Category Archives: France

Saturday 9th August 2025 – TODAY’S DIALYSIS SESSION …

… was slightly less painful than that of Thursday. Not by much though, it has to be said. I’m still quite dissatisfied as to how things are developing with all of this but there doesn’t seem to be very much that I, or anyone else for that matter, can do about it.

What probably didn’t help was that I was in a bad mood, and I was also desperately tired. I’d had another bad night last night.

At first though, it looked as if it was going to be quite good. I’d finished tea early and for some reason (maybe because I was rather more focused than usual) I didn’t take all that long to write up my notes.

By the time that I’d taken the statistics and backed up the computer it was only 22:30 and how nice it was to be in bed at that time for a change. And I was asleep quite quickly too.

However, it wasn’t to last. Round about 03:10 I awoke, and that was that. I couldn’t go back to sleep again. There I lay, vegetating in bed until about 05:00 when I gave it up as a bad job.

When the alarm went off at 06:29, I was already in the bathroom having a good wash. And that was after dictating the radio notes that I’d written the other day, and I’d already begun to edit them too.

After I’d washed and taken the morning’s medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Last night I was having my bath changed for a shower. My care assistant was a young girl. I was living in some kind of apartment in one of these big United States plantation houses of the Nineteenth Century, a type of thing like that, made of wood, very light. The bath was one of these freestanding units on feet, but I was having it taken out to be replaced by a shower. They hadn’t actually started work yet but this girl and I were discussing it. She was looking out of the window saying how she would love to be able to go out there and sit down in the sun, and abandon her job and the people for whom she was caring. Then she calmed down a little and said that when the shower room is done, there would be plenty of room in the bathroom. She could sit in there and admire the weather and the view because it was bound to be really nice in there in the sun.

There’s quite a bit in there that is relevant to what is going on in my life right now. And I have had that very same conversation, or one very much like it, with someone just recently. I’m surprised that it’s preying on my mind though.

Later on, I must have stepped back into that dream. My cleaner said that she wanted to go to sit out in the sun but I told her that when the bathroom had been finished it would be lovely in there and there would be much more room to move about. She could sit in the bathroom which would be just as pleasant, in order to admire the views

There is actually no window in my bathroom so you won’t be able to see very much outside. But there will be plenty of room in there, once I can find someone to take away the old bath that’s still in there. It’s advertised on the internet as to be taken away for free but as yet, there are no takers.

Isabelle the Nurse was late again … "although nothing like as late as yesterday" – ed … and as well as dealing with my legs, she had a look at the catheter in my chest and changed the dressing. And that made me squirm just to think about it.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of THE OLD ROAD.

Yesterday, I mentioned that his flamboyant style of writing was irritating me. But it’s not just his style of writing. What do you make of these two sentences, quite literally one immediately after the other? "The Old Road, as the reader has already seen, never during its course turns a sharp corner. It has to do so at Canterbury because it has been following a course upon the north bank of the Stour,".

He goes on to say "The Old Road falls, as we shall see, into Watling Street, a mile before the city, and enters the ecclesiastical capital by a sharp corner, comparable to the sharp corner at Headbourne Worthy in the exit from Winchester.".

Personally, I don’t know what it was that he was drinking but I could do with a drink of it myself.

There are however a few moments of extreme levity. After spending the night sleeping in an inn at Alresford, "next morning before daybreak, when we had satisfied the police who had arrested us upon suspicion of I know not what crime, we took the hill again and rejoined the Old Road."

After breakfast, I came in here and edited the radio notes right the way through to the end. And here I had a disaster. I was convinced that I had edited the music and had that been the case, I would have been just seven seconds over. However, it turned out that I hadn’t, and I was 48 seconds under when I had finished.

Not even I can pad out that much time, so I began to rewrite them.

Not that I progressed very far though, because my cleaner came along to fit my anaesthetic patches and to serve up a disgusting drink.

When I was ready, we went downstairs and began to unpack the boxes that I had packed the other day that my cleaner took down. She began to fill the CD and DVD shelves while I carried on sorting out the kitchen with the things that had come down.

The driver who came to pick me up was a couple of minutes late today and by that time I’d almost finished what I was doing. We had a quick drive down to Avranches in the beautiful August sunshine.

At the dialysis centre, we had another problem. They wanted to put me in the bed on which the mattress had collapsed, so I dug my heels in. Today though, the team on duty in the room consisted of Julie the Cook and Océane, and they swapped the bed over for another empty one.

Not that that one was all that much better either. I mustn’t be assembled correctly or something like that. What with the pain in my arm from the connection and the pain in my hip from the bed, by the time that the session finished, I was in a right old mess. I’d managed a sleep at first, but not for long. And in the end I had to abandon work as I was in too much agony to carry on.

The taxi was already waiting when the session finished, but it took the girls a good fifteen minutes to come to deal with me when my machine timed out, so I was no earlier coming home than I might otherwise have been.

My cleaner and I stayed downstairs for twenty minutes finishing off what we had started earlier and we also sorted out a few more things too. Now we have plenty more boxes for me to fill ready for Monday.

Just four more trips back up the stairs before I’m down there for good. And that’s just as well because I had a real struggle on the stairs tonight and I won’t be able to do it at all very soon. My cleaner has said that for her Friday session, she’ll work downstairs and have the place looking fine for when the removal begins, which was nice of her.

Tea tonight was a baked potato, vegan salad and breaded quorn fillet, and now I’m off to bed because I’m thoroughly wasted and I just want to sleep.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the police … "well, one of us has" – ed … Percy Penguin once asked me "are you a policeman?"
"No, I’m not, petal" I replied. "Why do you ask?"
"Every time that I see your name in the local newspaper" she said "it’s always about you helping the police with their enquiries."

Friday 8th August 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone this morning.

That is not, however, a surprise. When you are in bed just before 23:00 … "for once" – ed … but awaken at about 01:30 and just lie there vegetating without being able to go back properly to sleep, you don’t have all that much time to go travelling.

That’s right – for once, I was in bed by 23:00 and that doesn’t happen all that often, much to my regret. Tea hadn’t taken very long to make and it was soon over, so I could come back here to write my notes, take the statistics and back up the computer.

And as it happens, I could have been finished even earlier had I applied myself more diligently to my work but as usual, I was sidetracked here and there during the evening.

Once in bed though, I remember nothing whatsoever until I awoke. And being awake, I did my very best to go back to sleep but somehow I couldn’t doze off again. I simply lay there in bed, drifting occasionally into a kind of semi-consciousness but still being aware of my surroundings, and then drifting back out again.

Round about 06:00, I gave up the struggle and took to my feet. I went into the bathroom and had a good wash, and then into the kitchen for the morning medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone but as I said just now, there was nothing on there from the night.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I find that extremely disappointing. These days, the only excitement that I seem to have is whatever takes place during the night. The rest of my existence is a boring, humdrum tour around these four walls with the occasional delight of dialysis and the odd trip to Paris for chemotherapy.

There was plenty to do this morning, such as to watch the highlights of Forfar Athletic v Stranraer and a couple of other matches too, and then the weekly summary from Stranraer as the club prepares for the match against Edinburgh City on Saturday.

Isabelle the Nurse was horribly late today. She forgot yesterday to tell me that she was going to undertake her morning round today in the reverse direction, due to one of her later patients having an early medical appointment.

After she left, I could make breakfast and then read some more of THE OLD ROAD.

It’s a book that is beginning to annoy me and I’ve only just started to read it. It’s his flowery prose, where he takes several lengthy paragraphs to express an idea that he could put down in a dozen words, that’s the problem. I mean – look at this as a way of expressing “the passage of 120 years” – "From just before its opening till a generation after its close, from the final conquests of the Normans to the reign of St.Louis, from the organising plan of Gregory vii. to the domination of Innocent in., from the first doubts of the barbaric schools to the united system of the Summa, from the first troubled raising of the round arch in tiers that attempted the effect of height to the full revelation of Notre Dame—in that 120 years or more moved a process such as even our own time has not seen."

It’s not only that either. His curt dismissal of the pre-Roman British civilisation as "savages" and "barbaric" when in Neolithic and Iron Age times we had classic pottery, jewellery, the smelting of iron (in the later period) and an agricultural system that was not surpassed until the early days of the Agricultural Revolution, is totally unsustainable.

He writes "Letters, geography, common history, glass, and the use of half the metals were forgotten. Not tU the Latin reconquest in the eleventh century was the evil overcome and an organisation at last regained.", but while the first sentence is only partially correct – letters, geography, common history and glass had been restored for several centuries by 1066 – the “reconquest” of which he speaks was not “Latin” at all. He should be reminded that the Duke of Normandy and his followers were in fact for the most part fourth-generation Norse who had occupied Normandy following the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Épée in 911.

Another thing that he mentions is "the rudest and most remote of our ancestors,". It made me wonder what on earth they must have been doing in their remote isolation.

But returning to our road for the moment, he goes on to talk about "Chalk is viscous and spongy when it is wet. It is never so marshy as to lose all impression made upon it. It is never so hard as to resist the wearing down of feet and of vehicles. Moreover, those who are acquainted with chalk countries must have noticed how a road is not only naturally cut into the soil by usage, but forms of itself a kind of embankment upon a hillside from the plastic nature of the soil.". Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WHEN WE WERE IN WYOMING looking for the emigrant trail of the 1840s towards Oregon and California, we saw some really good examples of trail ruts in chalk.

After breakfast, there was work to do. I went right through the kitchen a second time, sorting out what I won’t now need for a couple of weeks, and packed it all away in these plastic boxes that I have. Having done that, I then began to pack away the crockery, carrying on until I ran out of boxes.

There was time after that to write two important letters. One concerns a shareholding that I bought in 1977 and about which I had completely forgotten until a chance remark had jogged my memory. And before any of you lot says anything, it’s a tiny proportion of the total shares and the company has never ever paid a dividend. The purchase was more in the nature of a charitable donation.

The second letter will heave an enormous shark into a very small swimming pool. There are several matters that are annoying me, spinning around in my head, and yesterday I reached the limit of my patience with one of them. Consequently I wrote a letter to the Director General of the organisation concerned and I was … errr … unrestrained. There will be some fall-out about this, without a doubt.

Having done that, the next task was to persuade the printer to work. For some reason, it was proving to be extremely recalcitrant. It took a good while, including cleaning the print heads on no fewer than four attempts to persuade it. But in the end it managed to squeeze out a couple of fair letters.

Whatever it is, I don’t know but I never seem to have much luck with printers.

My disgusting drink break was thus later than usual and it didn’t take long to drink. However, I wasn’t long back in here before my cleaner came up to do her stuff.

She stuck me under the shower, due to the fact that I’d missed out on Wednesday, and then we sorted out some more things to go downstairs. She ended up taking the boxes downstairs, as well as some of the CD racks, Tomorrow, I’ll go downstairs and put everything away while I’m waiting for the taxi, and when I come back if the taxi comes early again.

After she left, I finished the radio programme on which I’d been working and then made a start on the next one. The music has been sorted out and the notes almost finished. It won’t take long to do and then I can crack on and do another one while I’m in the mood.

Tea tonight was miniature vegan nuggets with a salad and air-fried chips, with some more of that nice mayonnaise that I made on Tuesday.

So right now, I’m off to have an early night. There’s football to watch in the morning and plenty of other things simmering away in the background. I don’t know from where all of this work has appeared.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the Norse ancestors of William the Conqueror … "well, one of us has" – ed … when Prince Rollo sailed up the Seine to besiege Paris, he had difficulty controlling his fleet of longboats.
Consequently, he installed a gong on each of his ships. One bang signified "go to port" – two bangs signified "go to starboard" – and three bangs signified "go full ahead."
That system is the basis of the modern system of remote communication that was popularised in the Nineteenth Century and was called "Norse Code." And that’s why every Norse raid was dreaded because of its series of gong bangs.

Thursday 7th August 2025 – I AM IN …

… total agony after the dialysis session today.

For a change, the taxi was early today. And not just five minutes either but a good half an hour early. But then came the bad news. There were over three litres of water to extract today (which explains why I have been so tired) so they made me stay for four hours. And in the bed where the mattress has collapsed right where I put my left hip so all through the session, I was in complete and utter pain.

