Category Archives: France

Monday 21st October 2024 – I’M STILL ACHING …

… just about everywhere that it’s possible to ache, and probably a few places where it isn’t possible either.

Mind you, I have to admit that I’m not aching quite as much as I was when I awoke this morning. I thought that a good night’s sleep might have helped everything ease off seeing as I was lying comfortably in bed, but it wasn’t to be.

A longer sleep might have been nice but once again, I missed by some considerable distance my target of being in bed by 23:00. It’s still taking longer than I would like to finish off what needs to be done, and there’s the added problem with the aches and pains that make me reluctant to move from my comfortable chair.

But once in bed I was soon asleep and I can’t recall any awakening until about 06:15. And even then, I turned over and went straight back to sleep again. When the alarm went off I was in a pub in London watching a pub band play. There were Keith Ginnell and his wife on keyboards. His wife had been a famous model in the past, Vicky somebody I think. On drums was Keef Hartley and the singer was Magic Michael. He was too tall for the stage and had to bend his head to fit under the ceiling while he was singing. he was singing that song “Giddy up, Bobby” and I was thinking how easy that was to play when I thought about it. Then I went to the bathroom where I overheard some kind of dispute going on between Keef Hartley and Keith Ginnell. I thought that it was a shame that they were arguing like that because they were a really good group.

What I didn’t dictate was that I was staying at that pub but had to clear out my room ready to leave. And in the WC I’d bolted the door behind me but nevertheless someone still came in and walked past me, and I wondered how they had managed to do that.

Now you are of course going to ask me who Keith Ginnell is and what the song “Giddy Up Bobby” is all about. And the answer to both questions is that I don’t have any idea at all. I know who Magic Michael is of course, and who doesn’t? He was one of the hangers-on with Hawkwind back in the early 70s and later on had a few singles out of his own, most of which sunk without trace. Keef Hartley was of course one of John Mayall’s drummers and later on had a group of his own, but Keith Ginnell and “Giddy Up Bobby” escape me completely.

What’s so surprising is that I could actually remember them.

While we’re on the subject of remembering … "well, one of us is" – ed … I didn’t forget someone’s birthday yesterday. Not at all. It goes without saying that I won’t ever forget it

So I staggered to my feet in a cloud of agony and slowly inched my way into the bathroom where I had a good scrub up and even a shave to make myself look pretty, even though it will take more than a scrub-up and a shave to make me look pretty.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And there was some stuff on there too. There had been a big riot somewhere. The soldiers were all hemmed in at some kind of barracks and had been completely overwhelmed. They decided that what they would so as a desperate kind of last stand for all those who were fit enough was to make some kind of fighting arrowhead and charge out of the building on their horses hoping to break through the enemy lines. So they charged out in this arrowhead and almost broke through but were held somewhere down at the bottom of Oak Street and Mill Street in Crewe. The fight raged round there for an hour or two when suddenly the enemy surrendered and gave up the fight. I’d been watching the events unfold and after the events went peacefully some kind of big American convertible, a huge car with a woman driver pulled up and said “taxi for Hall”. I climbed in and it took me off down Wistaston Road/Victoria Avenue. I was chatting to the woman – she’d been in London earlier in the day in the fog, just socialising. I told her that I’d been to Scotland and it really was foggy there. She was telling me how she did taxiing part-time, how she enjoyed it. She was working for Orange Cabs but she didn’t have a card with her number on for me so we carried on chatting like that and eventually she brought me home

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we were AT THE SITE OF THE BATTLE OF LITTLE BIG HORN with LITTLE BIG ANTLERS a few years ago and the question that was going through my mind then was “why did Custer and his men dismount?”

On foot they would have no chance of escaping the native Americans, as events were to prove. Knowing that there was a detachment of soldiers with the baggage train in the vicinity, if they had formed a “fighting head” – a triangular-shaped formation, they stood a very good chance of piercing a surrounding line of enemy and the weight of their charge would have pushed at least some of them through the encirclement and on to safety at the far end of the ridge

But as for riots going on in Crewe, it’s extremely unlikely. The people there have long-since lost any free will and initiative.

The nurse came early and caught me off-guard this morning. He refrained from upsetting me, which was good, and now he’s gone off duty for a week which suits me fine. It gives me a chance to gather up my sang-froid ready for the next bout.

Still, the earlier he comes, the earlier he goes and I could crack on with breakfast.

Today, the Woolhope Naturalists are having a lecture on Space and Interplanetary rotation, sitting at a picnic around a waterfall. Some of their propositions have long-since been contradicted by later discoveries but it’s interesting all the same to hear the state of knowledge in 1867.

What’s also interesting is that the 48 members present had to go into the back of beyond to visit this waterfall, and not only did the railway company agree to stop the train at an isolated spot, it built a railway platform and had three gangers ready to help the party alight.

Just imagine that today! It would take them ten years to build the platform, even if they were so disposed to do so, and there would have to be all kinds of Health and Safety surveys and inspections first.

And this “Health and Safety Culture” – do you know what’s brought it on? It happened the day that Solicitors were allowed to advertise.

Back in the old days if you stumbled on a pavement and hurt your toe, you shrugged your shoulders and moved on. But once we began to see the "had an accident? It might not be your fault. Contact us for a free interview" advertisements, everything changed overnight.

The Naturalists were also visiting the famous church of Capel-y-ffin, a site that became notorious later on with the arrival of “Father Ignatius” and then the infamous Eric Gill, whose famous sculptures and type design did little to counter the later unsavoury allegations about his private life that were to occur once his biography was published after his death.

Having finished all that I came in here and finished off as far as I could (because some of it requires access to a television) and then carried on selecting music for the next radio programme.

My cleaner turned up to help me fit my anaesthetic patches and while she was here I gave her my orders for the supermarket tomorrow. And the taxi for the Dialysis Clinic was driven by a young guy and we had a very lively chat all the way down to Avranches.

At the clinic they didn’t hang about to plug me in. The first one hurt like hell but the second needle, I didn’t feel it at all.

The nurses asked if I had any pain anywhere so I mentioned the issues that I’m having. They gave me a Covid test and that was that. No doctor came anywhere near me to make further enquiries so I don’t see the point in asking.

As well as the doctor in charge, Emilie the Cute Consultant was there too and although she went to see a few other patients, she kept well away from me. Julie the Cook did likewise, so she must be a regular reader of this rubbish too.

I read my Welsh and spent some time reading, and I also had a little doze. While I was away with the fairies, being careful to avoid drawing the attention of the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine to my activities, I was on a train in Tunisia. A Tunisian woman in local dress came to sit next to me. I suddenly realised that I hadn’t validated my ticket so I stood up and went to look for a machine. There was none in my carriage and the next one was compartmentalised with the curtains drawn and what looked like discreet security guards. I turned to a guy in the vestibule of my carriage to ask him. He told me that you don’t validate it – the ticket inspector does as he or she passes – so I went to resume my seat. However it looked nothing like it did when I left and the Tunisian lady wasn’t there

There was a similar issue about TICKETS ON TRAINS when I was in Tunisia a few years ago, and I can well-believe the presence of Security Guards and curtained compartments on certain trains.

They unplugged me and threw me out into the torrential rain where my taxi was waiting, and we had to wait for the guy who lives in Sartilly. And he had already reserved the front seat

My driver was friendly enough but didn’t say too much and as we stopped outside the building, the rain stopped, the sun shone and we had a rainbow.

My cleaner watched me upstairs, and it was a retrograde number of steps today, no surprise with me feeling not too well. And I was glad to sit down and relax for an hour.

Tea was a lovely stuffed pepper with pasta followed by apple cake and soya cream and now I’m ready for bed.

But the subject of having pains everywhere reminds me of the guy who went to the doctor.
"Every time and everywhere I touch myself" he said "I’m in absolute agony."
And he proceeded to prod himself in his leg, his arm, his torso, his neck, his posterior, everywhere. And each time he winced in pain.
The doctor looked at him for a moment and then took him by surprise, prodding him in his ribs
"Did that hurt?" asked the doctor
"Well, actually doctor" said the man "no it didn’t. What does it mean? Am I dying? Do I have a serious problem?"
"Not at all" said the doctor. "All it means is that you have broken your finger."

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Sunday 20th October 2024 – RIGHT NOW I AM IN …

… absolute agony.

Since 17:00 this late afternoon I’ve been on my feet and my knees are giving me complete misery. I wish that I’d never been born, feeling like this.

Not only that, I woke up this morning … "♫dih dah did dah DAAH♫" – ed … with aches in just about every region of my body, and they are still there now. I’m in a bad way and if I’d been a horse I would have been shot long ago.

And there I was, thinking that it was going to be a good day today.

After all, although I missed my 23:00 deadline, it wasn’t by much and in any case, today I have a lie-in until 08:00 seeing as it’s Sunday.

It didn’t take long to dictate the radio notes that I’d written. There wasn’t much of them this weekend and that makes a change. But I was soon in bed and after all of my exertions during the day I didn’t need much rocking

There I lay, in perfect repose, with nothing whatever that disturbed me until all of … errr … 07:15. And when the alarm went off at 08:00 I was already in the bathroom scrubbing up. I’d given up the idea of going back to sleep a long time before that.

The nurse came round of course. "Ohh what a lovely loaf!" he said. "Have you been baking?"

It’s that kind of comment that is really getting on my nerves, especially as the loaf is a long way from “lovely”. One of these days he’s going to receive THE AUSTIN POWERS TREATMENT.

After he left I made breakfast and read my book for a while. The naturalists are discussing climate change – one of the very first, in fact the earliest, reference that I have seen of it in a layman’s work. They note that the theory is in its early days and how it’s subject to ridicule.

The ridicule is something that you could have understood in 1867 but it’s totally beyond my comprehension how anyone today could ever doubt the issue in the face of the overwhelming evidence that exists.

They are also theorising on “erratic boulders”.

An erratic boulder is a rock of a completely different geological structure to those around it, and you find them stuck in the middle of fields and other places completely out of place and out of character.

Their geology back in 1867 was in its infancy so they are theorising, and coming surprisingly close to the truth. The fact is that they are picked up by an advancing glacier and transported in the ice. When the glacier melts, the boulder drops out and is deposited. We saw dozens and dozens out in the Arctic

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few years ago when we talked about the Titanic disaster, there was the American senator who asked “what is an iceberg composed of?”, and was largely ridiculed for his question.

The fact of the matter though is that he wanted it put on record that there are sometimes boulders in an iceberg when a glacier carrying an erratic boulder has calved off an iceberg with an erratic boulder embedded in it, a boulder that might have sprung the side of the ship.

After breakfast I came in here and began to transcribe the dictaphone notes. Our Year at school had gone off on a field trip somewhere. I was wandering around, feeling not too well, feeling a little down in the dumps as usual when I bumped into a couple of my friends. We arranged to meet later for lunch but I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be still here by lunchtime so it was all very doubtful. One of them, I had a letter to give to him but I didn’t have it on me at that particular moment – I’d have to go back to fetch it. Wandering round a little later on I bumped into some more friends of that particular guy. We began to chat. They weren’t all that welcoming, as if there was something wrong between them and me which there probably was. In the end I happened to mention “are you seeing the other student for lunch?”. One of them said that yes, he was, and the rest of them were too. “Good” I replied. “In that case I have a letter to give him. Could I give it to you?”. This boy was clearly put out of his stride but he was the kind who would never refuse to do something so he reluctantly agreed. I had to go next-door to find it. That was walking into one of the lean-tos of my house in the Auvergne – the one where I slept during the winter of 2007. Of course the snow had come in through the roof and it was snowing that way. It was freezing cold too and very uncomfortable, but I did manage to find the letter. I folded it into three making sure that all the text was on the inside, then handed it over to this boy. Folding the text over to the inside meant nothing because I was sure that one of the others would take it and read it but that would be a matter for them, not for me.

