post.

But I also spent a lot of time talking about “Pinetree” – the early warning radar station that the Americans built in 1951 to detect and intercept nuclear missiles coming over the North Pole towards the USA.

Many people wondered how thick the plain brown envelopes were that were passed underneath the table that convinced Canadian politicians to be prepared to sacrifice the lives of their own Inuit and Métis citizens to protect the lives of citizens of someone else’s country.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night too. I was with 2 really old women who had lodged a complaint with a department about one of their acquaintances who had been defrauding the Government of thousands of pounds of money in respect of some kind of fraudulent claims. I went to meet them and they took me round all the joints that had been affected and how much this woman had claimed from here and how much from there. It was quite clear that these women were totally out of their tree quite happily pointing out places “this is where I came to grief when I claimed for something else” and the other one saying “yes I came to grief over there”. It’s obvious that they were just as crooked as the woman about whom they were complaining and had presumably been caught so were getting their own back. I was listening and making notes while they were rambling and we were walking around the town looking at these places. At one point we came to a big wide road and had to wait for ages to find a gap to cross. There were all kinds of vehicles going past including 6 Morris Minor Travellers driving to close to each other that I wondered how on earth they managed it. Eventually when there were some cyclists coming past I grabbed hold of them and we dashed across the road at that point. I told them that I had to go so I asked if they had their cameras ready we could take a photo of the place they wanted to photograph, I’d finish my notes and then go but I couldn’t hang around any longer. It was a really strange occurrence with these women.

Then I was at my German friend’s the other day. We’d been doing some work. I’d ended up with a pile of scrap paper, a huge mound of coins, loose change, all that sort of thing. It was late at night and everyone was quiet. He handed out some DVD Player things and we all sat and watched different DVDs. There was a football match on somewhere and I was hoping to be able to tune my DVD player into it so I could watch it but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. In the end we decided that I’d go home but try to pack away my stuff in the dark was quite impossible. I was getting the coins everywhere, the scrap paper everywhere etc. In the end I had to say to my friend “don’t worry if you find anything of mine lying around here. You can bring it to me tomorrow”. He said something about the coins so I said “that’s not important” and still tried to pack away everything in the dark and failing miserably.

At some point I’d been to Tubize in Belgium and saw some really nice houses there that were fairly cheap. I thought “why didn’t I buy one of these?”. We had to walk to the nearest town to do our shopping so I set off and followed a few other people who were doing this. We had to walk up a bank up some steps and across a railway line. That was extremely difficult for me with my knees. On the other side on the path a couple of girls were going that way so I began to talk to them. I asked if Tubize was in the Flemish zone because I wanted to learn Flemish. That would have been ideal had I moved there. In the distance was a big tower that looked at first like Blackpool Tower in the distance. It turned out to be a fire-watching post for the forest. I noticed that the distance from Tubize to this town was incredibly long, much longer than I was expecting. I thought that if I’d done all my shopping here how on earth would I carry it back? I should really have gone and covered this distance in Caliburn and I would have done had I known

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper cooked in the air fryer. And as it was an unfrozen one that I’d bought on Friday I only set the timer for 12 minutes. The stuffing wasn’t quite cooked and the pepper was slightly singed so I should really have cooked it for longer on a lower heat.

But like anything else, using the air fryer is all trial and error and I’ll have it right one of these days.

But for pudding it was more ice cream and cinnamon roll. That was a good deal, I reckon, buying that.

Tomorrow I have a Welsh lesson but I’ll be going late because at 10:15 I have an appointment with the nerve specialist. I know what he’s going to tell me and it won’t be good news, but it won’t make much of a difference. Things are as they are and I have to make the best of it.

But in other news, while we’re on the subject of the Welsh lessons … “well, one of us is” – ed … the Summer School information was published on the internet this evening. I’ve wasted no time and signed up for a week in July.

A whole week’s Zoom lessons for £25:00 is good value in anyone’s currency and I should have to do it more often. It’s the only way that I can concentrate this days. I don’t seem to have the motivation when I’m on my own.

Monday 12th June 2023 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S …

… rather depressing day, today hasn’t been any better.

It was another day during which I spent a lot of time curled up on my chair asleep

It beats me what is going on right now. I went through a phase of this a while back and I thought that I’d managed to pull through it. But it seems to have come back with a vengeance.

Despite what I said, I didn’t go to bed all that early. When I’d finished everything that I had to do I went and checked over what I’d written about my trip to Canada in 2017 and added a few extra notes. I was still in bed in plenty of time though

What didn’t probably help was that it was a very mobile night. There was quite a lot going on. I started off by having a dream about some isolated community in Newfoundland and Labrador. The whole thing was a really exciting and interesting dream but it all just evaporated. All I could remember was me telling someone that it was their fault because they’d become involved in it. The rest of it completely disappeared and that was extremely disappointing.