It had all the air of being a good day too, unfortunately.

Last night, I was late yet again, despite not hanging around all that much. I think that it was down to the fact that tea took so long to make that I didn’t begin to write my notes until much later that usual. I could well have done without that.

Once in bed, I went to sleep quite quickly although I do have some vague memory of being awake at about 01:30. However, I went back to sleep again and there I stayed until about 06:05.

As usual, it took a few minutes for me to gather myself together before I fell out of bed, and then I staggered off into the bathroom, and then the kitchen for my morning medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. This was another one of these dreams where I was working in the office but I didn’t really care. I was letting all the work build up but I didn’t really care because I was planning on retiring, just walking away and leaving it all. I’d said that a couple of weeks ago but it was now three weeks later, everything was still there and I was still there and I hadn’t said that I was going. We were discussing some particular file that needed work doing on it. I had been helping a colleague out with a few things while he was away but when he came back there was still this particular file that needed attention. I said “never mind, bring it to me. Let me have a look at it and I’ll deal with it. I’m sure that I can find the time”. In the meantime, he was somewhere around and there was some kind of programme about houses. It showed this weird kind of semi-detached pair of bungalows. It turned out that it was fabricated out of an old London single-decker bus from 100 or so years ago. I seem to remember that in Shavington there was another bungalow that was exactly the same. It said that in this particular first one if you were to look closely you could see the shape of the bus but I had a really good look and I couldn’t see the shape of the bus at all in it.

We’ve had quite a few of these dreams in the past where I’ve abandoned all idea of working as I prepare for my retirement and then never actually retiring. There has to be something significant in this, I suppose. But the dream about bungalows being basically converted buses is nothing new, although it’s usually old abandoned railway carriages that are the most popular. There are some good examples HERE but as far as I know, there were none in Shavington.

Last night, there was a plan by Stoke City to have a big festival of football because they had reached an important milestone in their age so they began to organise this festival. They asked members of Crewe Alexandra if they could help. It turned out that when someone from Crewe was giving the matter some thought, it turned out that it was 100 years since the formation of Crewe’s first team. So instead, they began to organise a festival of their own and that it would be bigger and better and more important than the one that was being organised by Stoke City.

If they want to celebrate the 100 years of Crewe Alexandra’s first team, they are rather late. The club was founded in 1877 and played its first competitive match in December of that year.

There was another dream that took place in the hilly country where it had rained almost non-stop for several weeks. All of the ground above a village had become waterlogged and slowly a small depression had appeared in the hillside. This was immediately cordoned off and a guard was mounted on it. Slowly, the depression increased in size. Eventually the news filtered out that it was a burial chamber from when the village had first become occupied in the 1830s and people were warned to keep well away. But as the rain continued and the depression increased in size, slowly the earth was washed away and people began to see the old coffins. I was keeping well away because I didn’t want to see a decaying corpse or a skeleton.

Part of this dream seems to relate to Penrhiwceiber maybe, when we were talking about the desertion of the Welsh countryside as people flocked to the mines and the heavy industry. But the rest – the coffins, skeletons and all of that – could easily have its parallel from when we were in Greenland and climbed up to a cave near Uummannaq where a few years earlier, several mummified Inuit bodies had been found. When we were in the interior of the country later, scrambling over the tundra we came across a hitherto-undiscovered stone chamber burial with the skeleton still present, visible through a small gap in the stones. Of course, it’s very bad form to disrespect the Inuit dead in this way, but at first we had no idea what it was. We thought that it might have been a food cache or a collapsed fox trap.

Isabelle was late again this morning. The town was heaving with people, with it being the annual brocante. Some of the streets were closed off to vehicles and with the mayor’s wonderful new road system, the diversion took the cars miles out of their way.

After she left, I could make breakfast and read some more of Hilaire Belloc’s THE OLD ROAD.

It hasn’t taken me long to start nit-picking, that’s for sure. He tells us that "the Romans invented frontiers", which must have come as a dreadful surprise to the Chinese who started 400 years previously to build what eventually became the Great Wall of China, and also to the Neolithic and Iron Age settlers of Britain whose border dykes and earthworks we discussed at length several months ago.

He also tells us that "the south always conquered the north,", another comment that must have come as a surprise to King Penda of Mercia and Kind Aethelhere of the East Anglians, who were soundly beaten by Oswu of Northumbria, and Penda lost half of his kingdom.

One interesting comment that he makes concerns the Normandy coast between the Cotentin and the Seine estuary. He notes that it "gave an opportunity for the early ships to creep under the protection of a windward shore.". That was something that was used to full advantage in June 1944.

Back in here, I carried on with the radio programme that I had started yesterday, spending probably more time looking for the notes that I’d written that doing anything else. I was so carried away that I forgot to note the time and ended up being quite late.

My cleaner was quite late too so we had something of a rush, but when I was ready, she helped me downstairs to the new apartment. There were some things that I wanted to do. However, as I said earlier, the taxi came far too early and I hadn’t done a thing.

The taxi had to drop off another passenger – a young lady – somewhere out in the wild at the back of Sartilly and the driver spent more time chatting her up than he did concentrating on the road, and it was a most unpleasant drive. Apart from that, he was all accelerator and brake which is not the way to drive a diesel car.

However, at least with these new Social Security regulations about shared travel, I’m seeing parts of Normandy that I never knew existed.

At Avranches, we were way too early so I had to hang around. Then I was weighed and found to be considerably over my dry weight and the machine’s capacity so I had to stay for four hours. And then they put me in the bed with the collapsed mattress so I was in total agony throughout the whole four-hour session.

First though, I crashed out. For some reason (probably because of the water retention issue) I was exhausted and couldn’t keep awake. The pain soon brought me round, though, and in the end it became so bad that I was obliged to stop work as I couldn’t concentrate.

Eventually I was let loose and the boss of the drivers brought me home.

Once more, it was a very difficult climb back up here, and I’m not sure whether I can cope with the five that remain before I move downstairs.

Tea was a vegan burger with pasta and tomato sauce, simple but delicious, and now I’m off to bed for a good sleep ready to crack on with work tomorrow if I can and there aren’t too many interruptions.

But seeing as we have been talking about it raining non-stop, in that village in the Welsh mountains … "well, one of us has" – ed … the rain increased and the floods began. Everyone evacuated except the vicar. When someone in a boat urged him to climb in, he replied "oh no! The Good Lord will provide."
A couple of hours later the church is flooded and he’s standing on the roof, when another boat came past. The occupants urged him to climb in but he replied "oh no! The Good Lord will provide."
A couple more hours later and he’s standing on the top of the steeple as the floods lap around his feet. Another boat came by and the occupants urged him to climb in but he replied "oh no! The Good Lord will provide."
However, ten minutes later he’s swept away.
In the queue at the Pearly Gates he met St Peter, to whom he expresses his dismay. "I don’t understand it" he said. "I put my faith in the Lord that he would save me, and he let me down."
"What do you mean ‘let you down’?" roared St Peter. "He did send three boats to rescue you."

Wednesday 6th August 2025 – I HAVE DONE …

… something this afternoon that I haven’t done for several weeks. That is, I have crashed out in my chair.

It might have been only for fifteen minutes but nevertheless, you have no idea how disappointing it is to have done so.

What was worse was that it was one of those moments where I didn’t realise that I’d crashed out until I awoke. I had not the slightest idea that I was on the verge of going. The only reason that I knew that it was for fifteen minutes was because I had just started listening to a concert soundtrack and when I awoke, I was just about fifteen minutes in. Otherwise, it could have been fifteen hours or even fifteen years and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

It wasn’t as if I was tired either. Admittedly, I didn’t go to bed until a little after 23:30 but I slept right the way through until all of 05:50 and these days, that’s a very long time for me.

It could, and should have been much earlier than that but as usual, I was carried away by all kinds of irrelevancies that distracted me from what I was supposed to be doing and I couldn’t press on with the important tasks at hand.

When I eventually found my way to bed, I wasn’t in the least bit tired. I imagined that I would be awake for quite a while but I didn’t hold out for very long at all and I was soon deep in the arms of Morpheus.

Awakening was another one of these sudden jolts upright. It was still dark so I was surprised to see that it was as late as it was. The nights are drawing in quite rapidly already. Gone are the days when it was becoming light at 04:00.

As usual, it took a good few minutes to haul myself out of bed and head into the bathroom for a good wash, and then into the kitchen for the medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night and, more importantly, who had come with me. Last night I was with Percy Penguin. I was in Canada preparing to go back to Europe but for some reason it took me an age to pack my things. Percy Penguin was sorry to see me go. My brother was preparing to leave too. We were struggling to have everything done when suddenly the bus put in an appearance so we had to rush. I found myself outside the gates of the garden with my suitcase and had to shout to the bus to tell him to wait for me for two minutes until I caught him up. Then I realised that again that I wasn’t on my crutches and I had my suitcase and my rucksack but by now the gates were closed and I couldn’t go back in, and the bus was there to take me to the airport, I’d forgotten the sandwiches that I had just made and I could see that this was going to be some kind of catastrophe. Then I heard that, with my brother deciding not to come, Percy penguin was trying to find her way out to catch the bus and come along. While this was all going on, we were listening to some kind of radio programme that was being prepared. It sounded totally crazy to me but it turned out to be a broadcast of the Goon Show. They were talking there about someone who had been responsible for a lot of Britain’s landscape and had designed the last foam rubber road and the last patchwork quilt field. I didn’t know what was happening with all of this.

It’s nice to see Percy Penguin back in my dreams. It’s years since I’ve seen her and a good while since she last came to see me during the night. She doesn’t figure in my dreams half as often as she deserves, seeing as she helped me through some very dark times all those years ago. But here we go again with my family and not only that, with Canada, without my crutches and another panic attack too. This dream is obviously telling me something and I wish that I knew just what it was.

Later on, I had a pick-up to do for someone at 20:30. I was quite early so I went to the village hall or whatever it was at 20:00 because I noticed a few people hanging around there. When I went in, a rock group was taking to the stage. I recognised it as being the modern equivalent of Man with John Mckenzie playing guitar. I didn’t recognise the bassist but he said that he had been with the group for twenty years so I assumed that it was Josh Ace, son of Martin. They began to play and it was a really good concert. There weren’t all that many people there but it was enjoyable all the same and I began to regret very much that I had this job to do at 20:30 because I could have stayed there all night.

By the way, I’ve added in the name of John McKenzie because during the night, I couldn’t think of it. He was the bassist with Man for a while but last night, he was playing a six-string guitar with Josh Ace, a guitarist, on bass, a black Rickenbacker 4000-series. At least, I think that it was Josh Ace. He was tall, well, built and with red hair and a beard. I met his parents, Martin and Georgina, when they were in Hanley years and years ago playing with their group, The Flying Aces. I seem to remember that they had Richard Treece, ex Help Yourself, also on guitar but I can’t for the life of me remember who the drummer was.

However, I do remember once in the early 90s driving halfway across Europe to a village hall somewhere because I’d heard that Man were playing there. It was a tiny village hall, just like the one in the dream, but the band was a totally different band of the same name and their music was … errr … disappointing.

Isabelle the nurse breezed into the apartment to sort out my legs and feet. She didn’t stop long, and I could press on with making my breakfast and reading some more of MY BOOK.

We’re reaching the end of the book so our author is summing up his work to date. But one thing that I have noticed is that despite the passage of time, there is very little that has changed.

He tells us, for example, that Londoners "be natural subjects, a part of the commons of this realm, and are by birth for the most part a mixture of all countries", very much like the London of today.

Another subject that is very topical today is what is considered to be the drain of wealth from beyond the M25 into the capital. Stow tells us that back in the last 16th Century there were"men which charge London with the loss and decay of many (or most) of the ancient cities, corporate towns and markets of this realm."

A third thing that he mentions is that one of"the only inconveniences of London" is "the immoderate drinking."

As you can see from the above, in the four centuries since Stow wrote his book, nothing whatever has changed.