At school I wasn’t particularly popular. I tended to have friends by default. I didn’t really fit in anywhere. But going back to the happy time that I spent – two years living in that lean-to that was 2.0×3.2 metres, I learned an awful lot and believe it or not, I was really quite happy in there

Later on, while we were out we’d had a few business ideas and ended up going to put them to a bank manager. I didn’t agree with some of the things that were in the prospectus but never mind. When we came to show the bank manager a demonstration of our plans, everything that we did simply went wrong. We knew that it was a total wash-out but the bank manager seemed to be quite amused rather than angry. I thought that there might possibly be something to salvage from here. We went to have another chat and I decided that I’d go home. I had a long way to go and was only on a 50cc moped and had to do it all at 30 kmh. I said that I’d go for a bag of chips on the way home. My friend asked me if I would fetch a bag for her husband. I thought “yes, okay, I can do that and I’ll clear off quickly”. Then at the chip shop I met a man who was talking about vans. I joined in the conversation and in the end the two of us were talking. He’d just bought a Transit from the auctions. I asked him to which auctions he went and he said either Leicester for vans or to Shifnal. I asked if they were any good so we had a long conversation. In the end he said that he would have to go. At that point a woman pulled up. She was one of the people with whom we might have been interested in entering a partnership. I began to talk to her. It was clear that some things were interesting her but not others. We had an extremely lengthy conversation. In the end she decided that she had to go. Of course I had the chips and I thought that these are going to be stone-cold by now and by the time that I hit the road it’s going to be 22:00. This is going to be an awfully late night. I leapt onto my moped, raced away from the shop and at a set of traffic lights almost collided with the rear of a white Ford Cortina MkII. In fact I ended up falling on the boot lid. The woman who owned the car didn’t seem to be in the least bit concerned and waved me on. I carried on but was then held up by a level crossing. There was a line in the north of the city that was used about once per week for the movement of goods. Of course it had to be right now. I was sitting at this level crossing watching this slow goods train past, thinking “this is just my luck. Everything is seeming to happen to delay me on this particular trip. I have to return home but I don’t have a clue when”.

This is typical, isn’t it? Everything going wrong at the crucial moment. And ohhh! Happy days at the car auctions at Prees Heath, Silverdale or Longton. We had a calendar of what went on when and I made a little money by moving cars around from one auction to the other at one time.

As well as that, I did have a 50cc Honda Melody scooterette when I lived in Brussels. I remember one night late on going for a ride and ending up in Leuven, coming home as the dawn began to break. That was the scooter that I taught Roxanne to ride.

Finally, I was somewhere in the far North of Canada where I’d been with Strider in one occasion. I’d slept overnight in the back and in the morning I’d set out through the wilderness but as I went a little further it became a very green English countryside. I thought “this isn’t right for Labrador at all”. As I drove, the road became a little worse and a little worse and more narrow. It became a kind-of rough tarmac road. It went down a steep hill, and halfway down was a school on the right that said “Freetown School”. I thought to myself “I bet it isn’t free”. A little lower down was the sign for the town that said “Freetown, Québec”. We went over a hump-backed bridge which was a canal and carried on down. There was a bridge over the river all surrounded by willow trees etc. On the way back up the hill on the other side I could see a caravanette in the distance with two or three cars behind it. Eventually there was just one car behind it, an old Morris Minor. He stopped to turn right into a car park, holding up the traffic. We had to wait behind him. When he finally moved out of the way I could go forward, and found that there were now two more cars between this caravanette and me. I resigned myself to staying behind this caravanette for as long as it would take. I still couldn’t take out of my mind how everything has suddenly changed to an English rural green countryside when I was supposed to be in Labrador.

That was a great time, that trip DRIVING AROUND LABRADOR IN 2015 where I spent every night but one “sleeping out” and having creatures fighting to get into Strider’s truck cap with me.

And turning right into a car park, holding up the traffic? Are we driving on the left then, as in the UK?

While we’re on the subject of Labrador … "well, one of us is" – ed … I’ve had a rather strange, depressing and regrettable communication that has made me even more entrenched against this system of incestuous academia that seems to exist.

In July last year I had a note that another researcher had quoted me in something that she had submitted for publication, so I wrote to her asking for the details (as is my right) and for a copy of the work (which is an academic courtesy).

She wrote back to me today, 15 months later, to tell me that she can’t remember what she wrote and "Finally, there are two sets of Cartwright’s “missing notes” both of which I’ve published as books through McGill-Queen’s Press – Both listed here – " and then gives me the links where I can buy them

Buy them!

When I pore over all of these ancient out-of-print books and find items that have been forgotten, I publish them either here or on my TRAVEL WEB SITE.

Nobody has to pay a penny to access the information that I discover. It’s nice if someone makes an Amazon purchase using the links here so that I can receive a small commission, and grateful thanks to those who do, but much as I like it, it’s not compulsory.

But pay to look at the results of my own research? Some people are out of their minds.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall the trip that I made to Cambridge University to look at the papers that William Cory Johnson had bequeathed to it, only to be told that I can’t have access until a researcher from the University has had first dibs.

And they’ve only been there since 1877 waiting, or something like that.

Like I said, I’m sick to death of this incestuous academia. I’m clearly in the wrong business.

So abandoning yet another good rant for a while, I started on the two radio programmes. And they both gave me problems that took quite a while to resolve. They are now however up and running but I’m going to have to re-dictate the notes because the recorder is playing up again. It sounds as if I have my head in a bucket.

It was later than I hoped when I finished. However I then dashed into the kitchen where I made some pizza dough.

While it was rising I made the garlic butter that I needed to do, and then began to make the hummus (which was what I forgot to mention yesterday).

The first batch, with dried tomato and olive, went really well and made a lovely batch. But the second, which should have been spicy hot chili, ran aground when I found that I had no spicy hot chilis lying around.

At the moment, that helping is in the fridge and I shall send my faithful cleaner off on an errand on Tuesday. She has to go anyway to look for some Tahini as I have no run out of that too.

In between everything I was organising all of the pizza stuff. 2 helpings of dough are in the ice box in the fridge and the third made a beautiful pizza tonight.

And then there was a mountain of washing-up to do. Tons of it tonight.

But now, later than usual and aching in places that I didn’t even know I had, I’m off to bed, still seething about that researcher.
She reminds me of the time that Rutherford was researching, and proudly announced "I’ve just found out that protons have a mass"
"Blimey!" said his Professor. "It’s news to me that they were even Catholic."

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Saturday 19th October 2024 – THEY LEFT ME …

… pretty much to myself at the Dialysis Clinic this afternoon.

Once they’d plugged me in, they only came back once to deal with an alarm, one of the nursing assistants brought me a coffee, and that was that until it was time to unplug me

That’s much more like my way of doing things and if they can keep it up like that every time I go, I shall be much happier.

Another thing that shall make me much happier is going to bed early. Last night was ridiculous. Just as I was about to switch off everything and go to bed, round on the playlist came the classic Quicksilver Messenger Service version of Elias Bates (Bo Diddley to you)’s version of WHO DO YOU LOVE, all 25 minutes and 15 seconds of it.

Of course, one thing leads to another and once you start you’ll be surprised at how many other things there are and it was after 00:30 when I finally crawled into bed

For once though I had a good sleep. Apart from a brief, very brief moment, I was asleep for the entire night but I was still feeling the worse for wear when I crawled out of bed at the sound of the alarm.

First thing was to go into the kitchen. I’ve no bread left and so I set to work to make a loaf of bread, starting by making the dough and giving it a good kneading.

Whilst it was busy festering I went into the bathroom. With it being a Dialysis Day to day I gave myself a good scrub and even applied the deodorant, not that it makes much difference

Having organised myself I sorted out the washing. There’s tons of it, but I washed the bed linen today along with some of the stuff of which supplies are running low. When I came here from the Auvergne I didn’t bring everything with me – just enough to keep me going. But there’s no chance now of going back to the Auvergne to pick up the rest.

When the nurse came round he looked at the dough and asked “are you making bread?”. His asinine, patronising comments are getting on my nerves.

Luckily he didn’t stay long and was soon down the road, and I can carry on with breakfast and my book.

Today, the Woolhope Naturalists are at Llandrindod Wells where we hear them applauding the efforts that are being made in salmon conservation and calling for some kind of control of pollution of the local rivers – a good 100 years ahead of their time.

And then I put the bread in the oven.

After I’d started the washing off I’d made a start on the dictaphone notes but the arrival of the nurse had put paid to that. So after breakfast I carried on. There was this very small girl. She was very small and very lively, and very interested in everything that seemed to be going on around her. One day I had to go to the hospital. A car came for me – it was a big Austin A110. I climbed into it and it had to go to pick up some more people. A guy was picked up and he sat in the back, a woman or a guy – it seemed to change between the two. Then there was this small girl and this woman. The woman insisted on sitting in the front, so much so that she actually climbed into the front while I was in the seat. In the end I agreed that I’d step out of the car and sit in the rear. The little girl made some kind of comment so I said “God, I’m sitting next to you, am I?” in one of those harmless fun tones which started a little bit of a play argument. This all took place at the entrance to a car park somewhere but it turned out to be at the Earl of Crewe. We were all at the Earl of Crewe outside, all fooling around, all of us. Someone came up to me and said “You’ve forgotten that it’s her birthday today, haven’t you?” meaning the little girl. I replied “I didn’t really know”. “Don’t worry. The driver has bought a little present for her on your behalf”. I thought “that’s nice of him. That’s the second time that he’s done that. I’ll have to see about paying him back or something”. But I have half an hour when I’m not doing anything. I was planning on looking at a recipe that someone had given me. Instead, I can look at the recipe in the car and go to buy her a present then. We all ended up in some kind of old house with low ceilings and wattle-and-daub walls. We were all inside there and making conversation with each other and the little girl was doing her school homework. There was someone else there doing some work at the seat behind her. I was going to read this recipe but I thought that I’d go to talk to this girl and see what she’s doing. and this dream carried on like that for ages.

This dream certainly dates me if I’m being picked up by an Austin A110. I was still a teenager when those cars were top-of-the-range. And I often used (and probably still do) tease young girls like that. The incident of the woman wanting to sit in the front reminds me of that strange guy at the Dialysis Centre who never opened his mouth all the time except when the taxi driver asked “who wants to sit in the front?”.

Having had one phantom alarm call we have a second. And one of my friends seems to be coming “extremely close” to everyone who comes to her house. Tomorrow morning there is going to be someone new going so we should all be at the house and we should catch her. Se we were there and were waiting. Sure enough, someone came, a refugee from some island somewhere. She had a close encounter with him which makes the fourteenth in fourteen days. After that we walked home. I walked away over the hills and when I was round about at an arch some woman came up, a type of girl, not even wanting to talk to me about anything other than the items of clothing in my freezer bag that I had to give her, a freezer bag with eight items of clothing in there so now there was one piece of pizza and just three or four left. She wanted to search through them and wasn’t going to let me go home until I’d submitted to a search

There is actually one of my friends who behaves like that. Mind you, it’s a good 15-20 years since I’ve seen her and even then I used to keep a respectable distance. However, I don’t understand anything about the second part of that dream.

By the way, I have absolutely no recollection of either of those phantom alarm calls.

Finally I was in a bedsit room in Manchester. It was something of a mess but I was leaving today. I had a train at 18:00 that I absolutely had to catch. I wanted to see one of the many followers of this blog before I left but he could only fit me in after 17:00. As he lived in Altrincham that was leaving it rather tight to go out there to see him then come back to Manchester in the centre for my train. I’d have to have everything ready but it was now 09:25, I was lying there, I was hearing people washing so I arose, found a bearskin to keep me warm and then went to see if there was a washbasin free where I had a really good wash ready for going out catching the Underground and going off to do the things that I needed to do

If I could go across Manchester on the Underground, that would be something of a miracle. Any plans for an underground network in the city have long-since been scuppered which was a shame and today everyone has to go by tram and even then it’s not all that convenient. The “Northern powerhouse” promised by so many politicians is a myth, a vote-catching soundbyte and as long as the politicians won’t admit that there’s anything of any importance beyond the M25, so it will remain.

Having hung up the washing to dry, I sorted out the bread. One side of it hadn’t risen at all so we can call this loaf a failure, which is a shame. But I can’t understand why that would be because the bread was in the middle of the oven with the heat, in principle, passing equally all around it.

While the bread was cooling and the washing was drying I came back in here where I was supposed to be having a morning off. However, I made an interesting discovery relating to what might in the near future be an interesting radio programme so I followed it up.

Round about 11:50 I had a message – “could you be ready for 12:15? We’re short of numbers today and there’s a person needing to go to Avranches for 13:00. Would you share?”.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I am being offered an extraordinary service that exists nowhere else in the World to my knowledge, and it’s all free to me. Who am I to argue about any of this? In any case, the earlier we start, the earlier we finish

It meant a mad panic though, for me and my faithful cleaner to prepare me for the trip and we only just made it. Just as she was leaving, the driver turned up.

It was someone who had taken me to Paris in the past and we had a good chat on the way down to Avranches.

With the taxi coming early, I was early arriving and so I was coupled up quickly, and then left to my own devices.

For the first time in a couple of weeks I crashed out (and isn’t that a change?). Only for twenty minutes or so and when I awoke I had the most appalling indigestion that plagued me for hours.

With no interruptions I reviewed my Welsh, last week’s and the forthcoming week, had a close look at the homework that I need to finish off and then tidied up the laptop. The whole desktop is far too cluttered and there are loads of tabs open in Waterfox and I’ve no idea why. They aren’t open now.

No-one bothered me or interrupted me and as far as I could see, there wasn’t even a doctor on duty. But for the compression stage of the procedure where someone has to clamp my arm for ten minutes I had Julie the Cook again
"You really ought to try to do this yourself" she said
"Clear off!" I replied. "How else am I going to have a beautiful girl sitting beside me for ten minutes holding my hand?"