Next off I was walking around and suddenly overcome with an attack of whatever it was that I have when I’m about to drop onto the floor when my knees all fold up. The funny thing was that I was asleep in bed having a dream and it happened in the dream but it really did feel realistic that I was going to crash to the floor any minute. In this dream I was teaching in a school of very small children. Something came up about an opportunity to go on a travel somewhere to North America. Someone came down to talk to the children about it. His manner of speaking was for much older children and adults so my children didn’t really understand it so I had to practically interpret. Afterwards when he was still in the classroom with the children and I’d gone out, I was looking through the paperwork and found more things that the children needed to know about this so I had to keep going back to talk to them even though he was in there just being sociable. Things like “if the parents had difficulty understanding the forms they could come to see me and we’d fill them in together”, those kinds of problems that I was finding

At one point here I was in Hogwarts again trying to write an ending to the story. Hermione was there in the ladies’ bathroom talking to a mirror that was all fogged and confused. The two boys walked in so she had a little chat to them about how she was feeling and how they’d been over all this before, everything like that. It was a shame that their last spell at Hogwarts would end up like this

There was also someone’s taxi that was not charging the battery. he had a problem with the electrics or something. I had a go at fixing it but then there were no dashboard warning lights. It must have been a fuse. I took the fuse out to clean it and put it back in but still nothing. I fetched my circuit tester and saw that there was definitely a circuit going in and going out again at the fuse box. I then had to hunt for my fuses in the barn. That was extremely difficult. I looked everywhere. We were talking. I said “I know that I have some for every time I used to go to the scrapyard I’d look under the bonnet of a car and take a handful of fuses”. As we were talking I suddenly had a flash of inspiration and looked on one of the shelves in the barn. There was the fuse container that I had so I took a fuse from there and took it over to his car.

When the alarm went off we were discussing cross-Channel ferries, one in particular called Berengaria, named after the Queen of Richard I. There was actually an ocean liner called Berengaria. She was the old German Imperator that was seized as war reparations after World War I and sailed for Cunard under the command of Arthur Rostron, he formerly of the Carpathia and who saved the passengers from the Titanic.

After the medication I went to have a shower and pretty myself up ready for the nurse to come. He gave me my injection and I reminded him that next time he comes, he needs to give me the blood test so that the hospital can see how I’m doing and whether there are any complications

After he left, I’ve been working on my notes from Canada 2017. Despite spending a lot of time asleep I’ve pushed on quite well with the notes. I’ve been all around Red Bay, visited the wreck of MV Bernier and I’m now pushing on through the interior towards the coast at Mary’s Harbour.

Despite my Welsh lesson tomorrow and the visit from the physiotherapist, I’ll push on with my notes. I should make it to Port Hope Simpson tomorrow, where I spent the night on my way around.

That’s an interesting settlement. Created in the 1930s as a logging camp to hose the workers working on the timber concessions there, it was one of the places chosen by the controversial Prime Minister of the Province, Joey Smallwood, to house the people from the coastal settlements that he had cleared out under his even more controversial resettlement programme

So of course, it goes without saying that once everyone had settled there, the operator of the logging concessions closed down the business and the people were left with no work.

And how many times have I heard that story? People whisked away from their traditional hunting and trapping grounds, dumped in a strange new settlement and abandoned with no prospects whatsoever?

It wasn’t quite so bad for the people of European and Métis descent but for the Innu and Inuit it was devastating and has led to an enormous social and domestic problem in these communities.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta. The pepper came out of the freezer and cooked for 16 minutes at 160°C in the air fryer cooked it to perfection

So I’m going to bed now. I’m hoping for a better sleep tonight if I can. I should be fighting fit tomorrow for my lesson – fighting for breath and fit to drop.

Monday 5th June 2023 – LAST NIGHT WAS …

… somewhat better than the previous one.

But that’s not difficult. Almost anything could have been better than that.

Feeling as tired as I was, I went to bed early and was asleep quite quickly. Just the occasional tossing and turning here and there.

Mind you, I did awaken early and when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up. Not quite “about” but I was sitting on the edge of the bed dressing.

After the medication I went and had a shower. It was something of a struggle to climb into the bath but only because of the pain in the lower calf, not because of any underlying health issue that might have affected my climbing into the bath in the past

The nurse came round at 08:20 and gave me my injection. He went afterwards to my neighbour who had the bad fall. Apparently things are not looking so good for her and that will be quite a shame.

And the nerve specialist finally phoned me back early this morning too. He can fit me on on 20th June at 10:15.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent travelling through Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island and on the ferry across the Gulf of St Lawrence. We’re now pulling into port at Argentia ready for Strider, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and me to drive up to Saint John to see my friend who lives there.

Argentia is quite an interesting place. The slow Transatlantic convoys – those with prefix SC – in World War II set out from Sydney, from where I’d just sailed, and the destroyer patrols that guarded the convoys in the early stages of their journey sheltered here in Argentia.

The village itself was demolished to make room for the naval installations. Even the bodies in the graveyard were dug up.

On 10th August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt met in the harbour on board a ship in the harbour to discuss issues concerning the conduct of the War to date and how the USA could help to further the UK’s War aims.

When I was HERE IN 2010 it was in the middle of a torrential rainstorm so I didn’t have much of a look round. And when I was there in 2017 I was in too much of a rush.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. I was keeping a diary. One of the entries on which I was working was about my trip to the hospital where I’d ended up being in some kind of class that was doing something like an eye examination test where everyone was being asked questions about eyes etc but in a more vernacular rather than a scientific sense. I wasn’t asked any questions but I still had to take part in it. I was writing it up in the diary. There were lots more than happened on that particular day but I can’t remember much of it now

There was another dream about a circus, Silcock’s Circus but I can’t remember how it went. But then I was with my friends from the Wirral and another one of my friends but the woman with him was neither of the women with whom he has been married. We’d all met up once for my birthday but it was time to go. We walked back to the bus stop in Weston. The couple from the Wirral were walking ahead so I was walking with the other two who were bringing up the rear. I said my fondest goodbyes to them and that I’d see them again but I wasn’t sure when, then walked off to say goodbye to the others. The Wirral couple cut me off and headed that way. The other two went to speak to them. I thought “never mind. I’ll wander off anyway and leave those four to it”. Eventually the 6 of us (so who was the sixth?) were together at the bus stop. I pointed out the new views of Crewe with all of the redevelopment and cutting down of trees you could see so much more of the town from here than you could 30 years ago. We talked about all of the changes that had taken place in the area. Mrs Wirral asked me if I could fly by aeroplane. I told her that I had done but the problem with aeroplanes was the transfers. If I go by bus it’s basically door to door with no wandering around unnecessarily whereas with the aeroplane I’d have to walk miles and that was what was the problem with that. It wasn’t the question that I couldn’t afford it. That was something else.