However, I did have a smile when I read what he had to say about certain privileges of the Londoners being revoked by the King and only reinstated on payment of a heavy fine. He states various reasons why this should have taken place, such as that the citizens "misbehaved themselves in point of government and justice" but concludes by saying "to speak the plain truth, the princes have taken hold of small matters and coined good sums of money out of them."

But seeing as we have been talking about concluding … "well, one of us has" – ed … the book is now, regrettably, concluded. I found it a fascinating book and really enjoyed reading it too. Tomorrow we’ll be starting on Hilaire Belloc’s THE OLD ROAD – the story of the old Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Thomas a Beckett’s shrine at Canterbury Cathedral.

Back in here, I had the important task of going all the way through the list of what I need for the apartment downstairs, such as curtains, internet cables and the like. When my cleaner arrived to do her stuff, we went through it again and I sent it off. The stuff will start arriving on Friday and then we can crack on.

In the meantime, I’ve had some more disappointing news. One of my friends who was down to help me move has had a bad fall and dislocated his shoulder, so he’s had to withdraw. It seems that people are dropping like flies when I try to round them up.

This other plumber turned up this afternoon to inspect that work that needs doing. First of all, he couldn’t do half of the work but after a lengthy discussion, he went away and he’s now found a tiler who will fit the false wall and tile it. So if this plumber who is supposed to start on Monday fails to turn up, we may well have a Plan B.

In between everything else, I was writing the notes for the next radio programme and they are almost complete. And I could have finished them too had I not had that unfortunate doze off. Ahh well!

Tea tonight was a delicious leftover curry, and how I enjoyed it too. It really was one of the best that I have ever made.

So late again, I am off to bed ready for dialysis tomorrow, I don’t think. And when I come back, there will only be five more trips after that back up the stairs – assuming that there will still be people alive and kicking to help me move. At the rate that people are dropping out, it’s most unlikely that there will be anyone left.

But seeing as we have been talking about falling asleep … "well, one of us has" – ed … I think that if I were to die, that’s just how I would like to go. Just like this afternoon. All of a sudden, with no warning, no notice, nothing at all. Peacefully and quietly, just like my paternal grandfather.
Not yelling, screaming and panicking like the passengers in his minibus.

Tuesday 5th August 2025 – WHEN THE ALARM …

… went off this morning at 06:29, I was already sitting at my desk working.

In fact, I’d already dictated the radio notes that I’d written the other day, decided that I didn’t like how they turned out, deleted them and dictated them a second time.

That’s the kind of thing that you can do when you awaken at 05:10 and leave the bed at 05:20.

It wasn’t as if I’d had an early night last night either. After tea, I came back in here and dillied and dallied as usual these days, exhausted as I was after dialysis. I completely lost track of time and by the time that I realised what time it was and put my head down to work, it was far too late to do anything about it.

Eventually though, I finished my notes, took the statistics and backed up the computer, and then wandered off to bed.

For a change, it was a restless night. I must have awoken three or four times during the night, not that I remember too much about it. But at 05:10, as I said just now, I was awake and couldn’t go back to sleep.

With it being nice and quiet outside in the street, this was the opportunity to attack the notes and dictate them. And then delete them and dictate them a second time because the first attempt sounded as it I had been dictating with my head in a metal bucket.

When the alarm went off, I went off for a good wash and to take my medication. Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night.

My brother and I found ourselves back at home last night but there had been an enormous load of changes. We didn’t understand any of it because our mother had totally changed the system of supplies and we didn’t know exactly where we were. When we began to look through everything, we could see that there were some deficiencies so we went into the rear living room to have a further look in there. My mother was most aggressive when we began to ask about certain things and chased us away. We began to go through the pantry where there were all kinds of different kinds of food there, all these special types of food that had points with them for prizes etc. There was one set that had points for individual presents rather than out of a catalogue. We just didn’t understand why all of this had been bought. My brother wasn’t being very careful. He was dropping tins over the floor and I was picking them up to put them back. In the end I was stressed out so I just picked up a tin of luncheon meat off the floor and threw it at him, telling him to be more careful. He didn’t really appreciate that. There was all of this going on to our food supplies, what we had in stock in the kitchen which was nothing at all like what we were used to having

So here we go again. No matter what happens, I don’t seem to be able to separate myself from my family during the night. Apart from my niece in Canada, during normal waking hours, I haven’t wasted a minute’s thought about my family for decades. But during the night, when I’m trying my best to think about Castor, Zero and TOTGA, along comes my family to push me out of my stride and I wish that they wouldn’t.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I don’t mind Nerina coming along during the night because I did invite her to share my life, for better or worse (and she will probably think that it was more of the latter) and in any case, you can’t live with someone for nine years and not like them, but the others can push off.

The description of my mother as “aggressive” was certainly very apposite. She lived in her own little World and only very rarely did she make contact with the World in which the rest of us lived. She had had all kinds of torments when she was younger which explains a lot, but it didn’t make life easier for the rest of us.

Anyway, I digress … "again" – ed … I shall have to stop being in such an introspective mood and look more outward, even if that’s not possible until I’m downstairs (two weeks to go).

Isabelle the Nurse turned up to deal with my legs so I told her of my encounter with Emilie the Cute Consultant, whom she knows.

Isabelle also thinks that going to Paris is too much for me and is wearing me down. She’s seen how I am when I return and notices a great difference. She thinks that I’ll still be very ill when I return from Rennes if they keep on giving me this second product. She reckons (and so does everyone else) that the biggest difference will come when I don’t have twenty-five stone steps to climb every time I come back from a medical appointment.

And seeing as we have been discussing medical appointments … "well, one of us has" – ed … the Centre de Réeducation has contacted me. They would like me to go for an assessment interview on 26th September.

The letter contains a note “pre-admission” so it looks as if they are lining me up for another thirty sessions of treatment. Not that the first course of thirty did me much good, but I’m hoping that with the chemotherapy, something might happen that will make my lot a little easier.

After Isabelle left, I could make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

Today, we have been reading an endless list of mayors and aldermen of the City of London, with his acid remarks about some of them.

There’s nothing exciting from that point of view, although some of the actions of the mayors that John Stow highlights are quite interesting.

Two that spring to mind are firstly, in 1352 the mayor "procured an act of parliament that no known whore should wear any hood or attire on her head, except red or striped cloth of divers colours."

Secondly, in 1472 the mayor "Sir William Hampton punished strumpets and caused stocks to be set in every ward to punish vagabonds."

The stocks clearly didn’t act as the necessary deterrent because in 1503, the mayor, Sir William Capell "caused a cage in every ward to be set for the punishing of vagabonds.".

Back in here, I had some more furniture to put up for sale, and that involved taking photos and measurements.

Once they were online, I had two offers straight away but after some time spent in intense negotiations, I worked out that these were some kind of phishing attack for my bank account details so I abandoned the discussion. One of the site owners also came to the same conclusion because one of my correspondents was pulled from the site.

The rest of the day has been spent dealing with the radio programme, that is, when I’ve not been having a disgusting drink break. The programme is now finished and it sounds quite good except where there is the “blip” where the speed changes and I had to do my best to adjust it. I can hear the change, but I doubt if anyone else can.

Tea tonight was a taco roll and as I had run out of mayonnaise, I had to make some more. The wine vinegar is downstairs and the only vinegar up here, apart from the malt vinegar, was some balsamic vinegar. It certainly gives the mayonnaise a different taste and it’s not unpleasant at all.

So right now, I’m off to bed, later than I would like, but that’s what comes of having to stop and make mayonnaise and then wash up all of the oily, greasy machinery. Tomorrow it’s shower day so we shall see how we go. Someone wants to come to look round to see the plumbing job so that will keep me out of mischief for a while.

But seeing as we have been talking about my mother’s cooking … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of a girlfriend from school who came round to our house one evening.
My mother made everyone a hot drink and then a couple of hours later, she asked if we wanted another one.
My girlfriend hesitated. "If that just now was coffee, " she said "could I have tea, please? But if it was tea, could I have a coffee?"

Monday 4th August 2025 – BANE OF BRITAIN …

… strikes again:

Sitting here all morning fuming because the plumber hadn’t shown up, I eventually decided to re-read the message that he had sent me at the beginning of last week.

And sure enough, there in black and white, is written “a week on Monday” – i.e. the 11th August.

Here I am, having been fretting all day for nothing at all.

Even worse, in the mad rush to order what I needed and ended up with what I could buy at short notice rather than what I would like, it turns out that I had plenty of time to shop around and make an online order. Still, it’s too late to fret about it now.

And seeing as we have been talking about it being too late … "well, one of us has" – ed … it was too late last night when I finally went to bed last night. After my marathon lie-in on Sunday, I wasn’t all that tired, which is no surprise

Mind you, I was asleep quite quickly and there I stayed, flat out, until all of … errr … 04:10.

At that point I could easily have left the bed but I decided once more to loiter around for a while. The next thing that I knew, it was 05:45 and so at that point I decided to leave the bed. Not that I managed it straight away – it took me a good few minutes to summon up the courage to leave the bed.

The first thing that I did was to go back to yesterday’s entry and add in the dictaphone notes that I had forgotten to include last night.

After a good scrub up and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, I went to sort out the medication and then I came back in here to find out what was on the dictaphone from the night. I was in an apartment in the rue de Villedieu. Looking out of the window I could see someone going past with a pile of books and records so I wondered what was happening. As I opened the door, a paper that had been on my desk blew out and I had to run after it but the faster I ran, the faster it blew in front of me. It took me quite a while, up to the hospital roundabout in fact, before I was able to catch it and stamp on it. By this time, the people with all these books and records had disappeared. I was chatting to a friend about this and we had no idea of what was going on. A few days later, I was walking down by the old cemetery and in the corner at the bottom where all of the records of the cemetery and the burials of the town had been kept, it was now an office for an auto-electrical company. I was wandering around a little more and came across a guy who used to supply sand into the cemetery. I asked him if he knew what was happening. He replied that the books and records department had been closed in May. I thought that this was the reason why the books and records had been moved, but to where have they gone? No-one at all seemed to know. They had disappeared off the face of the earth. I thought that if the company had closed down, that might be the reason why there was no football on Sunday morning, maybe because the commentators who accessed all of the records for their broadcasts, they had decided to move on too although it would be extremely unlikely.

This reminds me of an incident in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, in 1992 where the disposal of a pile of records led to an extremely unfortunate crisis that had still not resolved itself when I left for the European mainland. It was one of those events that would have the most enormous repercussions but we’ll leave it at that, for fear of incriminating certain people.

Later on, I stepped back into that dream. We were talking about the ancient martial art of Terzhik which involved a way of entering through the window of some kind of sacred or special place. This is what had started off on this series of dreams by thinking that I had seen someone coming through the window into the records office. However, I didn’t spend long dreaming of this because I awoke with a start again halfway through.

As for any martial art called Terzhik, I doubt very much that there is such a thing. But people coming in through the window is a concern that I need to address when I’m on the ground floor, knowing how suddenly and how profoundly I can crash out.

While we were tidying up, my cleaner came across a video that I hadn’t seen. It talked about the Welsh migrations during the Industrial Revolution when hundreds of thousands of people left their homes on the farms and in the mountains to go to work in the coal mines and in the big cities. I hadn’t seen this before so I sat down to watch it. It was extremely interesting, talking about the lines of emigration up the Conwy valley and places like that. It went on to talk about the migrations from the South to the North in 1913 when the Wrexham coal mines open – that would seem to be when my grandmother moved from Penrhiwceiber in South Wales up to Wrexham. It showed all kinds of interesting things like the contemporary carriages and the rock-strew routes that they used to take, how their carriages were broken down along the way and had to be repaired so a whole new breed of carriage repairers had to be set up in mid-Wales. It talked about the cemeteries being vacated, bodies being removed and being found just about everywhere because there was no possible way to bury them anywhere else. It was just reaching the interesting part when I awoke.