When they weighed me I found that I’d lost another 2kg. My “unfit” target weight is now firmly in my sights and if I can reach it I would be delighted. But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … getting it off is one thing. Keeping it off is something else completely.

The taxi driver was a new girl. She was an ambulancier in the Champagne-Ardennes who moved here five weeks ago. She applied to the company for a job and in the kind of logic that only they think is reasonable but neither my driver nor me could understand, they put her to driving taxis when she’s no idea of where she’s going. At least as an ambulancier she’d be with someone, which would help her pick up the hints.

And for once in our lives, having left the Dialysis Centre early, at Sartilly we find ourselves in a long queue stuck behind a tractor (it’s that time of year again) and we crawl all the way to Granville at 30kmh.

My faithful cleaner watched me up the stairs, and today I could manage nine before I need to lift up my leg with my hand. This is certainly progress and I hope that it keeps up.

Back in here even though I was early I did nothing until tea time. I was exhausted. But I made myself a lovely tea of a burger on a bun with salad and baked potato followed by apple cake and soya cream.

Now that this severe indigestion has eased somewhat I’m off to bed once I’ve dictated the radio notes. Tomorrow I’ll be busy with the radio, with pizza dough to make and there’s something else that I need to make but I’ve forgotten what it is right now. I hope that I remember.

But I forgot to mention an incident that caused panic and embarrassment at the Dialysis Clinic today.
A man walked by mistake into the ladies’ cloakroom and a couple of minutes later two women walked in behind him.
Suddenly there were all kinds of panic as a couple of nurses dashed towards the cloak room with the emergency gear.
"What’s going on?" I asked
"It’s one of those two women" replied a breathless nurse. "She’s had a stroke!"
"What about the other one?" I asked
"She wasn’t quick enough" replied the nurse.

0

Friday 18th October 2024 – I HAVE BEEN …

… a busy boy yet again.

So much so that not only am I going to have tomorrow morning off (apart from bread-making and doing a machine-load of washing) but I actually had a couple of hours off this afternoon too.

In a mad, fit burst of energy I had all of the work that I intended to do today finished by hot chocolate time and it’s nice for once to be in a position where I could just lounge around.

It’s not as if I was in bed early last night. It was another late night, midnight in fact, when I hit the sack. But something remarkable happened, or didn’t happen, as the case may be. I slept all the way through to the alarm.

No awakening, no drenching in perspiration either. It really was a deep sleep. But that means that it’s not the dialysis that’s causing the problem. It must be something else, and I wonder what it might be.

So when the alarm went off I crawled out of bed and went off into the bathroom for a good wash and scrub up. Then back in here to find that the internet was down.

Not to worry. There were plenty of things that I could be doing. Like transcribing the dictaphone notes. I was out driving a taxi around Sandbach last night. I could hear all of the confusion in Crewe by listening to the radio and thought to myself “in a minute I’ll be mixed up in that” but a voice came over the radio when I told them that I’d finished my job, and that was to go to Sandbach Hall and pick up a couple of passengers to take them to Northampton. I thought “that’s sounding good”.

Yes, I’d often go to drive the taxi that we had in Sandbach, just for an evening’s peace and quiet away from the stress. I always drove it on a Thursday night because there were the weekly accounts to do and sitting at the station there waiting for the trains to come in, I could crack on and do them. But I had a few decent fares from there on a couple of occasions. Never quite made it to Northampton but Coventry once one Sunday afternoon.

When I’d finished that I decided that I’d perform a full back-up.

The last one that I took was in September last year and since then I’ve been backing up every night on the memory stick that lives in one of the USB ports

The situation here is that I have the big powerful machine with a 1TB SSD that is the driver disk, and a 4TB drive that is the data disk. And then there’s an array with several hard drives in it that constitutes the back-up disks. That all works very well so let’s hear it for the array

… "Hip, hip array!" – ed …

There are several external drives that I use for the more specialised back-ups and then there’s the 128GB USB stick in the back of the computer where I back up my data at least every night, and more often if necessary.

The nurse came to see me while I was in the middle of it all. He changed my bandages and when he finished, asked me “can you put on your socks on your own?”.

These socks are actually elasticated and very difficult to manage, and also I can’t bend enough these days with all of my problems. But I asked why he wanted to know.

The answer is that he thinks that in a week or two’s time I’ll no longer need the treatment to my legs and if I could put on my socks myself I wouldn’t need the nurses round every morning.

Sounds like a good plan to me so I reckon that after my shower on Wednesday I’d have a try. Anything if there’s a possibility of a good lie-in on a Sunday morning again.

After he left I made breakfast and carried on reading the report of the Naturalists. We’re discussing primroses, cowslips and oxslips, not that I have any interest in botany, but I was interested to see the lecturer discussing treatment that was novel in 1867 but is commonplace today, and how flowers have evolved over the last 150 years or so.

He went on to say how putting manure on your primroses and cowslips improves their quality and, rather quaintly, goes on to extol the benefits of what he calls “street scrapings”. Yes, the horse-power back in those days came from real horses.

Back in here I carried on backing up until I’d finished, not having noticed that the internet was back on.

Once I’d finished another good job I started work,, finishing off the radio notes

My cleaner came early today. She decided that as it was a lovely day she’d go to join the crowds at the pèche-à-pied this afternoon so she’d come at lunchtime.

For the benefit of new readers, of whom there are more than just a few these days, I live in one of the best shellfish-producing areas in Europe, if not the World.

In principle, all of the beaches and rocks are let off to concessions who have the right to exploit what they find there. That right goes from high water-mark down to the low water-mark.

However, we also have some of the highest tides in Europe and about a dozen times per year, the tides are such that they go out beyond the low water mark. And when that happens, it’s a free-for-all on the very low part where everyone can rake up what he can, as long as he obeys the limits about size and quantity.

So she’s off with her bucket and grattoire and she’ll be OK as long as she shares her catch with her friends. After all, you mustn’t be selfish with your shellfish.

While she was here we chatted about this idea that I have about trying to put on my own socks. She’s not sure how I’m going to do it but she’s willing to see what I can do and how I do it.

And to be honest, so am I.

My salad butty at lunchtime used up the last of the bread and so tomorrow morning I’ll have to make some more. I’ll also have to set a washing machine off so even though it’s going to be a day of rest, I’ll still be busy.

Liz and I had a little chat which was nice. It’s been a long time since we spoke to each other

But anyway I finished off all of the notes for this programme that I’d been preparing. The music that I’d selected ran out at just over 53 minutes and I’d been keeping a careful count of the text that I’d written and I’ve calculated that it will run to 7 minutes and 12 seconds.

It’ll be great if it does because there won’t be much at all to cut out once the soundtrack has been edited.

After the hot chocolate I uninstalled a program that had been causing me problems and reinstalled an earlier version, only to find that I was having the same trouble.

That was when I discovered that I’d inadvertently changed a setting on the program that I’d deleted, that the version that I’d re-uploaded had remembered. A flick of a switch changed that and now I’ll have to uninstall that program and reinstall the new one again.

Tea tonight was vegan salad, chips and vegan nuggets, followed by apple cake and coconut-soya cream

So now it’s bedtime. so I’m clearing off, ready to fight the good fight tomorrow, and I hope that you like my Robinson Crusoe impression

When my cleaner was in I told her that today I was going to do my impression of Robinson Crusoe.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Well" I replied "all of his work was done by Friday too"

0

Thursday 17th October 2024 – SOMEONE IS GOING …

.. to have their nether regions given a good kicking in the near future. And I can’t say that I’m sorry.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few months ago I had an ugly confrontation in the private hospital at Avranches with someone on the accounts department that led to me writing to the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the company.

Today I’ve finally had a response, full of grovelling apology (I had a cheque sent back to me a week or so ago) and containing the ominous “your letter will be placed before our Committee who will examine your complaint”.

Having received full reimbursement, it’s obvious that my complaint has been upheld, after all, it’s not like a private organisation to hand back money without a fight, so all we need now is a good witch-hunt, complete with a ceremonial burning at the stake

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, after I finished my notes last night I had one or two things that needed doing so yet again I was rather late going to my nice, clean, fresh bed.

But once in it, I was away quite quickly and there I stayed, all curled up, until the alarm went off. There had been one or two minor awakenings during the night but I was soon asleep again.

When the alarm went off I was in the middle of a dream. I was auditing some accounts for some company, going through their office and checking everything. There was a guy and girl there working together. It was quite obvious that the guy had his eye on the girl. After he went out of the room I began to talk to the girl to find out a little more about her to see if I could encourage these two in some way. Then the guy came back and carried on talking. I could see that he was looking nervous and was glancing at me so I just said to him “oh, go ahead. Don’t mind me” and tried to encourage him to ask her for a date. Then I was at home and one of my friends was there. We were talking about diabetics. I was watching TV in French, a TV programme in French while she was working. She was wondering why I was sitting down and not doing things. She found that it was actually a programme about diabetes. They were talking about “if you’re having a crisis, have a fruit” but I replied that quite often when I have a diabetic crisis I don’t have any fruits any more. I’ve run out”. And then I was thinking “maybe it’s a good idea to go out and buy some, then we can have a coffee as well, things like that” but my friend had so much work on her plate that I thought “maybe it’s not such a very good idea to propose that we stop for a moment”

Eating a fruit is a good idea in a diabetic crisis and at the hospital they usually give me a cup of orange juice if I’m having a wobble. Then along came the dietician who tells me that fruit has loads of potassium in it, my potassium is too high and I must cut down on the fruit. But that is just how everything is – one thing going on is affecting something else so I need a pill for the side-effect, but that pill then affects something else so I need another. And so on. I counted once just recently and it was about 32 pills, tablets and medicines per day (it’s increased since then). And I bet it’s all on account of the first one that I started taking. It’s hard to believe that when I went to live in Leuven in early 2016 I was just taking four pills per day.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up, a shave and applied plenty of deodorant, even though it probably serves no useful purpose. And then I came in here to listen to the dictaphone. I can only remember a small part of this dream but I had to go to the bank to draw some money out at a cash point. I drew out £80:00 when I went to the shops last Tuesday but I thought that if I was drawing out that sum every week it’s going to be an awful lot of money. I was driving down the hill to where the little bank branch was where there was a machine where I could draw the money but suddenly I found myself maybe half a mile further on at a road junction. “Never mind” I thought. I could turn left here, turn round and go back again. But the left turning was a one-way street. I thought “I’ve been here before and turned down here but it’s all really complicated but I can’t remember seeing the bank branch when I drove down here just now. I mean, it’s dark and usually all its lights are on and you can see it from quite some distance away but tonight there was nothing. I hope that it’s not been closed down while I’ve been going”.

And I’ve been down this road during a previous night too. It’s the road that I drove down once and waited on a corner somewhere in South London when I was on another nocturnal ramble. And although I can’t recognise the first part of it, I now recognise the second part where I tried to turn left last night and the corner where I waited last time. It’s in Saint John in New Brunswick, just around the corner from where my Canadian insurance broker has her office. Well, well, well. But I wonder if the dream is symbolic of the issues that I had recently with my bank card.

It was Isabelle the nurse today, seeing as her partner has had to go to the doctor (and doesn’t that inspire a lot of confidence in a nurse?). She was her usual cheerful self, blitzed through her task and then cleared off, leaving me alone.

And so I made my breakfast and read my book. Right now, I’ve read the introduction and all the members are taking the train in the middle of a blinding rainstorm, to go to look at the rocks at Colwall in the Malvern Hills. We’re having a long, complicated talk on geology and underlying rock strata, which makes me wish that I could remember more of my A-level Geography. All the time that I spent studying rock formation in the Arctic with Mark St Onge on our trips out there on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR seems not to have done me much good

Back here I cleared up a few bits and pieces and then made a start on writing the notes for the next radio programme. I’ve now done a few but this is turning into something rather more complicated than I had imagined. It’s not easy.

My cleaner came in and helped me with my anaesthetic patches, and then she tried some of the new tubi-grip bandage that we’ve acquired thanks to the prescription from Isabelle the nurse. That seems to work really well and I’m impressed.

The taxi came early and we set off, picking up another passenger on the way, for the Dialysis Clinic.

Being quite early I was soon installed in my bed with my laptop and music and the nurses didn’t hang about either. The first needle went in almost painlessly but the second one wasn’t so easy and they needed the echograph machine to test for the tube in my arm.

And when they finally found it and pushed the needle in, the anaesthetic had worn off.

It looks as if it’s definitely all over between Emilie the Cute Consultant and me.

She was there this afternoon and although she gave me a little wave of her hand, she kept her distance and that was that.

She certainly speaks English because there’s a monolingual English-speaker being dialysed and she was talking to him in English so she’s probably a regular reader of this rubbish and will recall a few of the comments that I have made. That’s enough to drive anyone away, I suppose. Let’s face it, I have enough trouble trying to persuade anyone to come near me in normal times, never mind when we are thrust together cheek by jowl to fester away in a hospital.