I was an explorer back in the early Middle Ages. I discovered Paris on behalf of the French. That led to huge dances and celebrations all over the country. I was at one of them. For some reason King George ended up displeased and I was arrested. Crowds of people still came out to the exit to watch me take my exercise. I was thinking that one day they would decide to cut off my head at the end of all this. They were presumably letting things drag because nothing at all seemed to be changing.

At some point during the morning I dozed off for half an hour. I’ve clearly not recovered from Saturday night and my lack of sleep.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper, made with one of the peppers out of the freezer. And I cooked it in the air fryer on a low heat of 160°C for a total of 17 minutes, and that cooked it to perfection. It really was done to a turn.

And on the subject of things being cooked to perfection, my fruit buns were certainly delicious. It was an excellent batch that I made yesterday.

So tomorrow I have a Welsh lesson so I need to prepare for it. And the physiotherapist is coming round tomorrow afternoon too. I’m not sure what he’ll have to say about my leg and the little incident on Saturday morning, but with having had the nerve specialist contacting me again, it looks as if things are slowly moving forward.

it just makes me wish that I was.

Monday 29th May 2023 – I’M GOING TO HAVE …

… to stop watching all of these HARRY POTTER films.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, while I’m eating my tea I’ll be watching a film on the DVD, gradually working my way around my collection of DVDs. Right now, the film that’s on the machine is HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE.

And so during the night I had to go to a wizards’ conference to learn something or other on a course. Wondering how I was going to go there, someone turned up and said that they’d take me. They had an umbrella that was like a helicopter blade. I hung onto them, they hung onto the helicopter blade and off we went. We flew past the house of someone whom I knew. I always suspected that they were rather strange and there were 5 people hovering over their house on broomsticks. I waved. Suddenly we came down to earth. The guy said “I’m going out of my area now so you have to get off and walk”. I asked “how go I come back?”. He replied “you come back to this spot and I’ll pick you up”. “So how do I come back here?”. he replied “you could always call a taxi”. I said goodbye to this guy and set off to walk. When I arrived at this place they were burying a cat that had been hit by a car. I thought that the collar might have special magic powers so I was wondering if I could have it. But they were obviously intent upon burying the cat wearing the collar so it was probably inappropriate to ask. They carried on with their plan to deal with the cat while I prepared myself for this weekend course.

It’s actually a film that I remember very well, having been to see it with Marianne when it was doing the rounds of the cinemas. And I remember thinking, when Dumbledore took out his wand to clean and rebuild Professor Slughorn’s house, that I would give all that I own and more besides to have a wand that would do that

A couple of weeks ago, it was the 10th anniversary of her voyage to meet her maker. It’s bizarre how quickly time flies. It seems like only yesterday but a lot has happened since then.

So retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, and in particular, about today.

It all started off with me once more raising myself from the dead before the alarm went off. And once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages, I made a start on the radio stuff that I’d dictated on Saturday night.

There wasn’t any rush today so it took a while, but in the end I finished up with two more programmes completed. There are only notes for two more, and then I can begin work on the next batch. But I’ll have to take it easy because I’m now 9 months in advance of broadcasting. I know that I want to be well ahead, because you never know when the bell might toll for me, but this is becoming rather excessive.

Being that far ahead isn’t really a good idea. I remember back in the old “Radio Anglais” days when I wrote and recorded a programme about Chris Squire, only for him to shuffle off this mortal coil the morning the programme was due to be broadcast. I don’t think that there’s been a radio programme rewritten as quickly as that one was.

Anyway, eventually I managed to finish the programme, despite the interruption from the nurse who came to give me my injection this morning.

One thing that I was going to do was to take out the rubbish to the bins but we have another hurricane blowing around outside. That’s the problem with living in what is one of the windiest places in Europe.

Mind you, it used to have its compensations. In this kind of weather I’d be out on the headland with the camera taking photos of the sea roaring over the sea wall into the harbour but these days I can’t even open the door of the building.

Instead, I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I’ve already mentioned one of them but there were still several others. I was just dropping off to sleep when I heard the physiotherapist shout to me. I don’t know what happened there but there have been a few times here and there over the years that I’ve had this phenomenon of people calling my name when I’ve been asleep and it’s awoken me with a start. I’ve never worked out why.

But strange things happen when you are asleep. I knew someone who dreamt that he was awake, and when he awoke, he was!

Later on I had to take my overtime sheet to the supervisor to have it signed so that I could submit it for payment. She began to ask me all kinds of strange questions about my hours etc that really weren’t anything to do with overtime. Then she asked me about lunches. How did I cope with lunch?. I replied “every so often I’d go to buy some meal tickets and hand over a meal ticket when I picked up my lunch”. She said something like “your brother will buy a spaghetti with his lunch money. Why don’t you do that?”. I couldn’t understand what was the issue or why she was making such a fuss out of something like this. All I wanted was my overtime sheet signed and none of this had anything to do with that.

At another moment I made a start writing a humorous book about an estate agent as well during the night but I didn’t get very far with that unfortunately. And when I awoke I couldn’t remember any of what it was that I’d written in my sleep.

With what time has been left, I’ve been sorting through the notes for 2017. It’s going to be a very long and laborious effort because Strider, STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I travelled about 12,000 miles during those 5 weeks.