Rural depopulation is something that has been going on since the start of the Industrial Revolution but in Wales, with the dramatic rise of heavy industry, the process was much more intense and many villages lost a huge amount of their population. In 1871, Penrhiwceiber wasn’t even listed in the census, yet in 1909 there were over 4,000 people working in the coal mines there As for the roads in mid-Wales, they are not much better than those that I saw in my dream. The problem in a lack of investment – neither the Welsh Assembly nor Central Government believes that there’s anything north of the “Heads of the Valleys” except sheep and druids.

There was another part of a dream somewhere but I can’t remember where it fitted in, but I’d gone for a walk and had gone almost as far as Nantwich before I realised that I had set out without my crutches. I wondered how that was possible and, more importantly, once I realised, how was I going to return home?

Wherever this fits in, I have no idea. But it’s not the first time that I’ve dreamed that I’ve been walking without my crutches. But I’d love to know how I returned home once I’d realised.

Isabelle was late this morning and she didn’t stay long, just enough time to sort out my legs and then she was away. I could then make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

Our author has pressed on today and is now discussing the chronology of the Bishops of London.

He has quite a few comments to make about some of the Bishops, but he reserves his most incendiary vitriol for Eustachius de Fauconbridge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who was made bishop in 1221. He says that while Fauconbridge "was giving Holy orders, a great tempest of wind and rain annoyed so many who came thither whereof it was gathered how highly God was displeased with such as came to receive orders, to the end that they might live a more easy life of the stipend appointed to the churchmen, giving themselves to banqueting, and so with unclean and filthy bodies (but more unclean souls) presume to minister unto God, the author of purity and cleanness."

Back in here, still fuming over the non-arrival of the plumber (I hadn’t re-read the message at this point) I drafted an advert onto one of these Chamber of Commerce sites to see if I couldn’t find another one.

While I was at it, I put some more things online for sale and, in the case of the old bathroom fittings, to give away. There is still plenty more to be sold.

When my cleaner had finished applying my anaesthetic patches, we collected some more things together, photographed another piece of furniture, and then took downstairs the things that we had assembled.

Once I was down there, I put things away, mainly in the new bathroom unit, and then began to rearrange and reorder the food in the kitchen cabinets. There’s now much more space in there, which is good.

When it was 13:00 we went outside in the sun to await the taxi, but it was half an hour late. Not that I was complaining, because it was a gorgeous afternoon and I was enjoying the fresh air.

There was another passenger in the car and the driver spent all of the time talking to her. No-one said a word to me. I settled down in the back of the car and had a nice rest.

At dialysis I was put in a small room with three other people. It was a nice, comfortable bed with nice surroundings so I didn’t do much this afternoon. I simply relaxed and enjoyed the nice view.

And who should come to chat to me but Emilie the Cute Consultant. We discussed the issues about chemotherapy, and an in-depth discussion it was too. In the end she promised to ring Paris to explain in greater detail the issues that I’m having, and suggest that I go to Rennes for any subsequent treatment. It would be lovely if she could persuade them

With being late arriving, I was late leaving but we made good time on the way home. Back here, we measured the windows in the apartment downstairs so that I could order some curtains, and my faithful cleaner has struck lucky. Some of the shelves in the fridge here are broken and I would have to order some new ones as replacements before I go, but someone has dumped over in the rubbish bay a fridge the same size as mine and she was able to rescue a couple of shelves, which is wonderful.

It was another long, weary climb up here and I had to sit down for twenty minutes to recover before I could make tea.

We’re back in our usual routine as of today, with stuffed pepper, and enough stuffing left over for a couple of days. It’s only a small mix of stuffing too, but I’m really not in all that much of a mood to eat a great deal right now.

So tomorrow, there is plenty to do so I’m going to go to bed, late as it is. And here’s hoping for a good sleep because despite the events of Sunday morning, I really need it.

But seeing as we have been talking about the cemetery here in Granville … "well, one of us has" – ed … someone from Crewe came here years ago and was astonished by the number of graves in it for such a small town.
"Do people die here often then?" he asked the gravedigger.
"Ohh no!" replied the gravedigger. "Only the once."

Sunday 3rd August 2025 – I HAVE DONE …

… something this morning that I have not done for several months, and it took me completely by surprise.

This morning, I awoke early as usual after a dialysis session – 03:10 in fact. But that’s far too early to be showing a leg, even if I am accustomed to some very early mornings these days, and so I decided that I would curl up underneath the quilt and see if I couldn’t go back to sleep for a short while.

And sleep I did. When I awoke, the sun was streaming in through the bedroom window, the birds were singing, and a glance at the time showed that it was actually 07:37. How long is it since I’ve been in bed at that time of the morning (illness excepted, of course)?

It wasn’t as if I’d had a late night either. I’d finished all of my notes by 22:15, so the timestamp tells me, and after taking the stats and carrying out the back-up of the computer, it was 22:30 when I crawled into bed. And it didn’t take long for me to go to sleep.

On a Sunday, I plan to have a lie-in and so the alarm is set for 08:00 but since dialysis began seriously, I don’t think that I’ve ever actually stayed in bed until then, a far cry from when I had no visiting nurse in the morning, no alarm call and sometimes I’d stay in bed until after midday.

Had it been a normal day with an alarm at 06:29, lying in bed like this would have been classed as an abject failure, but on a Sunday it would be classed as an early start. However, I’m not going to note it as such because it’s disappointing.

Despite it being late, it still took me a few minutes to rise to my feet, and then I wandered off into the bathroom and then into the kitchen for the medication.

There wasn’t a lot of time for me to do anything much before Isabelle the Nurse arrived. She’d told me that she would be late because of the annual book sale in the walled town but she had the wrong date and it’s not until the 16th of August so in fact there was nothing to interrupt her passage and she was early.

After she left, I could make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

Our author is still in Westminster and has gone to the Great hall, where he describes in great detail the origins of the King’s Bench, the system of Courts and Judges that lasted until about 1875. Initially, it followed the King around on his Royal Circuits, trying cases that had arisen since its last visit and which later settled in the Great Hall, with only a part of the Court followed the King.

He tells us that "King Edward IV, in the year 1462, in Michaelmas term" because the Court had four terms, Hillary, Easter, Trinity and Michaelmas "sat in the King’s Bench three days together, in the open court, to understand how his laws were ministered and executed."

Another thing that he mentions is "a cloister of curious workmanship" built by Doctor John Chambers, the King’s physician. How I would have liked to see that!

He’s being continually surprised by the meals and banquets that are being served up, as am I, I have to admit. He tells us of John Mansell, the King’s Councillor, who organised a banquet for "The Kings and Queens of England and Scotland, Edward, the King’s son, earls, barons, knights, the Bishop of London and divers citizens." His house turned out to be far too small and he had to erect "tents and pavillions" and "there was such a multitude that seven hundred messes of meat did not serve for the first dinner."

There’s also mention of another huge banquet with an enormous quantity of food and "sundry wines and plenteous wise" that went on through the night and ended with "the king and queen being conveyed with great lights into the palace."

Back in here, there were the dictaphone notes to transcribe. I was in Canada last night, round at my niece’s. Everyone had gone out and left me on my own for a while. By now, it was almost teatime and I was feeling hungry but it was very difficult to know what to eat. In the end I had a scavenge around and found some noodles and some powdered soy sauce which I thought would probably do for now. Then I found that I couldn’t open any of the tins or bottles. By now my niece and her husband were back and they were watching me as I tried to saw off with a sharp knife the bands that hold things like knives in their sheaths etc to try to have some kitchen utensils. My niece asked me if I wanted something else so I replied that I’d made a start on this so it would do. My niece’s husband asked me if I wanted to listen to any music. I asked him what he had and he read out a whole list of CDs so I mentioned one or two, so he gave them to me. However, he didn’t tell me where to switch them on, where the CD player was. So I was standing there with these useless utensils in one hand and a useless couple of CDs in the other hand and this strange concoction of food on the plaque de cuisson.

So here we go again. I’m feeling nostalgic for Canada again. That’s something that I shall have to chase out of my mind and accept that it’s never going to happen again. However, I did actually find a packet of noodles when I was tidying the kitchen the other day. Apart from the indecision, which seems to happen a lot in my dreams, I can’t fit the rest in with anything else.

Nerina and I had moved house, and we were thinking of adopting a cat. We went to the local animal shelter and the person there listened to our story and offered us a female cat and her five new-born kittens. Much as I liked cats, I thought that that was far too much and so did Nerina but the guy was doing his best to persuade us, saying that all food will be provided etc, but we were still not keen at all on this idea of having this kind of cat family in the house.

Anyone who has ever looked after a cat will know that you don’t actually choose a cat – a cat chooses you. You’ll have an idea about the kind of cat that you would like and go to a refuge to find one but you’ll always come back with completely the opposite of what you would have liked. Your ideal cat would be there, but it would take one look at you and slink off into a dark corner but another cat will cling to your legs and won’t let go.

There was also something about being in Virlet but I can’t remember anything about it now.

After that, I had a very slow start to the day and didn’t do very much at all for quite a while. I had hoped to see the Forfar v Stranraer football match but for some reason, the stream didn’t come online this morning and it’s still not appeared. I’ve no idea why not either because usually, the camera team is quite reliable.

Once I’d decided to start work, I carried on with the radio programme that I’d started the other day. All of the music is now remixed and apart from in one or two places where we had issues setting tone and amending the speed of a couple of tracks, it’s come out quite well and I’m quite happy.

The notes have also been written ready for dictation but I shan’t dictate them immediately because I’m not convinced that they are long enough and they will need reworking.

There’s also a photograph of STRAWBERRY MOOSE doing the rounds of the internet in Granville right now.

The estate agent who came round a couple of weeks ago took a couple of photos of the place and these are being used to advertise my apartment here as available to let, and His Nibs is prominently featured, sitting in the middle of the bed.

In case you are wondering why I’m not posting the link, well, let’s just say that it does not show my apartment in the best of lights. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that tidiness is not my particular forte.

There were the usual breaks in the afternoon for disgusting drinks and also for baking. I needed more bread and a base for my pizza so I dealt with that this afternoon.

The loaf is slightly heavier today, but the pizza base was perfect and it tasted delicious. However, I’m not sure why, but I’ve suddenly developed a craving for Cheshire Cheese. It’s a shame that I can no longer eat it. Since I went onto this vegan diet in 1992 when my pancreas ceased to function, cheese is the one thing that I miss.

So right now, I’m off to bed ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed …
. Do you realise that there are at most only seven more trips up the stairs after dialysis and then I shall be installed downstairs and shan’t have to worry any more?

And if the plumber, who is coming tomorrow, extricates his digit, there might be even fewer than that. As long as my bed, my desk and my kitchen stuff are down there and the water is connected, I shall cope as best as I can. I really have to move downstairs as quickly as I can because the stairs are finishing me off.

But before we go, seeing as we have been talking about banquets … "well, one of us has" – ed … some friends of mine once went to a big banquet in Spain where the dish of honour was the … errr … cojones of the bull that was killed in the corrida that morning.
However, at this particular banquet, the main dish was … errr … rather small
"what’s happened here?" asked one of my friends
"Well you see, señor" replied the waiter "the bull, he doesn’t always lose."

Saturday 2nd August 2025 – TODAY’S DIALYSIS SESSION …

… was totally horrible.

Not so much the session but the aftermath. I was totally drained, totally exhausted and I felt as if the end of the World had come. When BILBO BAGGINS said "I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.", I knew exactly what he meant.

It wasn’t as if I’d had a particularly early start either. Although it was quite late by the time I finished my notes, the stats and the back-up, I slept all the way right through without moving until 06:20 – nine minutes before the alarm.

So while you admire a couple of photos of my freshly-painted living room, once more in a colour rather brighter than that which I had chosen, and with the curtain rail over the door in the wrong place, I shall tell you about my day.

When I awoke, I really was feeling rotten but a Herculean effort saw me sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor when the alarm went off at 06:29

But it didn’t galvanise me into action though. It classes as an early start because I was out of bed and with my feet in contact with the floor when the alarm went off, but that’s how it stayed for a good fifteen minutes.

Eventually, I managed to drag myself in some kind of undignified fashion into the bathroom where I had a good wash and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and I also hand-washed some clothes. With not having many clothes, I try to keep on top of things when I can.