The other nurses came by every now and again to check the machine and to ask me to translate stuff for them so that they could speak to the English guy.

However I spent most of the time now that I have an internet connection trying to track down the dates of some of these live concerts that I have. I didn’t check many because it’s really had to do it when you aren’t comfortable, you only have one hand that you can use and that’s interrupted every 20 minutes by a blood pressure reading.

They carried out a diabetes test on me and sure enough it was at a critical level so they gave me a big glass of orange juice. Presumably they don’t think much of the dietician either.

After they unplugged me, disconnected me and compressed me, I went to weigh myself. I’d lost 3.1 kg in this session. All of that would be quite impressive if I wouldn’t put almost all of it straight back on again. It’s no good taking it off and it all going back on.

And a blood test report was sent to me today. After dialysis a few days ago the creatine was down to 283 (the required level in less than 100 and mine was at 450 which is close to fatal just before all of this started). However when I went back to dialysis a few days later it was up at almost 350 again. So not even that is staying put.

But never mind all of that. If I’m feeling better with just that much improvement, what will I be like if ever it goes down to less than 100 and I’m at my target weight?

There were three of us in the taxi and the driver was having an intense discussion with the other passenger so I sat in the back and relaxed.

My faithful cleaner was waiting for me and watched as today I made 8 steps without using my hand to lift up my leg. If I keep this up, in a couple of months I’ll be outside through the skylight climbing up the roof to the chimney.

My cleaner says that she’s noticed a major improvement over the last few weeks and thinks that I ought to try going for a drive. But that’s out of the question right now. There’s not enough force in my right leg to apply the brake and that’s that.

Tea was, as I said yesterday, a slice of vegan pie with vegetables in gravy and I forgot the herbs with the gravy. But the pie defrosted and warmed up really well in the air fryer and really was nice. I made the gravy thick and glutinous and stirred the veg in it so that the gravy stuck to all of them. That made it even nicer.

So right now, later than intended, I’m off to bed. But the talk of tying someone to a stake and burning them alive reminds me of a boy at our old school.
He came in one morning saying."I saw this incredible film last night. It was all about this man who changed into a bat and they killed him by hammering a stake into his heart. Can you imagine that? Killing a man with a stake?"
"That’s nothing" I retorted. "My mother can do that with egg and chips"

0

Wednesday 16th October 2024 – I HAVE BEEN ..

… a very busy boy today.

And not only that, I’m a very clean busy boy too because I have had another shower today. And not only that either, but I have a lovely clean bed to dive into tonight because while I was soaking myself down, my faithful cleaner was changing the bedding on my bed and sweeping out the room.

Yes, this is a luxury to which I’m not all that accustomed. At this rate I shall be learning to become civilised, far too late to do me any good.

And while we’re on the subject of lateness … "well, one of us is" – ed … I was late again going to bed last night. Not by much, I have to say, but enough for me to complain about it – as if I don’t do enough complaining anyway.

In actual fact I’d finished fairly early and could I suppose have made the bed prior to 23:00 but instead I followed a few distractions to relax myself before I finally hit the hay. We’ve been studying different dialects in our Welsh class and she found an interesting article on the subject so she sent it to me.

The dialect that I know is rather confusing. My grandmother’s family came from Penrhiwceiber in South Wales, she grew up in the borderlands near Wrexham, I worked with a Welsh-speaking colleague from Caernarfon when I was on the buses in Crewe, I study with Coleg Cambria in Mold and I’ve been on Summer Schools in Gwent and Caerfyrddyn, and so I have a bit of everything.

Going off to sleep seems to be taking a little longer than in the past so the fairies had to loiter around for a little longer, but once I was gone, I was gone. I awoke once during the night round about 05:00 (yet again:) but soon went back to sleep again.

That seems to be quite a popular time to awaken. I wonder why it is. I know that I’m a very light sleeper but that time or thereabouts is just too regular to be a coincidence.

When the alarm went off at 07:00 I went off into the bathroom to have a really good scrub, and then came back in here to see what was on the dictaphone from the night. We’d set up a business with a couple of different people concerning an estate agency. We’d managed to secure a couple of clients and had gone into partnership with a couple of different people for a couple of different things. My partner was wondering about how progress was being made because we’d been away for a couple of weeks and there had been no contact. We went back to meet everyone again to see how things were. My partner wanted to make sure that nothing that we had done before we went away had been compromised. It was left to me to do the distasteful tasks of asking these other people who were in partnership with us. One guy said, rather offendedly, yes, he’d sold twenty-one apartments in the time that he’d been away but the two that we’d seen with him and organised, they hadn’t moved. Then he buttonholed my partner and asked “when are you going to come along and do this work that you promised?” so the two of them marched off somewhere. He was determined to make her work. In the meantime, the woman of another partnership with whom we’d gone into partnership at the beginning asked “when’s your partner going to deal with this examination and homework that we have to do? It’s already a week overdue now. I went with her we sat down, we each took a paper of this homework and she did one while I did the other. We then swapped papers to look at it and check each other’s work. I didn’t really know very much about what I was doing and was having to interpret it on the basis of what I’d seen in the question. That’s all I knew. It looked very common-sense to me but it was difficult for me to wrap my head around it because I didn’t know any of the technical terms however I did what I could and hopefully it was OK but the dream ended before we had the results of the checking by this other girl

“I didn’t really know very much about what I was doing” – that’s the story of my life, isn’t it? I seem to make it all up as I go along and hope for the best. When I rely on my intuition it works pretty much OK most of the time. Sometimes though I’ve had some spectacular successes but, on the other hand, once or twice I’ve had some miserable failures. Anyway, I’m far too old to change my ways now

Later on I’d been in the USA for some kind of work and was flying back to Canada but I’d looked in at a DiY shop on one occasion just before coming back and they had some 1.6Kw heater elements in there. There was also this beautiful kitchen unit in a flat pack. I looked at this kitchen unit and thought that it was lovely so I bought it. I bought my heater element then I realised that I couldn’t pick up the kitchen unit because it was too heavy so I took the obvious solution and just pushed it in its box. I pushed it all the way to the airport and all the way through the departure. It went into the hold of the ‘plane. When we arrived in Canada it was somehow with me on the ‘plane so I pushed it all the way through. Before leaving the USA I took this heater element and changed the plug on it for a Canadian plug. When I arrived back in Canada I left the ‘plane and pushed this through the airport, half expecting to be stopped at “Passports” but there was no-one on duty at Passport Control – we just pushed our way through into the main hall. I was there putting my things into some bags when someone came up to me and asked me why I’d changed this plug over to a different plug in the USA. I explained that I wanted it to work here in Canada. They asked “couldn’t you have waited until you arrived in France to do that? ”

Canadian plugs are the same as USA plugs, but let’s not bog ourselves down with trivialities. I would have loved to have worked in Canada but I was stuck in the “age gap”. Over 55 and you can’t have a work permit, and under 65 you can’t be a dependent. Now that I would qualify, I’m too ill to go. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WHEN I WAS ON A BUS IN MONTREAL IN 2013 the driver of the bus had lived for years in Brussels and worked the route that I used to take to go to see Marianne. He encouraged me to apply for a job as a bus driver with the Montreal City bus company and reckoned that I’d be certain to be accepted, but I fell right into that age gap. I would have loved to have lived in Montreal although THE OLD FAMILY PILE IN DRAPER AVENUE in the Côte des Neiges has long-since been demolished and redeveloped. The only place our family still owns in Montreal is the six feet of earth in the Mount Royal Cemetery where the bones of my great grandfather lie.

The nurse today was quick and efficient and had very little to say for himself except the usual patronising remarks that get on my nerves. He soon cleared off and left me to make a start on breakfast.

As for reading matter, Old Sarum was the last place that we visited with Thomas Wright. I’m now on the annual report of the Woodthorpe Naturalists’ (not “naturists”, Rhys) Club from (thinks) 1867. Why that’s interesting was because the club was the organisation that pushed forward the idea of gathering mushrooms and this report was the first document to actually identify and catalogue the different types. It’s the mushroom gatherer’s bible.

After breakfast I tidied up in the kitchen and dining area for a while and then came in here. Firstly, there was football to watch. There had been a whole programme of matches last night in the Welsh Premier League, unfortunately not shown live but the highlights of every game were shown.

To be honest, I’m glad that they didn’t show Y Bala v Connah’s Quay live. The highlights ran for 1 minute and 37 seconds, and I counted two shots on goal. Y Drenewydd threw away a 2-goal lead to go down 4-2 against y Barri but the surprising scoreline was that Aberystwyth, dead and buried at the bottom of the table and now managerless, stuck four away from home against 3rd-placed Caernarfon. And of course, we had yet another “let’s play it out from the back, boys” moment too.

Then I started work. And busy boy that I am, not only did I finish off the notes for the next radio programme, I chose the music, paired it off and segued the pairs for the one after too. And even wrote some of the notes too

This next one is another complicated one too and it’s going to be so easy for me to find myself carried off on a tangent if I’m not careful. I’m not allowed to be partisan or adopt a polemic stance, so we’ll have to see how well I can control myself.

There were several interruptions too. Firstly there was lunch. And then there was the shower.

That means washing my socks and undies etc first. And then stripped down and put on my shorts. My faithful cleaner stood by in case I needed her and then, propped up with a crutch, I gave myself a good scrub down as best as I could, and it was wonderful.

There’s some kind of pivoting chair available to help me into the bath and it costs about €300. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that in March someone came here with one to try out, but chipped the bath, promised to come back, and I haven’t seen him since.

So €300 for that. My cleaner and I found that a dining room chair and two wooden boxes do the job just as well, and cost nothing.

While I was hosing myself down she was in here changing the bedding and brushing out my room. And it is nice. In fact it was a wonderful hour or so all told and I hope that I feel the benefit of it tonight, even though it’s going to be late yet again.

Once I was out of the shower and dressed, I had a sort-out of my travelling rucksack that I take when I have to go to hospital.

The reason is that I’m running low on my anti-cancer chemotherapy medicine. They gave me a prescription for that at Avranches the other day but it’s a strictly-controlled medication that can only be prescribed by certain consultants, and there are none at Avranches (which is why I go to Paris).

Anyway, the pharmacy rejected it so so I rang them at Paris.
"Didn’t the doctor give you a prescription when you came?" asked the secretary.
"Yes" I replied. "But that was in June, it was only for three months and now it’s run out"
"I mean, when you came just now"
"I haven’t been just now" I replied. "The last time that I came was in June. The doctor said that he’d call me back there for a biopsy at the end of August but I’ve heard nothing since June."
"But surely you … didn’t you? …You must have … Let me see …Can I call you back? I need to speak to the doctor"

As a result, I’m expecting a call to go to Paris some day very soon. God alone knows when ‘ll be able to fit it in. Dialysis, 30 sessions at the Centre de Re-education looming, a series of 30 sessions of physiotherapy waiting for a place. It’s worse than when I was at work.

That’s not all either. The post has been building up and there have been several bills to pay to the Government for one thing and another. So I was busy setting up accounts on the Fench Government web-page so that they can use direct debit to take payment.

The good news is that I’m entitled to a tax refund. It’s only e40:00 but it’s symbolic

After all of that I reckoned that I deserved my leftover curry and naan bread, followed by apple cake and coconut soya cream. Another excellent meal that I really enjoyed. Tomorrow I might try a slice of pie warmed up in the air fryer with potatoes, veg and gravy.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, late again, I’m off to bed, a nice clean me in a nice, clean bed.

But talking about mushrooms … "well, one of us is" – ed … reminds me of the man who went to the Marriage Bureau
"You’ve been married before" sad the interviewer
"Three times" said the client "but I’m a widower"
"I’m sorry to hear that" said the interviewer. "What happened to your first wife?"
"She died from eating poisoned mushrooms"
"Oh dear" said the interviewer. "And the second?"
"She died from eating poisoned mushrooms"
"And the third?"
"She died of a fractured skull"
"A fractured skull?"
"Yes" replied the client. "She wouldn’t eat the mushrooms"

0

Tuesday 15th October 2024 – AS YOU MIGHT …

… expect, last night was something of a disaster.

In fact, it was quite a disaster, if the truth was known. Wide awake at 04:00 drenched in perspiration, up and about at 05:00. Of course, I had dialysis yesterday. It seems to be every time I have dialysis that this happens.

What I’ll have to do is to talk to a doctor next time one of them comes to see me. I’ll have to see if it’s an anticipated side-effect or whether there’s something else going on.

If it’s Emilie the Cute Consultant, I can always request that she comes here to rock me to sleep but I imagine that if I were to ask for that I’d be told to clear off in the fashion that JAH Catton, editor of “Athletic News” described when discussing an outburst from Wales international goalkeeper Leigh Roose, as "not such as might be expected from a gentleman.".