Right now I’m in Pictou in Nova Scotia on my way to see my niece’s daughter who was at University in Antigonish at St F-X.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg. And we had something of a calamity in that the pepper was too tall to fit in the air fryer. That’s something that I need to watch for the future. Frozen peppers wotk well enough in the air fryer but the microwave makes them sodden and the oven would take years for them to bake from frozen.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t the disaster that it might have been, and there’s still plenty of stuffing left over for a taco roll for tea tomorrow.

There’s no Welsh lesson tomorrow as Coleg Cambria is having a week off. I might do some revision for a change and then continue with my 2017 notes. I’ll be pushing on up the Cape Breton coast towards Sydney and the ferry to Newfoundland.

And then I’ll be pushing off.

Monday 22nd May 2023 – WHEN I AWOKE …

… this morning, I was actually fully clothed flat out on top of the bed. I’ve no idea what happened there but I must have been really tired.

However not so tired that I didn’t get up early. Once more, when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was already up and about.

Yes, that was one strange night.

Once I’d had my medication and checked my mails and messages I started work. And by the time I finished at tea-time, I’d finished two radio programmes.

Had things been different they would have been finished a lot earlier too but there were plenty of interruptions.

Firstly, the nurse came round and gave me my fortnightly injection. It’s supposed to perk me up and keep me going for another two weeks but it doesn’t feel like it. The effects of the product are definitely not working as well as they did at first and wearing off quicker.

They’ve already increased the dose from 40mg to 60 mg and I suppose that the next step will be to have the injections every 10 days instead of every 14.

The “release and retained” lists for the clubs in the Welsh pyramid were released today as well – 9 days early and already, players are on the move around. Consequently I’ve had to start to update my lists earlier than usual.

And then someone with whom I wanted to have a word came on line so we were chatting for some considerable time too.

Going back to the radio programme, when I was in France during my schooldays I met a Swiss bassist called Walter Fröhlich. He was one of the bassists who, along with Felix Pappalardi and Gerry McAvoy, inspired me to play bass in the days before I heard “Quadrophenia”. Wandering around in the depths of my back-up drive I came across one of the songs on which Fröhlich played so of course I had to include it in one of the programmes.

All in all, I accomplished a lot today although it doesn’t much look like it.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with pasta and vegetables. Yes, pasta. I said I would, and there was some nice spicy tomato sauce to go with it too.

There was the dictaphone too. I had my own apartment in Granville somewhere last night. It wasn’t by the sea at all but in the St Nicolas area. I’d spoken to Percy Penguin (who doesn’t appear in these pages half as often as she deserves) about coming round but she was with another guy and said “the two of us would come round”. She put her boyfriend on the phone and he spoke to me. We agreed to meet up at 20:45. He asked what the weather was like because it was pouring down with rain. I said that it’s really wet under foot but not waterlogged or anything like that so it’s OK to move around. He replied “yes but the big difficulty is that Percy Penguin is the same height as you so we’d end up with 3 of us on my motor bike”. My response was “that’s OK. We can go out in Caliburn. I decided that the best thing was for me to go round at 21:00 and pick them both up. They were living here in this building at the time so I thought that it would be nice for Caliburn and me to come back.

And later on I was at a strange kind of roundabout or road junction somewhere. To negotiate it was extremely complicated and I ended up flattening a couple of trees that had been planted because of the way that some vehicles had been parked on it. A car and I merged in together on this junction but the other driver felt that he should have had priority although there wasn’t a road sign anywhere. It certainly wasn’t clear. When I stopped he left his car and came to start an argument. I explained the situation as I’d seen it but he carried on and on and on. I said “look, something happened there and something wasn’t correct but it doesn’t make any difference. No-one had any problems. The vehicles didn’t touch each other” but he still carried on. I went on saying “if you become upset like this every time you see something happen that’s not what you think is correct then I’m surprised that you ever get anywhere”. But so it continued.

The interesting thing about it was that all of this took place in French.

So I’ll be off to bed in a minute. There’s a Welsh lesson tomorrow so I need to do some revision and be ready to go. But I don’t feel like it. In fact I don’t feel much like anything right now. But I dunno. It’ll all work out in Boomland, as T2 told us back in 1970. And that reminds me – where the heck is my copy of that? I haven’t seen that around for absolute ages.

Monday 8th May 2023 – AND THE ANSWER …

… to yesterday’s question was indeed “not very much”.

It’s actually a Bank Holiday here today when the country celebrates VE Day and strictly speaking I ought to be having a lie-in as I try to do on as many Bank Holidays as I can, but with the threatened arrival of the nurse to give me my fortnightly injection, that’s out of the question.

What usually happens is that when I try to lie in on a day that he is due to come to visit, he usually has a blood test to carry out in the building so he’s here before breakfast. Consequently, we had an alarm set today for 07:00 as usual.

Mind you, I needn’t have bothered because when the alarm did go off, I was sitting on the edge of the bed dressing. we’ve had another one of those nights – and mornings.

It was about 08:50 when he came round to give me my injection. And here’s a thing that’s totally unexpected – the database paperwork that he has to keep to record the injections that he gives me is now full.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“I don’t know” he replied. “It’s never reached this stage before”

So clearly I’m continuing to defy all expectations. No-one with this illness has lived longer than 11 years and I was diagnosed in 2015, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall (and I expect that I had it a good while before then) but while it’s true to say that I know all about ill-health, I’m still fighting on. Not exactly fighting fit, just fighting for breath and fit to drop.

With it being a Bank Holiday I’ve had a very relaxing day doing too much of nothing at all. I did finish the radio programme today, as I said that I would, and listened to the one that is to be broadcast this coming weekend but that’s about it.