In the kitchen, I dealt with the medication and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Jordan Davies had left Greenock Morton last night and had signed for a football club in Wales. His arrival was heralded by the club and they made a big issue out of it with headlines in the local paper etc. However, when he was on his way to the football ground to be greeted by the chairman etc, he was involved in a car crash and was killed. That was really the end of all of that. All of the celebrations were cancelled and it ended up being something of a really damp squib of an affair.

It’s no surprise that they would have cancelled the celebrations after that. However, this dream is a combination of two different things.

Actually, Jordan Davies has left Greenock Morton and yesterday he signed for Colwyn Bay AFC in the JD Cymru League. But the part about death in transit refers to Emiliano Sala, whose aeroplane crashed as he was flying from Nantes to play for Cardiff City in 2019.

Isabelle the Nurse came in a little later to deal with my injection, the last in this series, and to sort out my legs. There are all kinds of events taking place in the town tomorrow so she told me that she has no idea what time she will arrive.

After she left, I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

We’re still in Westminster, discussing inter alia the enormous list of famous and important people buried in Westminster Abbey.

But it’s John Stow’s little personal remarks that are so interesting and amusing. When he is talking about the raising of funds to rebuilt St Margaret’s Church, he tells us about King Henry III banning all trade in merchandise for fifteen days, which the citizens were obliged to redeem by paying the King two thousand pounds of silver because of the King "devising how to extort money from the citizens of London."

That’s nothing compared to his remarks concerning the revised works of Geoffrey Chaucer which were "twice increased through mine own painful labours" and "again beautified with notes by me." Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that if it weren’t for my own overwhelming modesty, I would be perfect, but not even I would write quite like that.

Still, if you have a trumpet, you may as well blow it.

As a matter of a more serious nature, he talks about the Great London Floods of 1236 and 1242. In the former flood, the Palace of Westminster was flooded and "men did row with wherries in the midst of the hall, being forced to ride to their chambers.". In the latter, "in the great hall of Westminster men took their horses because the water ran over it."

Back in here, I had some things to find to take downstairs and then I sorted out the photos from Thursday (which you have seen just now) and do it quickly too because my cleaner was coming early.

After she’d fitted my anaesthetic patches we measured all of the furniture in the living room, took one of the CD and DVD columns with us, and went downstairs with some masking tape to mark on the floor exactly where all of the furniture will go in the living room downstairs.

That’s important because the Saturday and the Monday afternoon, I’ll have dialysis and then on the Tuesday and Wednesday I’ll be having chemotherapy in Paris so anyone who will be here to help me will need to know where to put everything if I’m not here.

The chief driver of the taxi company turned up to collect me, and he was early too so it’s just as well that I was ready.

We arrived at Avranches much earlier than planned, and so as usual I had to wait an age to be seen and plugged it. At least, I had good company because Alexi looked after me today.

At first, I was really drowsy, due in no small measure to the fact that my blood pressure dropped to 7.7/5.6, which is about the lowest that it has been.

Once I’d recovered, I spent most of the afternoon trying to find a series of books called “The Paston Letters” – a book containing all of the correspondence issued by the Paston family in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century.

These six volumes are extremely important because firstly, they give an eyewitness report of the Wars of the Roses, as seen by the ordinary man in the street who suffered so much, and secondly, they cover the period of the evolution of the English language from Medieval English to Early Modern English and the official codification and standardisation of the language following the invention of William Caxton’s printing press.

As usual, having arrived early, I was late being disconnected and then I had to wait ten minutes for the taxi. Even then, the driver had another passenger to drop off at Brehal up the coast and she wanted to take him first, which annoyed me greatly but there wasn’t much that I could do about it.

Consequently, I was just as late coming home as I might otherwise have been had I left here late.

Climbing the stairs in my weakened state was awful and when I made it into here I had to sit down for half an hour to recover before I could make tea.

So a baked potato, vegan salad and breadcrumbed quorn slice later, I’m off to bed, totally wasted after all of my exertions. I really need to be downstairs as quickly as possible because I can’t keep on going like this. It’s awful.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about the floods … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of the time of the Great Flood of Crewe a while back.
When the Municipal Buildings were flooded, they decided that they would take advantage of the situation and play a game of water polo.
"Was it a success?" I asked.
"Not really" came the reply. "Most of the horses drowned."

Friday 1st August 2025 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S DISASTER …

… things are much better today and I’m feeling a little less … "only a little less" – ed … miserable, depressed and ill.

What probably helped was a much better night’s sleep than just recently. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday’s notes were somewhat … errr … compressed as I dashed through them before ill-health and fatigue overwhelmed me.

It was something of a mad rush to finish them but I managed to climb into bed just before 22:30 and once in there, that was that. I was out like a light and didn’t feel a thing until all of … errr … 05:40.

That might have sounded as if it was early, but it represented over seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, and when was the last time that I managed that?

It took a good few minutes to gather my wits, which is a surprise seeing how few I have left these days, but by 06:10 I was in the bathroom having a good scrub up.

The medication was next as usual, and then back in here to listen to the dictaphone to see where I’d been during the night and, more importantly, who had been there with me. And lo! And behold! I had a telephone call while I was asleep. It was from TOTGA. She was telling me that she was thinking about moving and in fact was planning to move on in a couple of weeks’ time. I told her that I was really pleased for her, but I was really sad in another way because her bakery would be closed and there would be no more fresh bread from there. We had a lengthy chat over the telephone. Halfway through it, I had to go out so I walked off down the street taking the ‘phone with me, chatting on the way and I came to her bakery. Of course, with it being a Tuesday it was closed. I could hear her inside talking to me on the ‘phone. Anyway, one of the blinds moved. It was her husband who was peeking out through one of the blinds. After a little minute or two, he opened the door and let me in. She was saying that she was moving in a few days’ time or in a short while. Her husband said that he would be there for another couple of weeks and then he’d be moving. I said that I’ll be moving in a week or two’s time too so we had a big chat about moving. Then she began to pack her boxes. She wanted her boxes opened in a certain peculiar way that meant that the tops had to be folded right back. I couldn’t understand why she was having to do that this way.
So welcome back to TOTGA, who has been missing from these pages for far too long. So she’s on the move too, at least in the ethereal World. I wonder what might be the significance of that. I don’t keep in touch with people as I used to since I cast all of my Social Media adrift eighteen months ago.

However, I could easily picture her running a bakery. Apart from the fact that she’s a good cook, she has a natural talent for organising and managing. With someone like her in the background managing all of my ideas, we could have ruled the World, but she had far more sense than to come anywhere within range of my evil clutches.

The next task was to review the news article that I wrote the other day and see how it was. In the end, I practically rewrote it and I still wasn’t happy with it. However, on the principle of “over-egging the pudding”, I left it as it finished and sent it off. And for a news source that is crying out for articles, it’s not been published as yet.

Back in the olden days in Brussels and down on the farm, I wrote quite a few articles for various publications and made myself a little pocket money, but even though this publication pays three fifths of five eights of … errr … nothing, I ought to go back into the habit of working for a living before my brain seizes up completely.

There’s an interesting article in the local news this morning. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the controversy three years ago about the Russian sailing ship Shtandart COMING TO VISIT GRANVILLE during the Festival of Sailing Ships, and how it seemed that I was the only person in the whole département who found it objectionable give the political situation and the number of Ukrainian refugees here.

Apparently, the organisers of the festival have invited her back this year, but this time, the regional and national authorities have intervened and refused her a landing permit. And quite right too, in my opinion. But all the same, this incident and that of three years ago shows quite clearly that, despite the number of Ukrainian refugees living in the area, on which side of the fence the local politicians are sitting. Remember that they even banned my pro-Ukrainian rock concert.

Usually, I try my best to keep politics off these pages because otherwise, I’d be talking about nothing else. However, sometimes, it’s unavoidable

Hurricane Isabelle the Nurse blew into the apartment to give me my injection and to sort out my feet, and then she blew out as quickly as she had come in. And once she’d left, I could make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

Our author, John Stow, has now made it to Westminster which, in those days, was a suburb of the City of London. His account of the area is fascinating, telling us all about the origins of the names of some of the places that are so famous today.

St James was a house for "fourteen sisters, maidens that were leprous, living chastely and honestly in divine service" but when the religious establishments were surrendered to Henry VIII, the King "built there a goodly manor annexing thereunto a park, closed about with a wall of brick, now called St James’s Park."

He also speaks of "a large plot of ground inclosed with brick, and is called ‘Scotland’ where great buildings have been for the receipt of the Kings of Scotland.". So “evening all”. And I bet that the plot of land is more than three feet long and three feet wide.

There are pages and pages of explanations like this, and it’s fascinating to read it all. I shall be sorry when this book comes to an end.

Back in here, I made a start on assembling the next radio programme’s music. It’s to be a live concert but it was recorded by different people in different fragments and so I have two complications to face.

Firstly, to make the recording levels and sound balance etc the same
Secondly, what to do about the gaps of a few micro-seconds in between some of the tracks where nothing was recorded.

Where there are overlapping parts, that’s quite easy, just fade in and out as appropriate and merge the tracks, but filling holes is more complicated, especially when one recording is 0.5% faster than the other one.

So that’s a task that has taken all day and it’s far from finished

The very first job though was to complete my order for LeClerc. And it’s extremely sad as more and more produce is being removed from the home delivery service. And when it was delivered, we had a catastrophe. The box of grape juice burst and soaked half of the shopping, so some of it had to go back.

There was an endless stream of visitors too today. Firstly, the energy guy came to do an energy audit, then my cleaner came along to do her stuff, and finally the sewing lady from down the road came to talk curtains with me.

It’s rather unfortunate, that, because she’s on the verge of retiring and so her stock of cloth has run down. She had nothing that I liked. She’ll have a rummage in the back of her shop to see what she can find, but it looks as if it’s going to be another on-line order.

People talk all the time about “shop local”, but these days, you can’t even give work away to people. They just don’t seem to be bothered.

When the LeClerc order (or what was left of it) arrived, I washed, diced and blanched the carrots ready for freezing, washed the tins and jars to remove the grape juice, and then went to sit down for a while. My knees were killing me.

Tea tonight was falafel, salad and chips – not very much tonight as I’m not that hungry. And then I put away the carrots and the rest of the stuff that needs freezing.

So having written my notes, I’m going to bed, later than planned, but still hoping for a good sleep before dialysis, which I hate with a passion.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about Westminster … "well, one of us has" – ed … John Stow tells us that "had ye one house, wherein sometime were distraught and lunatic people."
While I was chatting to a friend of mine, I mentioned it to her.
She replied "so he’s not a big fan of the House of Commons either."

Thursday 31st July 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone from last night.

But when you don’t go to bed until 23:45 and you awaken at 03:10, what do you expect?

It’s quite a surprise that I was awake so early because I really was ill last night. I was so feak and weeble that I could hardly move, and when I finally fell into bed, I expected to be there for a week without moving a muscle.

Moving a muscle I certainly didn’t do, but when I awoke, that was that.

03:10 is far too early to be up and about so I tried valiantly to find a way to go back to sleep. However, nothing that I could try seemed to work and by 04:45 I’d abandoned the struggle and was sitting on the edge of my bed trying to find the courage and the energy to stand up.

Once I was on my feet, I made my way over to the desk and by the time that the alarm went off at 06:29, I’d dictated the radio notes that I’d written yesterday, edited them and assembled the programme ready for broadcast some time deep in the future.

Next stop was the bathroom, followed by the kitchen for the medication, and then back in here I had plenty of other things to do that took quite a while.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in and gave me my injection, followed by the treatment for my legs, and then I could crack on and make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

It’s surprising how many “modern” aspects of life that we take for granted were well-known in John Stow’s time. He tells us that in 1530, Bermondsey Abbey "was valued to dispend by the year four hundred and seventy-four pounds fourteen shillings and fourpence halfpenny" – proof if ever any were needed that they had accountants in those days.

