Category Archives: laboratory

Thursday 6th July 2023 – MY PHYSIOTHERAPIST …

… came round late this afternoon to tell me that he’s not going to be coming back again.

He and my neighbour have apparently had a dispute and she has told him that she doesn’t want to see him again. So he’s told me that it’s not worth his while to come out here just for me. It’s quite a way out of town.

Actually, it’s not as if I’m really bothered. I’ve said before that he has a kind of manner that I don’t really appreciate all that much. Anyway, he’s given me the phone number of a colleague and told me to contact him.

But we shall see. Because right now, I’m too tired to do anything.

It’s not as if I had a bad night either. Fair enough, I was in bed later than I intended but I’ve been to bed much later than this. And had more-restless nights too.

When the alarm went off I was stark out as well and it was a real struggle to haul myself out of bed before the second alarm.

No medication for me. I had a quick wash and brush up and headed out for the laboratory. I arrived bang-on 08:30 and found myself to be the only person there.

It was necessary to wait 20 minutes though. There’s a special test that needs to be carried out that involves a heated tube so I had to wait for it to be warmed up.

But the nurse found a vein and took a sample straight away first go without any difficulty at all. They are pretty good at this laboratory.

When I came out of the cubicle I found the place heaving with people. I’d arrived just at the correct time by the looks of things.

While I was out, I nipped to LeClerc.. Caliburn is running low on diesel and whenever I go to the supermarket there’s usually an enormous queue. It’s not often that I’m out early on a weekday morning so I nipped out that way to check. To my surprise, there was a pump empty so I bunged in 50 litres. That will do me for several months, I reckon.

Back here I had my medication and then spent some time unwinding. I had another call from the nurse. She couldn’t read the stuff that I sent the other day so could I send some different stuff.

Having scanned that and sent it off, the doctor rang me. He still hadn’t received it so I told him that I’d print it out and bring it with me when I go tomorrow. So I printed it all and then the nurse phoned me back to say that he’d now received it and I needn’t bother printing it out.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone during the night. And by the sound of things, I was literally in the Wars. There was a train that we had to go somewhere to board. I think that we were probably prisoners or something. Before I boarded the train I felt the urgent need to go to the bathroom but there wasn’t anywhere to go and I wasn’t able to go standing by the side of the train. In the end I just climbed aboard anyway. I opened a hatch and somehow managed to pull myself inside ready for the train to set off. I don’t know whether we were fighting the Turks or someone like that

We were in the War last night. We left our support trench to go to the Front Line. We had to charge. We swarmed out of the door into No-Man’s Land but didn’t go very far at all. We just took shelter once we were clear. The Germans started to lob hand grenades, really like explosive charges fitted into glass jars. They always seemed to be landing where I was. I had to dodge around quite a lot in order to escape being blown up by one of them. Just at the moment when I was at my least comfortable a German General came round the corner with a couple of orderlies. I don’t know who was more surprised, me or him. He actually ordered me back to my trench instead of wanting to shoot me or anything like that. Then our Colonel came up. He went over to the German General and handed him a file. It turned out that he had given him the whole information about our defences. When I asked why the Colonel said “another part of the Front is much weaker than ours. I wanted to encourage the Germans to go to attack that and leave us all alone

Then I was away somewhere on a voyage and had a really bad attack of cramp in my left calf again. That wiped away every memory that I had of what I was doing and where I had been

Finally I’d been round to see someone. Someone else came with me. This other person was an older person who lived on his own. We were in a car somewhere in Belgium. The first person whom I’d been to see asked me which way I’d come. I told him and he was trying to tell me a better way to arrive that was quicker etc. I wasn’t really sure about this. Then the other person turned up. We got into the car to go somewhere else . I asked him about the first guy “is he always like this?”. He replied “yes, he loves to take control”. Just then the alarm clock somewhere went off. This guy said “yes that’s my alarm clock. I wasn’t sure what was going to be happening so I went to bed and set the alarm for now but as it happens I got up earlier. It’s no problem”. We began to drive to where we were supposed to be going.

Having dealt with that I did some more work on my radio notes and then went back to the Labrador coast. I was interested to read that our hero Vaino Tanner told us a story that when he was in Cartwright he heard a tale of dogs that had attacked and killed a small child, and how all of the locals denied that such a thing had happened.

Yet there I was, out in the abandoned cemetery in the abandoned village of North River across on the other side of Sandwich Bay, looking at the headstone of the grave of Ephraim Williams aged 4 years and 8 months “who was killed by dogs”.

Not only that, looking even deeper into things, I came across the story of little three year-old Willie Davis down the bay at Long Point. His cousin Tom told a reporter that “These dogs come and fastened right into him. I don’t know if Mother was looking or if she heard something. When she started pelting rocks at them, all the proper dogs went away, all but this old black one, he just stayed there and tore away at Willie. “

So small children being attacked, and sometimes killed by dogs is nothing new. In fact, during the Influenza epidemic that almost wiped out the Inuit community of Okak up the coast, it was reported that “dozens of sled dogs grew wild with hunger and began eating the corpses or attacking sick humans”

As well as all of this I’ve been trying to revise the next batch of my Welsh but today it was more a case of fighting off an overwhelming urge to go to sleep. I’m really not doing very well.

Tea was another one of these quinoa and lentil burgers with rice, veg and some thick onion gravy. For some reason, the gravy wasn’t as nice as last week which was a shame. nevertheless, I did manage to eat it all.

Tomorrow I have my appointment with the nerve specialist who is going to do his worst, and I’m not at all looking forward to that. It hurts like hell, but I suppose that it has to be done. I’d better go and have an early night for once in my life.

Wouldn’t it be awkward if I were to fall asleep in the middle of his test?

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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.

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