There’s just one more now that is half-done and I’ll do that this coming weekend. And then I’ll have to start off again. I’m months ahead, which is good news, but there’s always this feeling that some of it will have to be done again as some of these artists can’t go on for ever. I remember back a few years ago in the old “Radio Anglais” days when I spent quite some time waxing lyrical about Chris Squire, only for him to begin to manger les pissenlits par les racines the morning the programme was due to be broadcast.

There was also the stuff on the dictaphone that needed transcribing too. We’re back on the Sherlock Holmes murders again. A couple of people had been struck down in a park by someone dressed entirely in black. There was some woman who dressed herself in black ready to go out just as 2 people were starting to walk on a common in Balham. These 2 people were talking about their past, the girl saying “wasn’t it to this common that you brought such-and-such a girl with whom you used to go out, but she was rather strange?”. The name that they used was the name of this girl. There were police loitering in attendance. They arrested someone dressed all in black in the vicinity of this couple and dragged him away. It turned out that he was actually a mime artist dressed in black ready to perform his act to collect money. As the camera panned to see him dragged away it panned through a figure in black sitting in a café on the common overlooking the events that were taking place

Later on I was going on a coach trip with work for some kind of sports event. One of my colleagues asked me if I went on the previous one two weeks ago to Carlisle. I said no because I had something else to do that evening. While we were waiting for the coach back on this draughty bus station it just didn’t appear. We sat there waiting. There were several tomatoes rolling around, coming and going. One of them came back so I asked it if it had come to pick us up. Someone said “I’ve already asked him and it’s not him” so we sat there and waited. Suddenly I realised that I didn’t have my watch or my key to the office. I’d left them at home. I was wondering what I was going to do. I thought that I’d better take a gamble and go to fetch them. I ran, which was the first time in ages, all the way home to our house in Vine Tree Avenue. All the lights were on. I could hear people moving around. The front door was unlatched so I walked in and ran lightly up the stairs. The taps were all dripping in the bathroom but no-one was in there. My brother was asleep in bed with the light on so I walked quietly in, picked up the key card and my watch that was on the bed, came out and came downstairs again. I could hear my parents in the front room talking about me but I didn’t have the time to stay and listen. I managed to open the door again without making too much noise and set off to run back to the bus station.

It’s a total mystery to me why it is that my family keeps on intruding into my nocturnal voyages. During my waking hours I don’t even waste a minute thinking about them so what’s going on in my subconscious? I don’t mind Nerina putting in an appearance every now and again – after all I invited her into my life for better or for worse, but one of the reasons of leaving the UK was to escape the negativity of everything that was weighing me down and I thought that I’d left them all behind.

But it was interesting to read the bit about “running”, given how I’ve not been out running for a couple of years and I couldn’t do so these days anyway. When we started this programme at University we had all kinds of people recording their dreams, one of whom was a girl who was born without legs. She would tell us that although she’s never walked a single step in the whole of her life (for obvious reasons) she still dreamt about herself going for a walk. So clearly, dreaming isn’t completely tied up with your own personal experiences.

Finally I’d had some issues at work about sick leave, that kind of thing. In the end what I used to do was that at night I’d take a van from work without authority and do furniture removals etc. On one occasion I came back with my Luton Transit. We dropped it off at Zero’s father and began to strip it for spares so we could sell the bits and move on. It wasn’t until we had it pretty much dismantled that it suddenly occurred to me that in the back of it was an old Volkswagen estate, another estate car, a motorbike and lots of other bits and pieces. I’d been using it as a shed I went round to see his wife and said “you’ll never guess what I’ve just remembered” but she told me. She asked me what the plan was. One thing going through my mind was to hire a vehicle, put the Luton Transit on the back and drive al lthe way to France, unload it, drive back and carry on. I said that it would probably take us about a week. If you like, you, your husband and Zero could come along as well. She looked dubious at that point and asked “could it be done in a weekend?”. I replied “we could get there and back in a weekend but unloading it is something else”. She said “the difficulty is with Zero. She could go to her grandfather’s who could take a day off work to look after her but I don’t think that we could do anything else. Are you sure that it couldn’t be done in a weeked?”. I had to describe the journey to her etc. She said “the next question of course is whether we have any money”. I repled “you won’t need any money. Everything will be on me of course”. We had this huge discussion.

Interestingly, I do have a Luton Transit, as regular readers of this rubbish in one of its previous versions will recall. I bought it for scrap because I wanted the box off the back to use as a garden shed and it’s still down on the farm 20-odd years later. And there is a Volkswagen estate in the back of it too, albeit in pieces. A diesel estate that was crashed in Spain and which I recovered to use for spares for mine.

And even more interestingly, while I was waiting to take it down to the farm, I did use it around Brussels doing furniture removals at night and weekends. No tax, no MoT, no nothing in fact. But back then in those days no-one really cared. I remember reading the story of Sir Daniel Gooch, Chairman of the Great Western Railway, reminiscing about the experiences of the way that the GWR operated in its early days, and commenting “what would be said of such a mode of proceeding today?”.

And, interestingly, once more as Tom Petty would have it, “HOW COULD I GET SO CLOSE TO” ZERO “AND STILL BE SO FAR AWAY?”. I’m not sure how many times this is just recently that she’s just been tantalisingly dangled out of reach during one of my nocturnal rambles. It seems that I can summon up members of my family at the drop of a hat but Zero, TOTGA and Castor are totally eluding me. And the Vanilla Queen dropped off the radar a long time ago.