Take holiday homes too. Many people think that they are a modern phenomenon but that’s far from the case. When our author is talking about the buildings extra muros, he says that "wherein are built many fair summer-houses and, as in other places of the suburbs, some of them like Midsummer pageants with towers, turrets and chimney pots, not so much for use of profit as for show and pleasure, betraying the vanity of men’s minds."

There’s a lengthy account of the plague pits on the edge of the city, and also a very whimsical account of St Giles’ Hospital where "the prisoners conveyed from the City of London to Teybourne, there to be executed … were presented with a great bowl of ale, thereof to drink at their pleasure, as to be their last refreshing in this life."

Back in here, I began to sort out the music for the next radio programme, and I was well under way when my cleaner came to fit my anaesthetic patches

When she’d finished, we went downstairs to the new apartment to tidy up and put away a few things, and I took a few more photos that I’ll publish one of these days when I’m feeling like it.

That’s not going to be today though because I’m feeling totally dreadful, the worst that I have felt for years. I crashed out completely earlier this morning while working on the radio programme and while I felt a little better when I awoke, it didn’t last long.

The drive down to Avranches was horrible and by the time I was on my bed, I was finished. I crashed out for an hour and a half and felt even worse when I awoke. In the end, they had to cut short the session because I was not responding.

If ever there was a time when I needed to talk to a doctor, it was today but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, whenever you want a doctor, they keep well away.

The drive home was painful too and I had to struggle to reach the building’s front door. My cleaner and I went into the new apartment to finish off a few things, and then we had to come back up here. I really couldn’t manage it at all and my poor cleaner had almost to carry me up.

Once I’d caught my breath I gad the rest of last night’s curry and now, even though it’s early, I’m off to bed. I’ve had enough. Here’s hoping that I feel better tomorrow.

But seeing as we have been talking about prisoners … "well, one of us has" – ed … three prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs were talking to each other, discussing their sentences.
"I only have three years to serve" said the first.
"That’s nothing" replied the second. "I only have two and a half"
"I only have four days to serve" replied the third
"You lucky so-and-so!" exclaimed the others. "How did you manage that"
"Well," he replied "they are hanging me on Thursday."

Wednesday 30th July 2025 – AT LONG LAST …

… after several days of prevarication, I’ve finally come around to putting a photo of the bedroom online. The blue is rather bright, I agree, but there’s a huge difference between what I saw on a computer screen when I chose the colour and what the colour turned out to be in real life.

It’s complicated when I can’t go out myself to choose anything and have to rely on other people and the internet, but in those circumstances, we have to take what we can obtain. I’m sure that STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I, and the eventual cat of course, shall be very happy in there.

And in answer to the obvious questions that are bound to follow, yes I do have a sea view. If I go to the window and look to the right, I can see over the wall and over the clifftop to the sea. When the weather is really good, I can even see Jersey, even if it is 50 or so kilometres away.

You can also see the lovely granite walls that we have in this building, one metre twenty centimetres thick of granite – the legendary Grès de Chausey, built in 1668. Grès de Chausey was also used to build Mont St Michel down the bay from here.

With walls like this, I can play music as loud as I like and no-one can hear me.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … this building is part of the Patrimoine de France – the equivalent of a listed building in the UK. In theory, we can’t even knock a nail into the wall without asking permission.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, I’ve had a horrible day. Just like the Wednesday a week after the last chemotherapy, I’ve had a major relapse.

There were all the signs of that last night. Once more, I had a major wave of tiredness wash over me as I was writing my notes, and it was all that I could do to keep awake to finish the evening’s work.

Nevertheless, it was quite late by the time that I finally crawled into bed, relieved that I was to be there, and it didn’t take very long at all to go off to sleep.

What I didn’t anticipate though, although I should have done so, was that I would be awake at 03:20. Not just awake either, but totally unable to go back to sleep despite my best efforts.

In the end, a few minutes after 05:00, I finally gave up the struggle and crawled out of bed into the bathroom for a wash, followed by a trip into the kitchen for the medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night, and in view of the short night that it was, I was surprised to find something on it. I was back in medieval times. A few of us were associated with some kind of trade or brotherhood and were busy organising things for some kind of event. At that moment, the archbishop came in and he asked the person in charge of our party what we were doing. He replied that he was preparing things ready for the start of the hunt. The minister was outraged “having a hunt on a festival day? Don’t tell me that you are hunting on a festival day”. The boss had to deny it with some kind of stammer and embarrassment. Then we could continue our own preparations for celebrating this day by having sport and some kind of athletics competition followed by of course the dialysis for the day.

It’s no surprise that we have gone back into medieval times with the amount of medieval information that I’ve been reading just recently, especially with regard to the jousting tournaments. And involving dialysis too – there’s no surprise about that either. Just wait until I begin to dream about chemotherapy.

There were a few things to do this morning, such as finishing off sending the radio programmes for the month of August. And then Isabelle the nurse turned up. She gave me the injection, sorted out my legs, and then disappeared into the blue yonder.

However, I have heard on the grapevine that there’s some kind of issue regarding this nursing practice. I shall have to keep my ears open for more news.

Once she’d gone, I could make my breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK. Not that I managed to go very far as the kitchen fitter turned up. However, he had all of the keys and everything that he needed, so he simply stayed downstairs and attacked the remaining work.

There were a few things of interest in the book that are worthy of note. Our author tells us that there "was sometime a large and most sumptuous house built by Charles Brandon, late Duke of Suffolk" that went through several ownership changes and eventually a merchant "pulled it down, sold the lead, stone, iron etc and in place thereof built many small cottages of great rents, to the increasing of beggars in that borough."

That was a fate that befell many large houses in urban areas in the 1960s and 1970s, with the same consequences.

One question that has also been answered today was "why are the effigies of some medieval knights shown on their tombs with their legs crossed?". Stow tells us that of the eleven tombs that he has noticed in the Temple Church in London, "eight of them are images of armed knights, five lying cross-legged as men vowed to the Holy Land, against the infidel and the unbelieving Jews."

So in other words, a cross-legged statue or effigy lying on a tomb is of a medieval knight who has taken the Oath of the Crusade

Something else that I’ve learned are the rules of running a brothel or “stew house”, which I’m sure will come in useful one of these days. Stow tells us, inter alia that "no stew-holder is to receive a woman of religion or another man’s wife.".

Even more interestingly, "no single woman to take money to lie with any man, but that she lie with him all night until the morrow."

Running a brothel back in those days was apparently a respectable business. "William Walworth, then mayor of London" was the keeper of one such place, so Stow tells us.

Not so respectable, apparently, for the women who worked there. Stow says that "these single women were forbidden the rites of the Church so long as they continued that sinful life and were excluded from Christian burial if they were not reconciled before their death, and therefore there was a plot of ground called ‘The Single Woman’s Churchyard’ appointed for them far from the parish church."

There’s no doubt whatever that I’m learning a lot by reading this book, which is just as well because that’s why I’m reading it (and all the others like it).

After breakfast, I was going to make a start sorting out more things to take downstairs but there really wasn’t much point with the kitchen fitter being there, so instead I came back in here to prepare for my Welsh discussion group.

There were only three of us there today and it was awful. I couldn’t remember anything, not even the basics. I seem to have gone completely to pot. Mind you, I put it down to the ill-health that was starting to overwhelm me because by now, I could feel myself sliding down into the hole.

After the meeting, it was time for my disgusting drink break and, girding up my loins, I had another one of these extremely disgusting pea and mint ones. And if anything, it tasted worse today than last time. Just two more of those to take and I won’t be ordering any more of this variety.

Next to arrive was my cleaner, who came to do her stuff. And that included supervising me having a shower. By now though, I really was feeling terrible and I had never felt less like doing anything in my whole life. However, I forced myself and I suppose that I was glad that I had. But I was ruined afterwards.

Back in here, once my cleaner had changed the plasters on my arm, I crashed out. That was no surprise either.

One of these high energy drinks brought me round half an hour later which was just as well because Rosemary rang up for a chat. Just a short one today – a mere sixty-five minutes.

There was time afterwards to write the notes for the next radio programme and then I went to make tea.

There was a large curry in the freezer so I defrosted it and ate half of it with some rice and veg. The other half will do for tomorrow. My imagination has run aground.

The kitchen fitter came up to give me his final account and I paid him. His bill might sound expensive but it includes all of the stuff for the shower and also, he’s done a great deal of work that was never included in his original quote. Not only that, I’m well-pleased with what he has done.

There are one or two small jobs that he hasn’t done, and something that needs some repositioning, but I can sort that out.

The situation is that the plumber will be here on Monday to fit the shower, and we’ll see how far he intends to go with the finishing of the bathroom. Whatever he leaves unfinished, I’ll contact the kitchen fitter who says that he’ll find some time to finish everything off.

Right now though, I’m even more impressed with my little apartment than I was with my galvanised steel dustbin.

Right now though, I’m off to bed ready for dialysis tomorrow … "I don’t think" – ed … I hope that they have changed the mattress on my bed otherwise there will be a row.

But seeing as we have been talking about the Patrimoine de France … "well, one of us has" – ed … Liz once told me that she thought that it was quite appropriate that I lived in a historic building.
"why is that?" I asked, bitterly regretting ten seconds later having done so
"Well" she replied "You’re something of an ancient ruin yourself."

Tuesday 29th July 2025 – I STILL HAVEN’T …

… uploaded the photo of my bedroom, despite what I said yesterday … "and the day before" – ed …

For a change, I have been in great demand and I’ve no idea why I’ve suddenly become so popular.

Not that I was in any fit state to upload the photo last night either. I was so tired last night and had a real struggle to reach the end of the day’s programme. I was fighting off (sometimes unsuccessfully) wave after wave of sleep while I was working and that made me even later than it otherwise might have been.

In the end, I’ve no idea what time it was when I finally hit the hay. I couldn’t be bothered to look. All that I wanted to do was to sleep.

Not that I managed much of that either. It was an extremely restless night that saw me awaken several times. In the end, round about 05:30, I gave up even trying and crawled out from under the covers.

It was the usual desperate stagger into the bathroom followed by an even more desperate stagger into the kitchen for the medication. None of this should be any surprise of course, bearing in mind how I was feeling.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night, and I was astonished. I must have travelled miles. I was at the dialysis centre last night. They were busy sorting out people into what particular treatment they needed. With me of course it was the filtration but also I’m there for three and a half hours with my legs raised somewhat. During the dream they had me weighing myself and they were calculating the weight of my legs, fitting weights and things to them that were inclined and much more complicated to work so that I was walking around with my full weight all the time. It was a most uncomfortable situation to walk around or to sit down or to sleep like this but they didn’t seem to care. Into the room came some Jamaican Hercules dancing troupe people who had presumably been captured by the ancient explorers and brought to Europe. They were there in full dance mode while we were waiting to be treated with dialysis.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … even though I’m asleep when I’m dictating, when it comes to transcribing the notes there’s some kind of recollection of something in the back of my mind. But for this one, I have absolutely no idea at all. Apart from the dialysis and the musculation exercises (which will become relevant as you read on), it’s totally meaningless … "aren’t they all?" – ed …

On the dictaphone too, some time later was a note that I can still see the emblems from this dialysis session too. On this machine where I was being treated, on the floor was an arrow and a drawing of one of these ad-hoc storage unit things on wheels, something like a portable patient, with a drawing of a patient upside-down by his ankles and the person in charge of the county of Chester was also drummoned and sentence to be executed on this Danish island somewhere and he had a small chest and a double overlooking a uniform thing, yoga pants, tight yoga top. People were wearing that and this was how it was drawn, this pictogram, along with you upside down having been held by your ankles and an umbrella upside down, being held by the hook over the arm of the dialysis thing.

It’s strange that I stepped back, totally unawares, into a dream of which I was totally unaware. This is some kind of new experience. Usually, I can remember stepping back into dreams, even if it doesn’t happen as often as I like, especially when one of my young ladies is involved.