But as long as they don’t give me a sleeping pill. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the only excitement that I have these days takes place in bed while I’m asleep, and I wouldn’t miss that for anything.

You would think that that would be the trigger for me to rush to finish everything and dive into bed as early as possible, but somehow it doesn’t seem to work like that. Take last night, for example. I might have finished my work at a reasonable time, but then we had the battle to lift myself out of my chair.

Eventually though I made it into bed, later than I would have liked, and once again it took rather longer than it has done of late to go off to sleep.

My memory tells me that I awoke once during the night and went back to sleep almost straight away but by 04:00 that was that. I was wide awake, perspiring profusely from my legs, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep.

In the end, at 05:00 I gave it up as a bad job and went to make myself a coffee and catch up with some personal stuff.

However, I had had a disaster. The toenail on the little toe on the right foot must have stuck in the bedding somehow and on leaving the bed I’d torn it off.

At first I hadn’t realised but I soon did, especially when I noticed the blood. Wrapping some tissue round it I staggered into the living and took one of the compress pads. I couldn’t reach to plaster it so I just wrapped it around the toe and hoped that it might stop the bleeding eventually.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone too, and that surprised me. No Castor, no Zero and no TOTGA either unfortunately, but several other people whom we all know and love and who are pretty close to me. It was the birthday of someone whom we all knew. Alison, Jackie, Liz, Terry and I had been amongst the invitees to go to his birthday party. We’d all chipped in and bought some kind of present, something that had a long stalk on it. They asked me if I’d write some poems. I wrote the poems and circulated them around. Everyone liked them but Jackie asked me “what was this event that took place in January?”. I couldn’t think of what it was at that point so I mad some kind of light-hearted comment. Liz ‘phoned me up and we were having a chat on the internet about this but suddenly it went dead, the conversation, right at a crucial moment. That’s the problem with the conversations on the internet – they go dead because someone comes to the door or you lose connection and you never know. eventually we were all assembled there. I presented the present to him which he gratefully received. Then I took it back because I’d fabricated some kind of grip for the stalk, made out of elasticated material. I put it on but it was too lose so I borrowed a needle and thread and began to sew it so that it was tighter. Everyone made a few comments so I told them that if anyone thinks that they could do it better, I’m only doing this by default so I’d gladly give up the place to someone else. No-one did so I carried on and was about halfway through it when the dream ended.

I’m impressed that I can discuss the issues about internet connections in my sleep. And sewing too. I can certainly sew in real life, and knit too, but when I’m asleep? Is there no end to my nocturnal talents?

And then later on I was with some people. They wanted me to take a caravan and trailer down to the South of France and into Italy. Although I was in principle agreed the first problem was that I didn’t have a car. They said that a car would be sorted out for me somehow so I didn’t say much until the very evening they produced this car. It was in a shocking state and it was impossible for me to even consider taking this, never mind towing a caravan and trailer behind it. There was some heated discussion about this and they proposed a variety of solutions which I rejected. In the end they produced a motor bike, a 350cc Triumph. I thought that this was the most absurd thing that I’d ever seen. I wondered where they had found the motor bike. It turned out that they had stolen it. All kinds of alarm bells were ringing for me at that point. The first thing that I said was “what about the insurance?”. There they were, rummaging through the papers in the side of this motor bike and they came across an insurance document. In the end, much against my better judgement, I was persuaded. We were in somewhere on the south of Manchester . We coupled up the caravan to the motor bike then coupled up the trailer to the back of the caravan. It would just about move it but I knew that it was all going to lead to a huge disaster. I thought that the first issue would be to take it over the Pennines, all of this, and I’ve no idea how I’m going to do that. I had a think and could remember how the major road system went. I thought that if I went a little way north I could probably pass over there somewhere towards Sheffield and then on the M1. I set out, but when I came to a road junction I heard someone shout “Phil Miller”. “Did you hear that?” and one of the other people said “yes”. I said “you know who Phil Miller is, don’t you?”. They replied “no”. “He was the keyboard player in ‘Caravan’. I wish that I had the time to go to say ‘hello’ to him”. They said “why don’t you go?”. I replied “don’t be silly. I have far too much on my plate at the moment with all of this”. We set off again. They were unhappy with the way that I crossed a certain road but I didn’t care. The further I went down this street heading out of this town the more I know that I was just coming closer and closer to disaster. This is all going to go wrong before too long.

Apart from having all these people on a motorcycle, it was Steve Miller who was the keyboard player in “Caravan”. Steve’s brother Phil was a guitarist who, although he guested on Caravan’s album WATERLOO LILY is much better know for his collaborations with Robert Wyatt. Nevertheless, it’s still quite impressive that I could come out with that. And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when WE WERE IN NEWFOUNDLAND IN 2010 we encountered a car pulling a caravan pulling a trailer.

In case you’re wondering, by the way, the way to go south-east to the M1 is via Stoke on Trent and the A500 to Derby, but if I’m heading from the south of Manchester and want to keep away from traffic I’d go via Macclesfield and Leek, past my old stamping ground in 1975 of Bosley.

Having done a pile of work I stopped for a good wash and then waited for the nurse to appear.

He didn’t have much to say for himself, but he thinks that my left leg is almost back to normal so he’s going to try it today without any plasters to see if it holds out. And he put a small plaster on my toe where I’d torn off the nail. It had actually stopped bleeding but it’s better safe than sorry.

After a quick breakfast I came back in here and revised for my Welsh. And once again the lesson passed quite well and I enjoyed it. I was surprised at how much I could figure out, even if I didn’t understand everything. The key to understanding is not to understand and translate every word, but just to understand the gist of the conversation. I reckon that when you are having a conversation in your mother-tongue, you don’t hear three-quarters of the words that are spoken but you know what’s being said all the same.

No lunch today. I started work straight away and by the time I’d finished, not only had I chosen all of the music for the next programme, I’d written half of the notes too. And that was without really trying either

Once again, there was something that happened that made me realise that I must be feeling better than I have been for several months. That cheered me up a great deal too because I need to convince myself that I’m feeling better.

As for my chocolate cake, I had a slice with my hot chocolate this afternoon. And it really was delicious. The best cake that I gave ever made. But it was more done at the top than at the bottom. If only I could turn it over somehow and cook it upside-down for some of the time.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice, followed by apple cake and coconut-flavoured soya cream. That was delicious too and there’s no doubt – I might be eating simply but I really am eating well. If I ever lose my appetite or lose the will to cook then I will know that it’s the end.

So now it’s the end of my day and I’m off to catch up with my beauty sleep. And after last night I certainly need it. But then again I always do, especially with a dial like mine.

But before I go, I have been taken to task for what at least one person considers to be humour that really belongs in the gutter and not in a family-orientated web page
"Don’t you know what good, clean fun is?" I was asked.
"No" I replied. "What good is it?"

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Monday 14th October 2024 – AT THE DIALYSIS …

… Clinic this time, with one of the usual nurses on duty, things went so much better today and she managed to avoid drenching the room and everyone in it with my blood.

Mind you, there’s still a few hours before bedtime so plenty of time to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory yet. I’ve told my faithful cleaner to stand by.

So last night was another late night – although it could, and should, have been an early one by the time that I’d finished what I had to do. However, the next two radio programmes that I need to do are also going to be celebrating special occasions and will involve a lot of work, and so the quicker I start, the quicker I’ll finish.

Consequently I put on my researcher’s hat and set to work. The preparatory stuff led to quite some progress so even if I did have to burn the midnight oil, it wasn’t wasted. And I’ll have to become used to it because I reckon that that’s how it’s going to be for a week or two.

And isn’t that a change from two or three months ago?

Once I finally made it into bed I didn’t need much rocking and there I slept until about 05:30. It was another phantom alarm call but I recognised it as such and was back to sleep quite quickly though – it hardly disturbed my rhythm.

When the alarm went off at 07:00 I fell out of bed and hauled myself off to the bathroom for a good scrub up and to apply the deodorant. I didn’t bother with a shave because I don’t think that Emilie the Cute Consultant loves me any more

Having washed my undies I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night and see if Zero had come back. But no Zero last night. Instead, there was a strange dream about all of the women in our family being lined up and undressed. When they were totally undressed everyone stood in some kind of queue to welcome the arrival of the Roman legions. There was more than that in the dream but going back in the return of this dream is really all that I remember and I can’t remember anything at all about the actual dream itself which is a shame

In fact, no it isn’t and I’m glad that the dream stopped there because, had it carried on, it would have quite put me off my breakfast. If I’m going to be present when women are stripping off, I’ll choose them myself, thank you, not have them imposed upon me. Knowing my luck it will be a bunch of retired Bulgarian female weightlifters rather than the female members of an Olympic beach-volleyball team.

We had my white Passat estate and we decided that we’d put it back on the road. We went over it, made a list of everything that needed doing including the bodywork, bought all the pieces and began to clean it and weld it. It wasn’t as bad as we thought it was going to be and we did the most important parts. We found that we could drive it but the brakes were binding. I’d adjusted the handbrake but my father was going to climb underneath it. I said that it was either a 17mm or 19mm spanner. He felt it and thought that it was bigger than that. I noticed that he was trying to undo the void bushes so directed him to the correct area. Later on we were having a look. We’d done the rear of the boot but the sides of the floor needed patching so we bought some body panels for that and were busy measuring, preparing to cut out the old rot and fit the panels when the alarm went off.

Ahh yes! Good old Saltofix. A company in Oswestry that made replacement body panels and tailored patches for cars. The amount of stuff I bought for the Cortinas we were running must have kept them in business. There is still a stack of body panels and patches down on the farm that must be worth a fortune, especially the two rear quarters for a Ford Cortina MkIII in the back of the Luton Transit that are worth a King’s ransom. I wonder how much any body panels for the Vanden Plas in my barn would cost me these days. I should have bought them when I dragged the car out of that scrapyard in Belgium in 1998

Isabelle the nurse came along later. We decided (or, rather, she did) that we should try with just two plasters on my legs today. Like I said yesterday, I do admire her optimism. However she thinks that there’s a dramatic improvement already but I remain unconvinced.

After she left I made breakfast and read READ MY BOOK. Thomas Wright has now left Stonehenge and gone to look at the remains of Old Sarum down the road.

However before he left he made an interesting remark. Although it seems to be assumed that no archaeological excavations took place at Stonehenge until Aubrey’s excavations in 1666, he seems to be aware of an ancient book that states "in 1620 the celebrated Duke of Buckingham , King James’s favourite , did cause the middle of Stonehenge to be digged, and this underdigging was the cause of the falling down or recumbencie of the great stone there ."

Back in here later I made a start on my Welsh homework and in a mad fit of enthusiasm I worked my way non-stop all the way through two-thirds of it, leaving just one-third for next week. It’s not like me to race ahead of myself. usually I’m always struggling, miles behind relevant deadlines.

Having done that I carried on with my research into the next programme and I’m now beginning to choose the music that I want to feature. It should actually mean slightly less work because one track is over 17 minutes long and I’ve been waiting for an appropriate moment to feature this.

The cleaner fitted my anaesthetic patches onto my arm and stayed for a chat for a while. The taxi that came for me was the luxury car that’s usually driven by the boss’s daughter. However the driver was a guy who has taken me to Paris in the past and we had a really good chat.

Just five patients in the Dialysis clinic today. In fact the staff outnumbered the patients by about four to one. The young nurse who looked after me, Julie, is a self-taught pastry cook and she showed me photos of some of her creations. And I had to say that I was well impressed.

She was also quite good at wiring me up to the machine and I hardly felt a thing.

Emilie the Cute Consultant was there today, but she kept her distance and didn’t even come within my range of vision. I merely caught a couple of glimpses of her down the corridor.

Instead, it was the senior doctor who came to see me. "I have some good news for you" he said. "We can cut out one of the medicines that you’ve been taking".
However, without hardly drawing breath, he went on to say "but that will create a couple of side-effects so I’m going to give you a prescription for three more to counter the effects."

So is that now 36 per day? Or 37? I lost count a long time ago and quite frankly, I couldn’t care less. I’m sure that there are more medicines in this apartment than in the chemist’s shop in town.

As for the famous confrontation about the plasters and the compression socks, the doctor didn’t even bother. Julie the Cook took down (not “off”) my socks, took off the plasters, cleaned the legs with antiseptic and put the new plasters on. Exactly the same that the nurse does.

So I don’t understand any of this.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day that I crowed about having driven the trick cyclist away. However it’s a mistake to underestimate your enemies. She’s made of far sterner stuff and was back today.

We had all of the usual pregnant pauses to try to provoke a response, so I showed her MY TRAVEL WEBSITE instead.

Because I don’t have a password to access the intranet I had to show her on a ‘phone instead of my laptop. And the result of this is that I now have a log-in and password to access the intranet. The World’s my oyster!