Looking back on things, each time that I’ve been up in the High Arctic, and each time I’ve been trying to edit that Colosseum live concert late at night on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR I’ve had a strange encounter with a mysterious young lady of the opposite sex. First there was The Vanilla Queen, and the next time there was Castor. Jamais deux sans trois as they say around here, but the way my health is going, there won’t be another trip out there. 700 miles from the North Pole we were in 2018 and it looks like that will be that. No Rensselaer Harbour, no Thank God Harbour (where my namesake is buried after they poisoned him 150 years ago) and no Fort Conger.

All of this reminiscing probably means that I have too much time on my hands. But nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

So having crashed out here and there, I went for tea. Steamed veg with falafel balls and a vegan cheese sauce. It’s amazing just how different things have become since mainstream French supermarkets are now selling vegan cheese. It’s expensive of course, but it saves me having to bring back a rucksack full every time that I return from Leuven.

Tomorrow is a Welsh lesson of course, so I’m off to bed early. I don’t want to go crashing out in the middle of my lesson. And then I’ll have to pack my stuff ready for Leuven. Three hospital appointments I have on Thursday so I’m going to be busy.

Friday 28th April 2023 – WHAT A HORRIBLE …

… day I’ve had today. I’ve actually spent most of it asleep.

And that’s no surprise because I had another miserable night. Apart from the fact that I took an absolute age to go off to sleep again, I awoke at about 04:20 and just lay there vegetating for ages.

The alarm goes off at 07:00 these days and at 06:55 I found the energy (I’m not sure where from) to haul myself out of bed to beat the alarm. And that was probably the most energetic thing that I did.

The nurse came round as planned and took my blood sample. She had to take three goes before she could extract any blood from me. This is becoming ridiculous. I really am beginning to hate all of this.

It took me a while to come round into the Land of the Living enough to book all of my transport arrangements for my trip to Leuven. To my dismay my Old Fogey’s Railcard has expired and I’m having to pay full price for my travel, and I’m not ‘arf noticing the difference.

There are several factors contributing to the extra expense, apart from the absence of railcard

I’m coming home on a Friday, not a Saturday
I’m not taking the cheap route via Lille because I can’t walk quickly enough between one railway station and the other. Lille Flandres and Lille Europe are situated a good 10 minutes away from each other for a fit person. God knows how I’ll cope on my crutches if I tried that
The two cheap morning trains from Brussels, at 07:13 and 07:43, are fully booked and there are no seats available

And as for the last couple of times, I’m not staying at my usual hidey-hole either. It’s a long walk from the station and also if I want anything to eat it’s a long walk to the shops. There’s an Ibis Budget at the back of the station where I’ve stayed a few times, and that’s where I’ll be hanging my hat.

It took ages to sort everything out though. I went to pay with my Belgian bank account only to find that the app has to be upgraded. That took an age and when it had finally installed itself correctly the order had timed out and I had to start again.

And then there were issues with the SNCF app. That needed upgrading too and now that it’s done, it won’t open on my old phone. I’ve had to do everything off the computer and I’ll need to print out my tickets.

This afternoon the first thing that I did was to have a shower. I was feeling quite cold and I don’t know why and I thought that a shower would warm me up.

While I was in the bathroom I went one step further than David Crosby, gave in an inch to fear and cut my hair. Probably because I had the flu for Christmas, I reckon.

Back in here I fell asleep yet again, and that was that for quite considerable time. And when I awoke I really felt so miserable. It took for ever for me to pull myself together. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’ve been doing so well just recently.

There was time to listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. At one point I was asleep but awake in a kind of dream watching something happen in front of my eyes on the road while I was standing behind a hedge on the edge. It turned out to be a scene from a sequel to a well-known film – a kind-of Lord Of The Rings or The Hobbit or something. It turned out to be a kind-of trailer for a brief film where the producer shows his top-20 moments from his top favourite sequels to well-known films of that nature. We were there watching bits from The Hobbit, Harry Potter, this kind of film until he finally came round to his n° 1. everyone was praying that it wasn’t a certain scene but I didn’t get to see what it was because I awoke just as it was about to start the final scene. Just my luck

Did I dictate the dream … “no, you didn’t” – ed … about being on the taxis last night, having worked really hard with some really long hours. There was a lot of work to do around the Market Drayton area. One of the drivers phoned the people concerned and asked if we were still on for this work. They replied “yes” so he set off to Market Drayton. The way he went was down towards Woore and then across the old road to Knighton, that way. A way that I know well from my perambulations around that area in my youth. We were talking about some other people, Nerina and I, who we knew who had bought some kind of place out there. I had a couple of hours to spare so someone dropped me off at a little sweetshop-type of place. I went in and the guy said “you want upstairs”. I went up these incredibly steep stairs and found myself in this beautiful clean, tidy apartment. It was where one of my taxi drivers and his wife lived. They certainly weren’t the type to have had somewhere that was absolutely spotless. I was intending to try to ask if I could have a bath but when I saw how neat and tidy their house was I had second thoughts because I didn’t really want to mess it up.

And then one of my drivers had been out doing taxi jobs in Northern Ireland with my brother. They’d been away for a while. The guy who had organised it all came back and said that he would refuse to work with my brother again. He began to write out a whole list of everything that went wrong including my brother throwing some mushroom fried rice at him. I had to go off to do something. By the time I came back there was an enormous list. Part of the list was showing that everything in Northern Ireland had increased in price and how much was the increase. This list was enormous, on several pages. The guy in charge of everything said “I think that I’ve decided that I’m going to stop doing the cable car work from now on”. Another guy – a driver – rummaged through his bag and began to pull out things saying “I don’t need this, do I? I don’t need that now, do I?”. Something was strange about what he was pulling out so we had a look at it. It was actually the mirror arm of a car. Why he’d have one of those spare I really don’t know. In the end everyone calmed down and that left me and another driver to do the work for the night. I could see that there was going to be a lot of sorting out that needed to be done over the next couple of days to try to keep everyone happy again and try to stimulate some more business without running into some ridiculous costs.