Later on, one of the boys from the Welsh class came round last night. He was in an extremely bad mood and I thought that it was something that I had done at first. Instead, it turned out that he had been trying to do the Welsh homework all day, which was a bookkeeping exercise, and had failed miserably despite all that he could do. We sat down and looked at it, and I couldn’t make head nor tail of it either. Generally, when bookkeeping goes wrong, you have something in the wrong column. We tried various permutations but that didn’t work. In the end, we thought that we’d leave it and let our heads clear, and go back a little later. He told me that he’d seen another member of the class wandering around who was on his way to sit on the beach at Goodwin Sands so after seeing him leave, I went for a wander out onto the cliffs overlooking Goodwin Sands. That guy was there on the cliffs looking down at the people. We could hear someone having a really good discussion with a small group. Suddenly, he mentioned the name of our classmate and there was a reply, so we shouted down his name. He stuck his head out of the crowd, saw us and waved so we waited. Someone wanted to know who it was who called down to him. He replied “it’s some friends”. They said something like “it’s not that little girl who follows you around who has come to see what you’re doing, is it?”. He replied “no, because her mother is already down here on the beach and she’s hardly likely to come down here on the beach and leave her daughter somewhere else. So if her mother is here, the daughter is here so it can’t have been her who yelled”.

We should have had a Welsh group chat today but this morning we had a mail to say that it’s been postponed. The area around the Goodwin Sands, that is, the cliffs of Pegwell Bay, is an area that I know very well from the days of my youth and summer holidays with my mother’s relatives on the Isle of Thanet.

There was a whole group of us wandering around in IKEA doing the shopping but it was dragging on and on and on. In the end I lost a little patience and went for a wander around. Eventually, everyone else caught up with me and asked where I’d been. I told them that I’d been off with Zero looking at a few things and then I’d wandered off into the food hall. “Well, Zero never said anything” her father said “but she did ask if anyone thought whether she was trying to get you into trouble”. I replied “no, she won’t ever get me into trouble”. “Well, you need to be careful because she’ll dye your work trousers brown without any second thoughts”. We had something of a laugh about that but I was definitely not in a very good mood during that shopping trip. I was really fed up with this whole kind of thing at the moment.

So welcome back, Zero. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you. It really is nice when one of my young ladies puts in an appearance during the night, and how I wish I could step back into a dream with one of them. However, as seems to be always the case, someone comes along to throw a spanner into the works.

Isabelle the nurse turned up this morning. She gave me my injection and then sorted out my feet. I could then make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

Today, we are talking about all of the jousts between knights etc and the trials by combat that all took place at Smithfield, quite often in front of the monarch. One of the combatants was called, rather eloquently, “The Bastard of Burgundy”

There’s a lengthy discussion on the banquets that were served up at the Bishop of Ely’s residence, and I couldn’t believe the amount of food cooked. Even our author says that "it were tedious to set down the preparation of fish, flesh and other victuals consumed at this feast."

As it happens, I’ve seen the list, and I wouldn’t know where to begin to describe it. We start with "twenty-four great beefs… and one ox" through an entire menagerie to "larks, three hundred and forty dozen."

More interestingly though, he touches on the origins of the Old Bailey and the Inns of Court.

After breakfast, the taxi came to pick me up to take me for my x-ray. It was the guy who thinks that he’s the boss, and we had a very interesting chat all the way to the hospital.

When the x-ray was finished, I had to wait around for the taxi to take me back, and as there was no cleaner to help me upstairs, I had to manage myself. After a pause to recover, I packed a few more boxes.

My plumber had mailed me with a list of things that he needs for the shower so my kitchen fitter and I spent an age going through various on-line catalogues to find stuff that was available at short notice.

In the end, we had quite a list and he went off on a prowl to try to find what we need. He found most things, and acceptable substitutes for the rest, so who knows? I may even have a shower quite soon.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday I had something of a moan about the kitchen fitter, but I really must shut up and instead, count my blessings that I have found someone who is prepared to go way beyond the extra mile to help me out.

When my cleaner turned up to drop off tomorrow’s injection, she took down the boxes that I’d packed and they are now ready for putting away, which will be Thursday’s task.

There was the radio programme to finish, and that’s now done. I followed that by reviewing the programmes for the month of August and they are being sent off one by one ready for inclusion while the coordinator is on holiday.

In the middle of all of this, the Re-education Centre contacted me. Would I like to come for an assessment interview on 26th September? I don’t see why not. After all, it might even do me some good, even if I doubt it very much. But one thing is for sure, and that is that the taxi owner can buy himself a new Rolls-Royce this year.

While I was at it, I rang up the dialysis centre about the mattress, but for all the good that it did me, I may as well have saved my energy. "No-one else has complained about it" was the helpful … "I don’t think" – ed … reply.

So having had a fry-up (for a change) for tea, I’m off to bed ready for all of this work that I have to do tomorrow.

But seeing as we have been talking about x-rays … "well, one of us has" – ed … while I was in the hospital, I heard two x-ray plates talking to each other.
"I’ve lost an electron" said one of them
"Are you sure?" asked the other.
"Ohh yes. I’m positive."

Monday 28th July 2025 – YET MORE TORTURE …

… at the dialysis centre today. The mattress on my bed has collapsed and there’s a big hollow right where my left hip fits. And so, after about ninety minutes, with two hours still to go, I was in total agony. And so it dragged on throughout the entire session.

It’s bad enough being poked, prodded, stabbed with needles, awoken when I’m trying to doze, but this is the final straw. I shall telephone them tomorrow and tell them that if it’s not fixed by Thursday, I shan’t be coming again. I reckon that i’ve had quite enough.

Especially after last night. Chatting with my kitchen fitter after he’d finished seemed to take hours and all that I wanted to do was to eat my pizza. It was stone-cold by the time that he went, I was royally fed up and in the end, it was some quite ridiculous time when I finally managed to haul myself off to bed. I really can’t take much more of this.

When the alarm went off at 06:29, I was totally flat out in bed. It was quite a battle to raise myself out before the second alarm and had there not been a second alarm to encourage me to leave the bed, I probably would still be in there now. I was totally shattered.

In the bathroom, I went for a wash and a shave and then into the kitchen to sort out the medication.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night but there was nothing thereupon. I must have had a really deep, intense sleep. And if so, why aren’t I feeling much better than I am right now?

There were a few things that I needed to but I was interrupted by the arrival of the nurse. He was in and out in a flash, seeing that he’s off on his holidays this evening. I could push on, make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

We’re still on our perambulations of course, but today he tells us that "on the River Thames, of late years, was placed a corn mill, upon or betwixt two barges or lighters, and there ground corn, as water mills in other places, to the wonder of those who had not seen the like, but this lasted not long without decay, such as caused the same barges and mill to be removed.". I would have loved to have seen that in operation. It must have been a fantastic machine.

We’ve also had another rent payment made in flowers. This refers to one of the towers in Baynard’s Castle, which Edward III gave "to William, Duke of Hamelake, in the county of York, and his heirs, for one rose yearly.to be paid for all service."

There’s also a movement inspired by the Bishop of Rochester and several others to provide aid for the poor, and many men "moved liberally to grant what they would impart … and what they would contribute weekly for their maintenance for a time.". Where is the church today when it should be leading the same kind of campaign amongst the wealthy and privileged?

And yesterday, we had a fight amongst a couple of priests. To day, he tells us of a rather incendiary confrontation between the Archbishop of Canterbury and his retinue and the canons of the Priory of St Bartholomew. Tomorrow, we’ll probably find the Pope in there somewhere having a helping of violent disorder.

Back in here, I had a radio programme to review ready to broadcast. But once more, I didn’t like it so I re-edited it and remixed it. The programmer is off work on holiday in August so I’ll have to review the programmes for that month tomorrow and send them off.

There wasn’t much time to do much else before my cleaner arrived to fit my patches. When she had finished, we went downstairs with a few boxes to empty out. And I did take a photo of the bedroom but I’m so whacked that I really don’t have the energy to post it. I shall do it tomorrow.

The driver who took me to dialysis was the young, chatty guy and we had a very interesting chat all the way down there. We were early arriving too, but it did no good seeing that so were several other people and as usual, I was last to be plugged in.

They gave me a prescription for an x-ray on my chest, which is arranged for tomorrow. That is just crazy. I’m not having a moment to relax, with yet another climb back up the stairs when I should be resting. Why couldn’t they arrange it for a day when I have dialysis?

The disinterested doctor was on duty today and he didn’t seem too interested in what I had to say. He did, however, inspect (at my insistence) my catheter port and pronounced it healthy. But there’s a bruise that is causing the pain that I am feeling.

Apart from the mattress, which has totally annoyed me, nothing much else happened. Being late coupled up, I was late leaving. It was the young Asiatic girl who brought me home and we talked about Italian food all the way home.

Back here, we went into downstairs and began to make a list of the work that needs doing, but it ended up being something of a building meeting with a group of us outside my door chatting.

It was a real struggle to climb back up here. I feel that I’m going backwards with this chemotherapy and losing whatever mobility that I had. There was another barrage of messages from the kitchen fitter but I’ll reply to them when I’m in a better humour.

Instead, I made tea – a burger with pasta and veg. I couldn’t be bothered to do much else.

So right now, I’m off to bed, hoping that I’ll awaken in a better frame of mind tomorrow, although with this trip to the x-ray and the climb back up here, I doubt it very much.

But seeing as we have been talking about flowers … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of one of those “Mr and Mrs” quizzes in which Nerina and I competed.
The presenter asked me which was Nerina’s favourite flower. And Yours Truly, completely misunderstanding the question, replied "Homepride self-raising, I think."

Sunday 27th July 2025 – SO THERE I WAS …

… last night, talking about having an early night and hoping to have a lie in until the later time of 07:59 when the Sunday alarm goes off.

There’s nothing like a bit of optimism, is there?

Firstly, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall and probably expect, the early night didn’t happen. I’m not sure what went on, but I found myself at 23:00 still sitting at my desk working. However, I didn’t stay there for long. An early night I was determined to have and although it was not as early as I would have liked, I downed tools and cleared off.

Just as the last couple of days, I fell asleep quite quickly, thinking of having a really good sleep of eight hours at least.

Consequently, no-one was more disappointed than me to find that when I awoke, it was all of 04:10. I could well have done without that.

Refusing to give in, I curled up and did my best to go back to sleep again. And it worked too, at least for a while. 06:05 was still far too early to be awake again, and this time I couldn’t go back to sleep. When the water heater switched off at 06:20, I was already having a ride on the porcelain horse.

After a good wash, I went into the kitchen for the medication and then came back in here to find out where I’d been during the night. I dreamed that I was parachuting last night, taking some kind of course of something or other that wasn’t parachuting but parachuting was included in it. We went up in an aeroplane to quite a height and I leaped out. Eventually, I managed to touch down onto the ground, far quicker than I was intending to land, but it was a quite accurate landing and I was impressed. Someone came over and asked me how it was. I replied “to be quite honest, I was freezing. The wind was cutting through my jeans and I ought to have worn some kind of windproof trouser underneath to stop that”. Then I was thinking about going to do it again, working out that if maybe I were to pull on this guy rope here and that guy rope there, I’d be able to direct the parachute and land much more appropriately, much closer to the target and be able to steer the parachute and land pretty much where I liked.

There is absolutely no danger whatever of me ever leaping from a ‘plane wearing a parachute. And I certainly wouldn’t do it a second time. I’ll take all of my chances on solid ground, thanks. But it would be just like me, when I’m falling headlong towards the ground, to be thinking of a way to improve the system or its accuracy.

Later on, I’d been associated with a football club somewhere and our team had been promoted from the bottom division to the third at long last. The manager of one of the other teams in the club came over. He was surprised. He asked if it were true that we had been promoted. I replied that it was. He answered “God! Because I’m short of players for Sunday”. It was for a game in St Niklaas in Vlaanderen against The Old Irish. We had a chat and it turned out that one of my friends was playing in it, so I replied “go on then. You can put me down as a substitute if you like” although I really wasn’t interested in playing all that competitively. So off we went on the Sunday to the field to have a look around. There were plenty of people swarming around, including one woman who had a dog and a cat, each on a lead and was taking them for a walk. I had a chat with the woman and the cat. Her husband usually took the cat for a walk but he was away for a few days so she was doing it. The cat usually went in a certain direction but there was something going on there and she didn’t want to take it this time. The more I looked around, the more I saw that there was going to be an auto-cross in the middle of this field after the football match so I thought that this was going to be a really nice day to have out as long as I don’t actually go onto the football field.