In recompense I suppose that I shall have to throw her a sprat and say how much I’m in love with my mother and how as a baby I had uncomfortable feelings about my nurse. She probably is a follower of Freud.

During the process I fell asleep – not a crash-out but a gentle slide into somnolence and a gradual fading out. And while I was asleep, Castor came to see me. She just stood there, at the foot of the bed without saying or doing anything, almost as if she was watching over me like a guardian angel. And I had a great wish to reach out to her but pipes and tubes in my left arm, a blood pressure brassard on my right so I couldn’t move. Can you imagine?

The unplugging was also painless and without complications and I was soon in the taxi to come home. In fact, it was the earliest that I’ve ever been out of there and after my cleaner watched me up the stairs (I managed seven before I had to use my hand to lift up my leg) I actually had some free time to myself.

My cleaner thinks that I’m much more motivated, much more enthusiastic and much more switched-on than I was before all of this started. If that’s the case, I wonder what I’ll be like in twelve months time.

Tea tonight was as usual, a stuffed pepper. Just as delicious as usual and with plenty of stuffing left over for the rest of the week. It was followed by a slice of apple cake with coconut-flavoured soya dessert for pudding. And nice it was too.

So bedtime now, ready for my Welsh lesson tomorrow.

Before I go though, seeing as we have been talking about psychiatrists … "well one of us is" – ed … I’m reminded of one particular person who went to see a psychiatrist
"And what can I do for you?" asked the psychiatrist
"I’m having terrible trouble" replied the man. "I keep on thinking that I want to kill myself. What should I do?"
"You should start" said the psychiatrist "by paying me in advance"

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Sunday 13th October 2024 – ♫ I WOKE UP …♫

♫… this morning♫

At 06:05 and thought “here we go again. Just when I was hoping to have a really good sleep for once …”

But I did in fact go back to sleep again. And I’m glad that I did because I had a visitor – a most welcome visitor too who came to see me in my sleep.

But more of that anon.

After I finished my notes last night I dictated the notes for the two programmes that I’d prepared during last week and, having reviewed them yesterday, it was much easier, and much quicker to dictate them. And hopefully, much quicker to edit them too.

Everything was finished by about 23:15 which meant that, although it was after my target time of 23:00, there’s a lie-in tomorrow until 08:00. And how I need it too.

Nice clean shorts in which to go to bed too. Life’s becoming a luxury here these days.

As I said just now, I awoke at 06:05 and after a few minutes I was convinced that I could raise myself from the dead but I’m glad that I didn’t. Instead, I had sweet dreams until I awoke again at just a couple of minutes before 08:00.

When the alarm went off I sprung out of bed and headed to the bathroom for a quick wash before the nurse arrived.

The spare dressing gown fell off its hanger on the back of the door. There it was on the floor and I didn’t have time to pick it up. I suddenly began to think “when will I have thirty seconds to pick it up and hang it back?”

Yes, there is so much to do that life is becoming a race – a race against time. LIFE IS JUST A BET ON A RACE BETWEEN THE LIGHTS and that’s all that I can say.

The nurse came late today. She made a few encouraging noises and left off a few of the plasters to see how my leg improves. She’s certainly more optimistic than I am.

After she left I made breakfast and READ MY BOOK. Today we’ve made it to Stonehenge, as it sits in its natural state.

But before we leave the villa at Bignor, it’s worth mentioning that Thomas Wright had heard that "the farmer to whom the land belongs is desirous of selling that portion of it which contains the remains of the Roman villa ," and so "If the government will not interfere in a case like this-which it would do in any other country—it is to be hoped that there is public spirit enough to secure the preservation of these interesting remains on the site where they stand , in such a manner that they may be seen to the most advantage by every one that will visit them"

And so we see the seeds being sown of the idea of the National Trust, or English Heritage. But it took until 1882 and the Ancient Monuments Protection Act before the Government took any action, and even then the Roman Villa at Bignor was not on the list.

Back in here I carried on with the dictaphone notes. I’d made a start earlier before the nurse arrived but hadn’t finished. I was doing a character analysis of Lewis Carroll at one point last night. We met him once and had to ask him whatever questions we liked. Then we had to go away and write down our assessment of his qualities. For some reason or other I was busy writing stuff about his liking of folk music

Lewis Carroll – can you imagine how hard it would be to do that? Everyone is a product of his time and should be judged in respect of the prevailing conditions at that moment. How difficult is it for us to be able to put ourselves into the mindset of another period and judge someone in accordance with those characteristics? I personally am fed up of people making judgements on historical characters, or even contemporary people living in another culture, based on our own standards of today.

There was also something about being on the trail of the Romans in Derbyshire, finding soapstone blocks that had been really well-shaped and practically professional and listening to a talk on them. At the same time people were interested in reading about French place-names and how they’ve derived from the one that was given by the Romans when they came to settle in the area.

And that reminds me – It’s never “Roman” in France. The French don’t accept that the Romans brought civilisation and urbanism to France. It’s considered that France was already civilised and urbanised before the arrival of Romans and so the remains should be called “Gallo-Roman”. I’ve seen a historical meeting in France almost break out in a brawl when someone used the word “Roman” instead of “Gallo-Roman” to describe some remains.

Having awoken once, then back to sleep and who should come to see me but Zero! There had been a festival taking place, a music festival. It had been pouring down with rain and all the crowd was dancing under a huge piece of plastic. When it was time to go everyone ran with the plastic to put it away but I was caught in the middle and overwhelmed by all of it. In the end I managed to make my way to where my friends were waiting for a ride back to the campsite. We were sitting there chatting away. One of them was Zero’s father. I ended up round at his house. His brother-in-law was living with him – a right waster, fond of alcohol and buying all these derelict cars and somehow selling them on at a profit. It was really annoying Zero’s father. We were having a really good chat when his son came up and asked “could you do me a favour on Sunday?”. I asked “what is it?” and he replied “could you run me to Gatwick?”. I replied, laughing (and when I listened to the dictaphone I found that I had been laughing too), “I could run you to Gatwick but i certainly wouldn’t be for a favour”. He answered “OK, but I’ll buy you a pint”. I thought “it’s going to take a lot of pints for me to drive him to Gatwick”. We actually agreed on an arrangement. When I went to pick him up he had Zero with him. We arrived in London and I dropped him off. She asked if I could run her somewhere else. I replied “yes” and we ended up at some traffic lights in the south of London. She alighted and someone, I don’t know who, said “that’s the last you’ll see of her”. I set off to go north from there. There was some trouble with the van’s clutch. If I tried to pull away in second instead of first the clutch would go dead and the van wouldn’t move. If I then put it in first it wouldn’t move back and I had to perform some really complicated arrangement to make the clutch grip. That was causing all kinds of problems in these traffic queues with cars cutting in. I thought to myself “I’ll be glad to join the motorway and go back to when I don’t need to use the gearbox. But I was perplexed about the appearance of Zero. I thought “what is it that she’s doing down here in London? Why didn’t she want a ride back etc?

And then I stepped back into that dream later. Zero’s father went out and then her brother made arrangements to go out with his friend. That left the two of us alone together. We had a cup of coffee and a chat and she took her brother a cup of tea. Then we went into the living room and began to tip out the drawers of one of the units where she kept her things. What she wanted was some lined wallpaper that she would line her drawers and put her tools in, all in one long line in this drawer. But we hunted high and low in that house for some lined wallpaper – wallpaper with lines on it. I knew that there was some somewhere but we couldn’t find it. This was beginning to become complicated and we had all her things tipped out all over the living room floor.

How nice is that? Not only did Zero come to see me, I stepped back into a dream and she returned. I couldn’t wish for anything better and I wish that she’d come back to see me more often. As Counting Crows sang, MAN, I SURE DO LOVE THEM RED-HAIRED GIRLS.

Having done that, I attacked the two radio programmes that I dictated last night and by the time I stopped for tea, they were complete, 11th track added for each programme, notes for that extra track written, dictated, edited in and now I have two more programmes fully prepared that take me up to 20th June next year

There were plenty of interruptions during the course of the day.

Firstly, I had soup to make. Due to a confusion between my cleaner and myself I ended up with two lots of mushrooms. That can only mean one thing – mushroom soup. And seeing as I had some soya yoghurt, then that could only mean cream of mushroom soup.

Rosemary rang me too for a chat. Just a short one today – 1hr 11 mins. So my Welsh homework is now pushed back to tomorrow too but it can’t be helped. Talking to friends is much more important.

Tonight’s pizza was excellent again. I had two tomatoes that were looking the worse for wear so that called for a home-made tomato sauce as I made the other week. This time I made a couple of changes to what I did last time and the sauce was actually beautiful. It certainly made a good pizza

So now I’m off to bed, in the hope that Zero will come to see me again.

But all his talk about vans, France and so on reminds me of the time I went in the van to p-p-p-pick up a Penguin, a Percy Penguin in fact, from work one evening
A new French restaurant had opened in Holmes Chapel and I wanted to try it out so I asked Percy Penguin "do you fancy some Coq au Vin?"
"Yes please" she said, and climbed over the seat into the back

0

Saturday 12th October 2024 – WE HAD A …

… crisis in the Dialysis Centre this evening. The hole in the implant in my arm refused to close up after they pulled out the needle and we ended up with the place looking like a slaughterhouse.

“That’s the kind of thing that happens occasionally” said the nurse. And they want me to do the dialysis procedure myself at home. They must be joking. There is no chance whatever of that ever happening.

There was however a good chance of my going to bed last night at some kind of respectable hour. It wasn’t 23:00 by the time that I finished everything that I needed to do and crawled into bed but it was pretty close. There wasn’t much in it at all

Soon enough I was asleep, hoping to catch up on the sleep that I had missed the previous night, but it wasn’t to be. It was another one of these turbulent nights of which I’ve been having far too many. When the alarm went off Nerina and I were sitting in one of these plazas and were surrounded by food courts somewhere in Italy. We couldn’t make up our minds in which place to eat. We were being harassed by a couple of waiters from one establishment who wanted us to eat there. They were obviously making suggestions all the time. Nerina wanted to look at all the other menus so I had to stand up and go to the next restaurant, pick up a new menu, bring it back, read it, take it back, take the next one, all the way round the food court, all the time that these two waiters were harassing us about this and about that. In the end we decided, or rather, Nerina decided that the pizzeria in the corner would be the place where we’d order our meal so these two waiters went over with me to this restaurant to tell them that I was their best friend, all this kind of thing, but I suspected that there was something going on here that wasn’t quite right, about them receiving a commission or bumping up the bill or something like that. It all seemed to be extremely strange to me.

In the past we sat at plenty of places like that all over Europe. We’d wait for our holidays until the brats were back at school because the weather was usually nice, everywhere was still open and we’d have all the time in the World without being harassed by impatient waiters trying to clear us out ready for the next lot of tourists.

In one restaurant in Brest in Finisterre I remember that we were the only diners. They put us in a window seat to make the place look busy from the outside and then took their time serving us so that we stayed put. No-one came to clear away the table or give us the bill so we stood up. Still no-one came, so I worked out roughly how much the meal was, put the money on the table,, and walked out. And still no-one came.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment I staggered into the bathroom, had a good wash and scrub up, had a shave and applied the deodorant in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then loaded up the washing machine, forgetting to put my gants de toilette in there.

Once the washing machine was off on its way I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone notes, of which there were more than just a few. I was working a school holiday job down in the South of England as a teacher of some description. I can’t remember too much about this unfortunately but I know that there was something to do with a small child being carried by his mother into the showers. We were talking about trees, how deciduous trees all go to sleep in the autumn and the leaves fall off. I showed him another tree, which was a kind-of wire brush screwed to the wall of the shower which people would use to clean their football boots etc before rinsing them off. It was all extremely surreal and I can’t remember very much of it but that was it.

Me? A teacher? I think not. I wouldn’t be any good. I don’t “do” preparation but work it out as I go along and that would never work with a classful of screaming brats

Later on I had a nightmare about a whole pile of glass bottles on the table that was just on the point of falling off. I had a panic-stricken awakening to try to grab hold of them but what was actually happening was that my feet were sliding out of the bed at that point and just about to fall on the floor. Luckily I stopped that quickly enough.

That’s much more like my kind of dream, falling out of bed. I’ve fallen out of a few of them in my time, sometimes with no help at all and sometimes with some help from someone else.

So the alarm went off at 07:00. I left the bed and went to wash and dress. I happened to look at the watch and I was still in bed. It was 05:00 and all of that had been a lively, exciting, vivid dream.

Judging by the timestamp of the audio file it was actually 05:15 and it goes without saying that I didn’t actually leave the bed. But by the sound of things we had another phantom alarm during the night.