By the looks of things I’ve been spending a lot of time back on the taxis just recently. And it’s not wishful thinking, I promise you that. For a while it was good fun and quite an enjoyable job but it eventually took on a life of its own and swept us all along in the momentum.

Tea tonight wasn’t as nice as it might have been and I don’t know why. The potatoes didn’t really make nice chips, I suppose, and the sausage rolls somehow didn’t inspire me all that much. My salad was nice though and I’ll have another one of those tomorrow.

Shopping is on the cards so I’ll buy some more spuds for chips for tea tomorrow but the freezer now has some room in it and I’m wondering whether a bag of frozen chips might be a better idea in this case. I shall have to look into that.

There’s more frozen stuff that’s been in the freezer since the Dawn of Time too and I’ll empty a few more bits and pieces to have with my chips and salad tomorrow. But right now I’m off to bed. It’s been a horrible day as I said earlier and the best thing to do is to forget about it and start again tomorrow

It’s been said quite often that no amount of alteration can sometimes change something that’s clearly not working, and it’s better to forget it and start again. I suppose that that’s probably why I have a younger brother.

Monday 24th April 2023 – THAT WAS DIFFICULT!

With nothing much better to do today, I decided that I’d do this radio programme about the 14th July.

It wasn’t easy because I had all of the music, including the very, very last track already in my mind so I had to make sure that the speech fitted all of the gaps in between the music. I know that with the way that I speak, 300 characters of text is the equivalent of 17 seconds of speech so I can make sure that I’m always somewhere in the right kind of area, but that doesn’t take into account the fact that song lengths are often not as published and there’s quite often a silence at the beginning or end. And so it can quite often be rather hit-and-miss, especially if my maths aren’t up to much.

So no-one was more surprised than me to find myself almost a minute short of where I needed to be.

Luckily, when I’d been preparing the programme I’d made a reserve selection of appropriate songs of various lengths and so with a little judicious editing I managed to fit in Lindisfarne’s “Bring Down The Government” with some explanatory text.

It still wasn’t right though and I ended up having to re-dictate a couple of speeches and then do yet more editing. What with one thing and another (and once you get started you’d be surprised at how many other things there are) it was 21:00 when I finally finished.

It was some real good fortune that I actually felt like doing it too because I had another wretched night. I was in bed reasonably early but once again it took me an age to go off to sleep. I awoke again at 04:15 and couldn’t go back to sleep. I watched the dawn slowly rise but I must have gone back to sleep at some point because when the alarm went off at 07:00 it was a real shock to the system.

With the nurse coming today to give me my injection I had to have a shower otherwise he wouldn’t have come in through the door. So of course he has to come quite early today while I’m still soaking myself. That was rather embarrassing.

And he has to come back on Thursday to take a blood sample, so later on this week I’ll be doing another dartboard impression. At this rate I’ll be more comfortable sleeping on a bed of nails but I bet that someone would tell me to fakir off.

Next task that interrupted me was the dictaphone, to see where I’d been last night. Nothing like what I’d been up to on previous nights but then again it wasn’t as if I’d had much sleep. I was out with Steve Winwood last night for some strange reason. There was talk of forming a group but nothing ever came of it. We went to an Indian restaurant somewhere, one that I’d been told was good. As I didn’t know how to go to it, it was in a completely different town, we had to go all around the houses. We arrived and they began to serve us. It was a very strict place. Everything was very formal. We ordered our starters and he went to go to the bathroom. Someone on another table obviously recognised him and asked him what numbers he was going to perform with his new band. He mentioned a few songs and then walked off. I could hear him talking to someone in the distance but I couldn’t see him, going on about the restaurant and how he didn’t expect such a posh, formal place etc. One of the things that I asked him was that I read somewhere that the very first chord he ever played on a guitar was Dflat. I asked him why. He said that it sounded good. I asked if it was the opening chord maybe to a song. he made a very non-commital reply to that which I thought was bizarre.

Later on a group of us was walking up a mountain pass. At the side of the road there were 4 or 5 cars that were parked. Then there was a very sharp bend. Round this bend coming towards us was a cattle wagon, a big heavy thing that was fully-loaded. he took the bend really wide because of his length and almost knocked the wall down into the valley then drove straight into the back of one of these vehicles. he didn’t stop. He kept on trying to push this vehicle forward into all the others to push them to give him more room to turn. Someone shouted “camera” so I took out my camera and began to take a couple of photos. It was only then that he stopped and got out to inspect the damage. By now he’s transformed into a yellow school bus. 3 people came with a huge bag and had to clamber onto the roof at the back of the coach in order to put the bag on the roof rack. Another girl appeared. She went round to the front and said to the driver something like “I was on this bus yesterday and I think that I might have left something on board”. This was probably the most surreal thing that I’d ever witnessed

And then, in between everything else, I dealt with the radio programme.

Tea was a delicious stuffed pepper. And what I did was to turn down the air fryer 20° and to cook it twice as long as I did last week. That cooked it to perfection.

Plenty of stuffing left over for a taco roll tomorrow and for a leftover curry on Wednesday. That’s what i’m looking forward to more than anything because, of course, I have a naan bread awaiting me. I’m really impressed with the naan breads that I made and I’ll make another batch of them.

What I’ll have to do though is to remember that the dough expands considerably so instead of making the batch into three lumps, I’ll have to make it into four or even five.

But never mind – it’s still delicious.

Tomorrow I have my Welsh lesson so I need to be on form, and then on Wednesday I go to sign the purchase agreement for my new apartment.