Back in the Auvergne, I was associated with a football team – the 3rd XI of FC Pionsat St Hilaire, who were one of the worst teams in the local pyramid in the Puy de Dôme and always finished near the bottom of the lowest division. And I do have to hold up my hand and admit that my involvement was completely by default – none of the other committee members wanted to run the team and I happened to admire the players for continuing to turn out week after week so I took on the task.

However, there is plenty of mileage in this dream apart from that. Leaving aside the fact that this seemed to take place in Vlaanderen, although I might not be interested in playing, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there have in the past been rafts of dreams where I’ve turned out for a local football club and some of those dreams are far too real for my liking.

As it happened, I did have a friend who played for the club, and I also know a man who really does take his cat for a walk in the evening.

When the nurse turned up, the first thing that he wanted was my health card. He’s off on holiday on Monday night so he needs to bring his accounts up-to-date. Once he’d sorted out his paperwork, he attended to my legs and then cleared off to continue his rounds.

After he left, I began to make my breakfast but I didn’t get very far because the kitchen fitter came and I had to throw him the key to the front door seeing as the electric door lock on the front door doesn’t seem to work.

When he turned up here, I gave him my instructions and he wandered off downstairs to begin. I could go back to making my breakfast, only to find that my toast had burned.

While I was eating, I was reading some more of MY BOOK.

We started off in the quaintly-named Bladder Street, wherein he makes mention of several local "tippling houses." I shall have to remember that little phrase the next time that I want to make reference to the local boozer.

He also tells us about Allhallows Church in Bread Street where "two priests of this church fell at variance, that the one drew the blood of the other …. the priests were committed to prison … and being enjoined penance, went before a general procession bare-headed, bare-footed and bare-legged, before the children, with beads and books in their hands, from Paules, through Cheape, Cornehill etc."

It’s a real shame that modern-day clerical transgressors aren’t subjected to the same humiliation.

After breakfast, I sorted out more things and put them into boxes ready for my faithful cleaner to take downstairs whenever she’s next passing.

Back in here again, there was football and I watched with no little amount of amusement as Stranraer, near the bottom of the fourth tier, beat hated local rivals Queen of the South, championship contenders one division higher up.

Watching the players of the team from Dumfries totally lose their cool in the final five minutes as they panicked to the core when Stranraer unleashed their lightning-quick young centre-forward and had a player sent off, several others booked for professional fouls and for fighting was one of the funniest things that I have seen for quite a while

By now it was time to start work and the first thing was to sort out all of the music that has accumulated over the last couple of years but has not been classified. That took much longer than I would have liked.

Eventually, it was finished and I could then find the final piece of music and write the notes for it, which I can dictate when I next have an early start so that I can finish this radio programme and move on.

There was a break in all of this while I made my pizza base, and when it had arisen, I baked an excellent pizza which tasted delicious.

Just as I was getting my fork stuck in it, the kitchen fitter came up to say that he was leaving. He showed me the photos of the new, nicely-painted bedroom and it really does look wonderful. That room is now finished, except for the curtains, and I shall be organising those in very early course.

When I’m down there tomorrow, I’ll take some photos of it to show you, and I hope that you’ll all be as impressed as I am.

So now that my pizza is eaten and my notes are written, I’ll take the stats, do the back-up and then go to bead. It’s dialysis tomorrow, and how I am not looking forward to that. But then two days off and I can pack a whole pile of stuff ready to move downstairs not that things down there are drawing to a close.

But seeing as we have been talking about the painter in the bedroom … "well, one of us has" – ed … before he bought the paint, he said "the bedroom here looks the same size as the one downstairs. When you painted it, how many tins of paint did you buy?"
"Actually, I bought three" I told him
When he finished this evening, he came up to me and said "I bought three tins of paint, but when I’d finished, I had one tin left over"
"What a coincidence!" I exclaimed. "So did I!"

Saturday 26th July 2025 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… when the alarm went off at 06:29 this morning, I was still flat out, fast asleep in bed. And that’s something that hasn’t happened too often recently.

What I put it down to was the miserable night (if you can call it a night) that I’d had the night before when I’d had just about two and a half hours’ sleep, and odd cat-nap during the day. In fact, looking back on it, I’m surprised that I kept on going for as long as I did yesterday without too many signs of fatigue later in the day.

It wasn’t as if it had been a very late night either. I wasn’t sure what time it was when I finished my notes, the stats and the back-up, but it can’t have been many minutes after 23:00, if at all. And once again, I was asleep almost straight away, so tired was I.

But when I awoke this morning, once more I was drenched in sweat as all of this chemotherapy stuff that they pumped into me in Paris slowly fights its way out of my body. This is not a pleasant situation in which to be.

It was a struggle to leave the bed before the second alarm but I managed it, and then headed off to the bathroom for a good wash and shave, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant at the dialysis centre.

Once more, it was quite a leisurely start to the day and it was about 07:40 by the time that I finally finished my medication and made it back into here.

Once I was settled down at my desk, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was at a match between Ayr United and Morton last night. At first, Morton had no kitchen. They had positioned a couple of players in the kitchen area to defend the space but it wasn’t very easy without any furniture in there at all. They were conceding ground regularly. Then the furniture began to arrive and they began to assert themselves much more strongly as the trainers took more charge of the players, gave them more instructions and told the fans basically to no longer try to coach the team so that they would be able to manage and do a better job of it. The place where this was taking place was called “Canada Hall” – a huge one-storey building on top of a tunnel under which the railway ran. It belonged to the tunnel. There were all kinds of jokes going around talking about what would happen if it were to change its name to another railway company in another particular set of circumstances.

There was something else though about animals and pets in this dream but I can’t remember anything particular about that.

It’s no surprise that I can’t remember anything about the above because when I was transcribing these notes, I had no recollection of ever having dictated them. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I am in fact usually asleep when I dictate these notes. However, when I’m typing them out, a light usually switches on in the back of my mind with a tiny spark of recollection, but there was nothing whatever about any of the foregoing.

Later on, I was with Nerina last night and she was wearing the dark blue anorak that she had bought in Luxembourg when we were on our honeymoon. We’d been wandering around together as usual and ended up in some kind of military auction. We were going through some of the goods that were on sale there, having a laugh and a joke about things like “lots of half a ton of gentleman’s battle dress blouses” etc. We couldn’t really see what kind of use a large lot like that would be to everyone. But just as this dream was becoming exciting, the alarm went off and I awoke. But from what I remember, we’d been walking through the countryside on the edge of this town in order to reach this car boot sale and we’d seemed to be fairly happy, although I’m not quite sure why. I can remember us crossing a big, main road. One thing that I’d noticed though was that we’d been on the road for several weeks and I was wearing these jeans that were quite dirty and stained. I wasn’t looking very respectable at all

The only times that Nerina and I would ever be able to relax would be on holiday. We’d wait until September when all the brats would be back at school, and then take off across the Channel, drifting aimlessly around Western Europe from one cheap village hotel to another, eating local food, drinking local wine and generally chilling. Nerina had a map that indicated scenic routes (a green stripe along the side of the road, the thicker the more scenic) and she’d guide the car along as I drove. We neither knew nor cared where we were or where we were going.

They were good times and we had several good stories to tell. In one tiny village in Brittany we had the cheapest wine on the menu – a litre of house red – with our main course. For the dessert we had, as usual, the cheese board.
"Do you know what would go really nicely with this cheese" she said.
"Tell me" I replied
"Another bottle of that wine" she answered.

On the way back to the hotel I had to walk her around the village for two hours to stop her giggling.

The nurse was early once more this morning. He forgot the heat treatment on my knee, which isn’t really important, and didn’t take too long sorting out my legs He soon cleared off and left me in peace.

Once I’d made my breakfast, I sat down to eat it and to read MY BOOK.

We’re still roaming around the churches of London intra-muros and I’m thoroughly impressed by the number of bodies said to be interred in the old Grey friars Church and in the old St Paul’s. I’m surprised that they could fit them all in, what with so many recorded by John Stow.

He also quotes the Charter of St Paul’s, granted by William The Conqueror. "to all his well-beloved French and English people, greeting. Know ye that I do give unto God and the Church of St Paule of London and the rectors and scruitors of the same, in all their lands which the church hath, with borough and without, sack and sock, thole and theam, infangthefe and grithbriche, and all the rights that into them christendome byrath, on morth sprake and on unright hamed, and on unright work, of all that bishoprick on mine land and on each other man’s land. For I will that the church in all things be as free as I would my soul to be in the day of judgement".

He’s also talking about St Paul’s School again, and it’s a veritable tonic for today’s teachers who believe themselves overworked with twenty-five kids. He tells us that the school has been created "for one hundred and fifty-three poor men’s children … for which he appointed one master, one surmaster or usher and a chaplain."

After breakfast I packed a few more boxes with kitchen stuff ready to take downstairs. There are six now waiting to be emptied and we’ll do that this evening when I return from dialysis.

Back in here, I went a-searching for more music for another project and was still hard at it when my faithful cleaner turned up to fit my anaesthetic patches.

When she finished, she took down the boxes while I made my way slowly and gingerly downstairs to my new home. The aim was to begin to unpack but a neighbour came along for an inspection and chat, and then the boss of the taxi company turned up early so we accomplished nothing. However, I might have recruited a couple more volunteers into the moving plan – quite useful since we’ve already had one fall by the wayside.

We were early arriving at the dialysis centre but once more they took their time connecting me. I’m not sure what I’ve done to upset them but once more I was put into the little room at the end – the “naughty corner”.

They left me pretty much alone, except for when my machine gave out an error message. And I crashed out for twenty minutes too. I must have been really tired today.

When my time was up, it took them an age to see to me and as a result, I was no earlier that I might otherwise have been. But at some point, they had run a resistance current through me, recalculated my dry weight, reset the machine, and now I’m the lightest weight that I have been for probably 15 years.

Much as I enjoy the new svelte, slimline me, if I continue to lose weight like this, it’s going to start to become worrying

Late returning home, we had time to unpack the boxes nevertheless, although I’m going to have to sort everything out again when I’m down there permanently and put it away much more tidily.

It was another desperate struggle up the stairs. I could manage two steps before I needed help. This chemotherapy is sending me backwards instead of forwards. Throughout the day, I’d noticed an improvement in my health, but just these two steps were enough to knock me right back.

After my cleaner left, I had a disgusting drink break and then made tea. Baked potato, vegan salad and breaded quorn fillet and not very much of it. I’m not hungry and in any case, I couldn’t stomach it tonight.

So now I’m off to bed. The alarm is set, as usual on a Sunday these days, at 08:00 and wouldn’t it be nice to actually be asleep from now until then with no disturbances?

But before we go, seeing as we have been talking about Nerina and her map … "well, one of us has" – ed … we were driving along one road and I asked her "is this supposed to be a pretty road?"
"Ohh yes" she replied confidently
"Where are we?" I asked
"Somewhere along here" she said, indicating a line on the map with her finger
"That line there" I said, "that’s a canal!"

EPIC HALL

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

Category Archives: France

Saturday 9th August 2025 – TODAY’S DIALYSIS SESSION …

Friday 8th August 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

Thursday 7th August 2025 – I AM IN …

Wednesday 6th August 2025 – I HAVE DONE …

Tuesday 5th August 2025 – WHEN THE ALARM …

Monday 4th August 2025 – BANE OF BRITAIN …

Sunday 3rd August 2025 – I HAVE DONE …

Saturday 2nd August 2025 – TODAY’S DIALYSIS SESSION …

Friday 1st August 2025 – AFTER YESTERDAY’S DISASTER …

Thursday 31st July 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

Wednesday 30th July 2025 – AT LONG LAST …

Tuesday 29th July 2025 – I STILL HAVEN’T …

Monday 28th July 2025 – YET MORE TORTURE …

Sunday 27th July 2025 – SO THERE I WAS …

Saturday 26th July 2025 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

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