And finally it was in the immediate post-war period and I was wandering around Crewe. We’d seen a few tanks go through. As I went round a corner there was a motorcycle shop there, Paul Wolf Motorcycles. Outside was a Triumph Tiger Cub 200cc, one of the very early ones with the footboards and the accelerator pedal. It said “good home needed” so I thought “I wonder if this is for sale? Does he have anything else interesting?”. I went in, and it was a labyrinth inside, steps up and down into the bowels of the earth all the way down. There must have been thirty or forty flights of stairs to the level of the river where he had his kind-of garage and workshop. There was a huge row going on between him and a few other people about someone who should have come in to see something but hadn’t but he ws going to come in now. I saw a guy come in from the side door which was actually on the level of his reception desk about eighty feet below. I thought “that must be an easier way in”. Then I looked back behind me and realised that there were just as many steps back up as there were down. It was easier to go down than it was to come up. But then what if I couldn’t find my way back up from the ground level where his office was? I was beginning to have another one of these disturbed quandaries during the night.

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these dreams littered with indecision. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that at one stage it was a regular feature like the cars scattered all over the town, so I wonder what’s bringing it back. I wish that someone would bring back Castor, Zero and TOTGA and even The Vanilla Queen.

And there was a Paul Wolf Motorcycles, in Market Street in Crewe in the old Co-op store years ago.

Isabelle the nurse didn’t have much to say for herself today. I think that she said it all yesterday. But after she left I hung up the washing on the clothes airer and went to make my breakfast.

The WANDERINGS OF AN ANTIQUARY have taken us to Bignor Roman villa today. Thomas Wright gives us probably the best account of how it looked when it was discovered and states that it was the largest Roman villa in the UK. But that’s before the full extent of the Fishbourne Roman Palace was known

Back in here I had a chat with Alison on the internet and reviewed the work that I’d done during the week ready for dictation tonight. I need to take more care of what I type but it’s difficult with my vision these days and so wfvr wzpq. Last time I dictated some notes I found myself in a frightful muddle because a mistype presented another word that completely altered what it was that I was trying to say.

My cleaner turned up to fit the anaesthetic patches for me to and the taxi turned up a little earlier too. This was a vehicle from the other side of Avranches that had dropped someone off at the Centre de Re-education and was no on its way to pick up someone from the hospital at Rennes to take them back home. I was apparently something to make the empty journey pay. Not that I mind, of course.

There were very few of us there today, both patients and staff. It was a weekend team and while they were efficient they were far from sociable. And it goes without saying that I didn’t get to see Emilie the Cute Consultant.

Once they’d plugged me in, I was left totally alone except for the doctor who asked if I was OK – five seconds of attention. I had plenty of time to study my Welsh, now that I have uploaded the correct book, and almost reach the end of the biography of Lewis Carroll

It’s difficult to know what to make of him. With the benefit of hindsight many of his remarks could be taken in the wrong way that would be quite alarming but in the late Victorian era were probably quite innocent. They certainly aren’t on the same level as remarks made by someone like Frank Harris.

And then when they took the needles out we had quite the drama. Compresses, anti-coagulants, you name it, we had it. It quite wore me out and I was just sitting there with my eyes closed.

It took so long that my taxi went with the other passenger and I had to climb into a later one that ended up going all around the back of beyond to drop off someone else. Not that I minded because it was one of the nicer drivers who had taken me to Paris once and I quite like her.

My cleaner was there waiting and she watched as I hauled myself up the stairs. Today I managed six steps without lifting my leg up with my hand. I’d lost another 1.3 kg today so that might explain it.

Tea was a burger on a bap with salad and baked potato, and I was ready for it too. So now I’ll dictate my notes and go to bed.

But the dreams tonight and the hospital remind me about the patient with a broken leg.
A new arrival asked him "what’s the matter with you?"
"Appendicitis" he replied.
"But all the plaster?"
"Ohh, that" he replied. "I fell off the operating table".

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Friday 11th October 2024 – IT’S HAPPENED AGAIN

It was 03:05 when I awoke this morning. It makes a total mockery of trying to be in bed before 23:00. There have been nights – days, in fact, when I’ve not even been in bed by 03:05 so I may as well not bother if it’s going to carry on like this.

And yes, I did make it into bed before 23:00 last night. Not by much, it has to be said, but by enough to make it worth noting. And while it might have taken me a little longer that it has done of late to go off to sleep, that wasn’t too much of a problem either.

So there I was at 03:05, wide awake and transpiring, trying desperately to go back to sleep without any success so in the end, at about 4:20 I gave it up as a bad job and went to make the dough for the bread.

For a change, I tried a mixture of plain flour and bread flour to see if there’s a problem with my bread flour, but it’s not that because although it rose, it didn’t rise up by enough to make any difference to the usual.

One mug of instant coffee later, I came back in here and decided to catch up with some personal stuff. I’ve buckets of stuff that’s been hanging around waiting for me to do something with it, and so with this unexpected couple of hours I made a start. And made quite a bit of progress too.

First of all though, I had a listen to the dictaphone and found to my surprise that there was something on there. I was playing in a rock group and we were round at Gainsborough Road preparing everything ready to go out. We had three vans, two long-wheelbase Ford Transits and my old small Ford Transit. We’d loaded everything up and were sitting around waiting, then my partner motioned towards us and said “it’s time to go”. She took one sticker for her van and another sticker for the other big van. I asked “what about a sticker for mine?”. She replied “no”. I asked “why not?” but she didn’t answer. We had something of a back-and-to for a while and I asked her about it again. I asked “so why aren’t you giving me a sticker? Are you ashamed of the van or something?”. She replied “that van’s not having a sticker and that’s an end to the argument”. We continued to argue about it and I expressed myself in a rather extreme fashion. My sister said to me “you shouldn’t speak to your partner like this”. I replied “you need to open your eyes and see what’s going on here”. My partner left the room to make herself ready. I knew that she was waiting at the door listening as an argument then started up between my sister and me. I turned round knowing that she was listening, turned to my sister and said “it’s not going to take very much more of this and I’ll be out of the door of this place”

it goes without saying that regular readers of this rubbish will recall having noticed that even though my partner has adopted a totally intransigent and unreasonable attitude, my family is blaming me for what happened. That, I’m afraid was just par for the course and after I was 18 and had finished my studies, I was “out of the door of this place”. I had a lot of sympathy for my friend’s daughter Tina who told me once "I’m fed up. Every time I do something wrong my brother tells my mom and I get yelled at. But every time he does something wrong I tell my mom and she yells at me for not watching him". Had she not been 3,000 miles away I could have hugged her because I’ve been there and done that. Oh! The angst of being 11 years old! But mine lasted for years. I don’t have one single pleasant memory of my childhood.

Having made enormous strides (which means something completely different in Australia) in what I was doing, I finished off and went to give the dough its second going-over. As I said just now, it had risen, but not as much as I would have liked it to have done

In the bathroom, I had a good scrub up and then went into the kitchen to put the oven on … "clothes would have been better" – ed … While I was waiting for it to warm up I came across one of these half-cooked vacuum-packed baguettes that I’d bought a while ago and needed using so when the oven was ready and the bread went in, I bunged that in too and went back into my office to do some more work.

Isabelle the nurse was off on her high horse today. I’m supposed to tell her not to come on Monday because the Dialysis Centre wants to inspect my legs to find out why they aren’t healing.

But I’m not standing around all morning with no socks and no plasters and going down to Avranches and the Dialysis Centre like that, oh no, according to Isabelle the nurse and she’ll tell ’em too. On Monday I’ll have my plasters and socks put on in the morning by her and like it.

And as for having the dialysis at home, certainly not under any circumstances and she doesn’t care if it is Emilie the Cute Consultant who wants me to. She’ll ring them up and tell them that too!

So if it isn’t all over between Emilie The Cute Consultant and me already, it looks as if it will be by the time that I arrive there on Monday afternoon. I shall have to chat up Elise the Dishy Doctor at the Centre Normandie instead.

While I was eating my breakfast I was reading MY BOOK. We’ve left Yorkshire and are back on the South Coast at Bramber Castle.

Having been sure that the Iron-Age hill forts on the Welsh border were actually Saxon strongholds, he’s now convinced that Bramber Castle is a prehistoric site. However subsequent archaeological excavations have found nothing earlier than Norman on the site.

Still, for an untrained amateur archaeologist, some of his opinions have sometimes been dramatically borne out by the facts.

Next stop was to prepare an order for LeClerc. There’s plenty of stuff here so I can cut back on the order, but there are still some essentials that need buying.

That took longer than it ought too for all kinds of reasons, not the least being that I need to bring the order up to €50:00 so that they will deliver it. In the end it reached €53:00 or thereabouts.

Lunch was a cheese and tomato butty on some of the baguette that I baked this morning and it was nice, followed by some of the fruit. I’ve been told to cut down on the fruit that I eat which is disappointing so bananas are regrettably off the menu from now on.

This afternoon while the cleaner was here I finished off the radio notes and I do have to say that I’m quite pleased with what I’ve written. For once, it all hangs together. It’s not as disjointed as it usually is.

Not that I’m complaining about my previous programmes though, but trying to be erudite and preparing a work of literature in a foreign language is not that easy.

It wasn’t too bad when Liz and I were running Radio Anglais down in the Auvergne because that was in English, but this here is … errr … challenging. How on earth Rhys is managing with his “Rutube” channel in Russian is mind-boggling.

After my cleaner left and LeClerc had delivered the supplies, I tried a little experiment.

My friend Ann tells me that she’s not used her big oven since she bought an air fryer. I have a few of these spring-loaded cake tins of various sizes, one of which fits in my air fryer, so seeing as I am now forbidden chocolate, I resolved to make a chocolate cake in the air fryer and “yah booh sucks” to the dietician.

First lesson is that one cup of measured for the oil cake produces too much so I need a smaller cup

Second lesson is that in its airproof and windproof drawer it goes up like a lift and is the softest cake that I have ever made.

Third lesson is that it needs the temperature turned down and cooked much longer (like 70 minutes) before it’s done

Fourth lesson is that even with a piece of baking paper over the top (thanks for the tip, John), it still burns the top, but that can be cut off and sampled so it’s not the end of the world.

And so the conclusion is that it produced the best cake that I have ever made, but the procedure is much more complicated so we’ll call it a draw. Further experiments are called for

Having stuffed myself with offcuts of chocolate cake I wasn’t in the mood for much tea. Just a small salad, a few chips and a few of these micro-mini vegan nuggets that were on special offer. No pudding though – we’ll call the chocolate cake offcuts the pudding.

So now I’m off to bed. I’ve not been the remotest bit tired today despite the lack of sleep so I’m hoping for a good sleep tonight.

But talking about Tina … "well, one of us is" – ed … reminds me of the time that her class at school in Florida went to see THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT.
Having an English father and spending all of her summer holidays in Winsford, she has a complete understanding of British slang and a British sense of humour. So when the film was shown, she was rolling around the aisles in laughter and her classmates were looking at her, totally bewildered.
Marianne and I actually went to see it in Brussels where it was shown in English. And you could tell who were the native English-speakers in the audience because we were roaring with laughter while the Belgians were looking on, completely disorientated.
But that leads us onto that famous discussion between Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock and "it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners".

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Thursday 10th October 2024 – TODAY IT WAS …

… the turn of the dietician to come to bother me and disturb my pleasant … "well, sort-of" – ed … relaxation at the Dialysis Centre.

It’s remarkable (but no surprise really) that the trick cyclist never ever came back to see me for a second time, and I don’t know if this dietician will either after today, even though she promised to bring me a book.

Of course, here in any kind of French institution they don’t know what a vegan is and it’s cuisine à la Tricatel in these establishments so they are in no place to give me any advice about my diet. And in any case, as Kingsley Amis once said, "No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare".

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve no interest whatever in clinging on to life by my fingertips as long as possible just for six more months of agony or whatever. I intend to enjoy myself as much as I possibly can, growing older and riper and more degenerate

You should see the list of foods that she wants me to abandon. And there’s no chance whatever of that.

But last night there was every chance of my being in bed by 23:00 but, loitering around to no useful purpose, I missed it by five minutes. And once I was asleep there I stayed until the alarm went off and that’s something that hasn’t happened for a while.

So at the sound of BILLY COTTON I turned over and made a valiant attempt at leaving the warmth and comfort of my bed and only beat the second alarm by a whisker.

Having washed the clothes under the shower yesterday there was nothing to clean so I had a shave and applied the deodorant in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then came back in here.

There wasn’t much on the dictaphone this morning, as I found when I went to transcribe the notes. Someone came to see me during the night from Ireland and wanted me to leave the bed. They said some kind of motivational phrase, I don’t know what it was now but it referred to one of their towns so I sat upright and began to leave the bed. Then I had a rough idea of the time and thought that it’s not really worth it so I turned over and went back to sleep

So who was that who came to see me? I have a couple of Irish friends of course and one of those could quite happily have come into my bedroom and been quite welcome too but I couldn’t be that lucky

The nurse came to see me, her usual smiling face, and we had a little chat about nothing much. She forgot the prescription for the tubular bandage that my cleaner wants and promised to bring it tomorrow.