And then the fun will begin.

Thursday 13th April 2023 – THE VISITING NURSE …

… came round this morning to take my blood sample, and I was surprised. After all, he’d tried one of my biscuits when he was here on Monday, and he’s still alive. They must be quite good so I’ll have to make some more of them.

Mind you, he wasn’t so good at taking the blood sample from me. I ended up looking and feeling like a dart board. And to add insult to injury, he said that he hadn’t managed to fill all of the three tubes that were required but he hoped that there would be enough for the analysis.

When he turned up, at 08:40 this morning, I was really pleased because I was starving. And so would you have been too had you been up since 04:45 this morning. I’d awoken a long time before that too but just couldn’t go back to sleep.

And so with an early start like that I took full advantage of the peace and quiet by dictating some of the backlog of notes that i’d been accumulating.

While I was on my travels around the internet checking up on a few things that I’d written I happened to notice that the first Hawkfest – Space-rock festivals promoted by Hawkwind to try to recapture the spirit of the early rock festivals of the late 60s and 70s – started on a 19th July some time 20-odd years ago.

By pure coincidence that’s a Friday next year.

One thing that I’ve wanted to do is to dedicate a whole programme to just one group and while that’s not really feasible, I have quite a collection of music from obscure space-rock bands who came to whatever prominence they had thanks to an appearance at a Hawkfest, so I think that I’ll have my own Hawkfest on 19th July next year, if I’m still here

A couple of hours of spacerock would be really nice, but I’ll have to find out who has the recording rights to Nik Turner’s performances with his old group “Children Of The Sun” after he died last year.

Once the nurse had gone, I had a bowl of cornflakes and then set out for town in the rain to pick up my Aranesp. It didn’t take me long to go there and come back, although I was quite exhausted when I arrived back home.

One thing that I didn’t have to do though was to go to the post office. NIkon got back to me this morning to tell me that the old NIKON D5000 can’t be repaired. It’s not been made for years and parts are no longer available.

Considering that I bought it in June 2010 I’m not really surprised, but it would have been nice to have kept it going for longer.

So what do I do now? Mirrorless seems to be all the rage but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we don’t seem to have much luck with the NIKON 1 J5. It’s not strong enough to withstand shocks and being smaller than a conventional camera, the moving parts are smaller, lighter and much more delicate.

Having said that, I do persevere with the Nikon 1 because it fits quite nicely in a pocket and being lightweight, I can carry it around quite easily when I’m doing something else. The quality is surprisingly good but only within its limits and I’m expecting it to do much more than it’s capable of doing.

Armed with my cheese on toast and a coffee I came back in here to carry on working but I just couldn’t keep going and by 13:00 I was back in bed asleep. And that’s no surprise either.

Not that I was there for long, though. The laboratory rang me to say that they needed more blood. Caliburn came to the rescue and we went off there.

Surprisingly, the nurse there found my blood straight away with no drama and it didn’t take long to sort out.

The laboratory is just over the road from But, the electrical houseware supplier, so I went over there. I need a built-in microwave oven to go in the units that I bought in Germany last summer that I’ll be installing in the new apartment.

Another thing that I want is a big fridge-freezer seeing as there’s a nice space there in the kitchen, and so I reckoned that I’d go there for a good look around.

Back here I had my hot chocolate and finished off the last of my home-made biscuits while I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I was dictating out the music (do I mean the text?) last night and had it all arranged. The speech had been edited and I was intending to snip it into sections ready to assemble but for some unknown reason I forgot how to do it. I was sitting there for ages looking at the database that I keep, wondering about what I was supposed to be doing to assemble it all to make a proper radio programme. The way it was laid out on the database it just didn’t look right to me at all.

Later on, our mother was keeping us prisoner in our house. We couldn’t go out. We worked out where she’d hidden the key. While we were doing that someone else had worked out a way by which he could open the door but it was long and complicated. he waited until our mother had got up, left her bed and gone out and he began to creep downstairs. Of course we knew that mother would have left her key in her bedroom so we said “you want the third door”. He made a gesture, one, two, three, and started to go downstairs again. We said “no, Clive, the third door” but he carried on downstairs. He didn’t understand that we wanted him to go to the third door on this floor which was my mother’s room where he could find the key just sitting there.

At another point I had plenty of things to do but it was lunchtime and I was being friendly to my colleagues. We were standing around talking and I could see my lunch hour fading away rapidly. But then she invited us up to the 1st floor to have a look at the furniture that she was making in this warehouse. We said that we’d go. Before we reached the stairs she took us to a wall. She pressed a button and a panel rose up. There was an old fireplace that had been bricked up. She asked us to smell by it. We couldn’t smell anything at first but as she closed it there was a smell of varnish. I told her about it. We went upstairs. She had tons of furniture up there including a gorgeous collection of kitchens. We had a good look around here. I thought that there was some lovely stuff. The quality was undeniable but it wasn’t exactly my taste. I ended up spending a lot of time looking at everything to see if there was anything there that really caught my eye.

Tea tonight was beautiful – yet again. That vegan Cheshire cheese that I found in LeClerc a few weeks ago melts really well and with the new dairy thickener that I found there the other day, my cheese sauce was the best that I’ve ever made.

Consequently, steamed vegetables and falafel balls in a vegan cheese sauce it was. I’ll certainly have more of that some other time too. I’m really pleased that the supply of vegan food in mainstream French shops seems to be growing all the time. And not before time either.

So tomorrow I have the physiotherapist coming round in the morning to put me through my paces. I need to be at my best because I have some working-out to do ready to go off to the hospital next week for treatment.

So an early night it is. Here’s hoping that it’s not an early morning.

EPIC HALL

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