After she left I made breakfast and then read MY BOOK. Today we are wandering around the Devil’s Arrows near Boroughbridge. They are some peculiar standing stones embedded in the ground at a certain angle, not perpendicular.

Once more he was lamenting, lamenting the fact that one of them had been uprooted in a futile treasure hunt and then smashed to pieces and hauled away. How much else of the Country’s heritage has disappeared like that?

Back in here, in another fit of wild enthusiasm, I attacked the radio programme that I started yesterday. Now, all of the tracks are sorted and segued and I’ve written half of the notes already. I don’t know what’s come over me right now.

My cleaner came round to fit my anaesthetic patches. We discussed next shower day and she’s going to change the bedding while I’m under the jet. That means that on Saturday morning I’d better shift this backlog of washing in the bathroom so as to make a space to dump the dirty stuff

The taxi was late coming for me – it had been to pick up that British woman about whom I talked the other week. She’s becoming far too friendly for my liking and I’ll have to do something about this

At the clinic they were waiting for me so I didn’t have to wait for too long before I was plugged in

It seems that I now have a hospital appointment for 8th November. It’s for a scan and an electrograph on my foot to find this trapped nerve that I think that I have. Things in this respect are moving fairly quickly which is good news

As I promised yesterday I went to read my course book but I don’t have the new one loaded onto the portable laptop so I contented myself with the last chapter of the previous one. And then I carried on with reading Lewis Carroll’s biography.

There was nothing in there today that would have worried the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine, but there always were plenty of hints, rumour and suspicion about his activities that would have worried the editor had they reached her ears. It’s certainly true that his family destroyed many of the photographs that he took and tore pages out of his diaries before they were passed to his biographers.

One thing that made me laugh about the book was the account by the biographer of his job as curator of the Common Room at the University and especially the Smoking Room "hard by for those who do not despise the harmless but unnecessary weed, "

How times have changed since 1898!

But having posted that on the internet now via the medium of my blog, I wonder how long it will be before someone from Q-Anon or another one of these stupid sites goes around saying that he’s read something about smoking on the internet that the scientists missed, about it being harmless and its safe for everyone to light up again.

The dietician turned up to interrupt me. She gave me many instructions about my diet and so in return I told her about the scandalous meals that I’d been served in her hospital, and that took the wind out of her sails somewhat.

But having given me her instructions she’s going to order a blood test in four weeks time to see if I’ve been a good boy but Austin Powers KNOWS WHAT THE NEXT STEP WILL BE

Apart from that, no-one bothered me at all – no doctors or anything – until my machine sounded its alarm that the process was complete. Then I was uncoupled and weighed (I’d lost 1.7 kgs today) and then I could clear off

There was another passenger in the taxi back, a crabby old woman who was busy expressing an opinion that all foreigners should clear off back to where they came from, so I said “bonjour” to her in a perfect simulated English accent and that shut her up.

My cleaner was waiting for me and watched me as I climbed the stairs. And today, I managed five stairs without having to lift my leg up with my hand. Still a long way from when I could stagger up all 25 unaided, but if it keeps on improving like this, I might start to go back to the shops on Friday morning

Tea tonight was steamed veg and vegan sausage in a vegan cheese sauce, followed by apple cake and soya dessert. There’s no doubt that although my meals are plain, they are very very tasty and I’m not going to give them up without a fight.

So right now I’m going to bed as I have bread to bake in the morning. But before I go I’ll tell you about an incident that took place at the Dialysis Clinic today.
A nurse going past looked at me, stopped, and said "don’t you have such beautiful blue eyes?"
"Thank you" I replied
"Did your father have them?" she asked "or was it your mother?"
"Knowing our family" I replied "it was probably the milkman."

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Wednesday 9th October 2024 – I DON’T KNOW …

… where all this energy is coming from, but I know where it’s going. I’m about three quarters of the way through tomorrow’s work already.

The way things are going, I’m beginning to wish that I’d had this dialysis a long time ago. It’s quite constraining of course but if I can keep on going like this, even in the short term, it might even be worth the disruption. I only wish that it wasn’t so painful.

But there’s one thing that can be said for it, and that was that with having finished everything at a reasonable hour last night I was in bed before 23:00. And that doesn’t happen very often.

It wasn’t long before I was away with the fairies either, although I did refrain from engaging in anything on which the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine might comment.

Asleep I stayed too for quite some considerable time, which was just as well given the events of the previous night. I’ve no idea what time it was that I awoke briefly, but I was soon back to sleep again.

It was a struggle to raise myself from the bed this morning when the alarm went off and I almost missed the second alarm. That would have been a cardinal sin, right enough.

In the bathroom I had a good scrub up and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was working on a car last night, a Ford Cortina MkI, changing the front wheel bearings. It was interesting to say the least watching me try to stand up after lying on the floor. I spent hours but I couldn’t set the adjustment of the wheel bearings correctly. In the end I set them to “something like” and gave up. While I was repairing it I was thinking “who’s going to fix Nerina’s car after I’ve died?” and “if the head gasket blows on this I’d have to go round to see my father but he’s really not likely to be interested – maybe after supper I think but I’m on the way of dying and I have to think about things like this”. While I was working there there was this young Chinese girl looking at me from out of a window. I thought to myself that sometimes it’s very nice to have an audience and maybe she does this kind of thing, watching people all the time – she might know (…fell asleep here …)

Back in the past I had a couple of Cortina Mk Is. The first one was great. Back in 1973 I was working for an insurance company and this car was a write-off. It had been hit in the front offside and was judged to be beyond economical repair. It was in our car park on its way to the scrapyard and owed the company £12:50. Nevertheless it was taxed and MoT’d for seven months so I bought it, patched it up with body-filler, stuck a headlight in the mess and ran it. When the MoT ran out and it wouldn’t pass the next, I loaded a friend and her baby into the car and drove it to the scrapyard to weigh it in. The owner looked at me, looked at the girl, looked at the baby and said “I’m terribly sorry son. I can’t give you any more than £15:00 for this”.

As for having my father fix my car, the highlight of my life was my father once asking me if I’d fix his because he couldn’t manage to do it. I treasured that moment for years.

Later on I found a job working in an Old People’s Home thanks to an agency. I had to start at 08:00 so I set out at 07:40 and parked where I thought this Home was. It turned out to be a big, expensive hotel so I roamed around for a couple of minutes and couldn’t find anything. Somehow I ended up in the basement and asked one of the personnel there behind the desk. He took me to the fire door, opened it and pointed to a building and said “it’s that one” so I set out to walk. It was much further than I anticipated. When I reached the building I went in. The ground floor was like a storage area. There was a couple of people wandering around so I asked them. They said that the Old People’s Home is further up. I looked around but there was no lift so I thought “how do these old people leave if they want to go for a walk or go out in a wheelchair?”. I walked up two flights of stairs – I was walking quite easily. I finally found the Old Peoples Home and the reception desk where they were very pleased to see me, saying “oh good, you’re here at last”. I thought about whether I should recount my adventures to them but I decided against it.

As if I’m ever likely to be working in an Old Person’s Home. But strangely enough, even though I can’t remember anything about the dream itself, I can still see the buildings. The hotel was a huge chalet-roofed place on the type in which I’ve stayed at Lech in Austria. Lech of course was a small town in Austria through which we drove on our honeymoon on our way to see Nerina’s relatives in Milan. It was such a beautiful town that we vowed to go back there again. I don’t know if Nerina ever made it back but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve been back there ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS and of course, it is the favourite town in Europe OF STRAWBERRY MOOSE where he runs A TAXI SERVICE advertising his favourite hobby.

Isabelle the nurse came along and took a blood sample from me. Hit the vein straight away, totally painless and no drama either. She has “the touch”, quite unlike her colleague, so it’s no surprise that she gets to take all of the samples. Everyone waits until its her turn on the rota before they ask for their blood samples to be taken.

After she left I made breakfast and then read MY BOOK. Today we’re wandering around Aldborough in North Yorkshire and looking at the remains of the Roman town of Isurium. What’s interesting is that back in the 1850s there wasn’t a railway station anywhere near the town so he and his friends thought absolutely nothing of alighting from the train at the nearest railway station and walking several miles to the town and then back again later. These people were obviously made of sterner stuff than people today.

It’s also interesting that, in the days before preservation and museums, many of the householders who had uncovered mosaic floors in their gardens were quite happily exhibiting them, “price sixpence” but, as he says, "as all these inscriptions have followed each other within a few paces , we shall become alarmed at the expensive character which a visit to it is likely soon to assume , if an additional sixpence is to be levied on every fragment of building that turns up . The remains indicated by these inscriptions are so far , however, of sufficient interest to repay the visitor for the small sum demanded for showing them ."

Back in here I attacked the outstanding notes for the radio programme that I was preparing yesterday and now these are completed and ready for dictation on Saturday night.

That meant a stop for lunch – a slice of flapjack and some fruit. The supplies of fruit are running low so tomorrow I’ll have to think about preparing a supermarket order for Friday afternoon

This afternoon, having completed the day’s work already, I was planning on relaxing but instead I had a fit of enthusiasm again and carried on working.

Sometime next year, the International Day of Refugees falls on a day that my programme will be broadcast, and you’d be surprised just how many refugees there are in rock music

Edgar Froese and Johannes Krauledat fled from the Russians in Tilsit in the same column of refugees as my friend Lorna’s mother. Holger Czukay was expelled from Danzig, the parents of Gary Weinrib and Chaim Witz were survivors of Auschwitz and Belsen, Cait O’Riordan fled from Nigeria, and that’s just a handful of names.

It seems to me that a programme of music recorded by refugees would be a good idea for a programme. So accordingly I’ve been tracking down music recorded by refugees or their offspring and I’m now at the stage where I’m pairing it off and segueing it

That was tomorrow’s task but I’ll finish it off and start to write the notes. If I can finish early on Friday I’ll have a couple of hours off which will be nice.

During the proceedings my cleaner arrived and she helped me have a shower. I had a good idea too – if one wooden box on the chair made things easier, two boxes would make it easier still. And so it was too. I could swing into the bath with a lot fewer problems.

You have no idea just how wonderful it is to be under a shower after all this time. I really do feel so much better and so much happier with having had a good soak. Just wait until I’m downstairs and I have my walk-in shower

There was an interruption for the hot chocolate and coconut cake of course, after which I made a batch of dough for the garlic naan.

Tea tonight was a leftover curry of course, with rice, veg and a naan bread, delicious as usual. In fact it was one of the best that I’ve mad. The naan was cooked to perfection, for once in my life. The rest of the dough is rolled up into individual balls and stuck in the freezer for the future.

So now I’m off to bed for some beauty sleep before my trip to the Dialysis Centre tomorrow

But the story of the admission fees reminds me of the time that the public conveniences on Crewe Bus Station were built. There was an official inspection followed by a guided tour for the public.
The leaflet that was prepared to announce the showing proudly advertise the price "two shillings and sixpence – or two shillings and sevenpence if you want to see all of it"

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Tuesday 8th October 2024 – AS SEEMS TO BE …

… the case the morning after the dialysis, I’m having trouble sleeping. Well, not actually sleeping, but staying asleep, as in awakening at … errr … 04:05 this morning.

And being totally unable to go back to sleep, leaping … "well, sort-of" – ed … out of bed and starting work.

In that unhealthy situation I decided to catch up with what I’ve been missing and attacked a pile of outstanding correspondence. So if you’ve been awaiting a reply from me, you should have had it.

If on the other hand you are awaiting a reply and it didn’t come this morning, I’ve possibly forgotten it so drop me a reminder.

Actually, being awake at 04:05 is not as dramatic as it sounds because it was just about 23:00 when I finally finished off all of the outstanding stuff and headed for bed.

Five hours sleep might seem to be a small amount but I went for years with never a sleep any longer than that. Thinking about it, it’s hardly any wonder that I was crabby all the time

Although I was asleep quickly enough it was another perspiration-ridden night during which I probably lost another kilo of weight. And it was probably that which drove me from my bed.

However, thinking about that too, I’ve not crashed out at all today despite the early start. So I did some mathematics.

The sleep that I was having during the day was on average 1.5 hours. So if I’m no longer crashing out, I’m saving 10.5 hours, which means of the 18 hours that I lose at the Dialysis Clinic, the net loss is only 7.5 hours.

Then there was the 1.5 hours that I used this morning, and the 3 hours on Sunday morning now that my lie-in is abolished, so now the net loss is 3 hours.

Take away three lunchtimes – total 1.5 hours – that I no longer have. And then working on a Sunday and relaxing on a Saturday morning means a credit of 6 hours working time.

So in other words, because of all of this I’m actually gaining 4.5 hours. So maybe it’s not as useless as I was thinking.

Of course I could be building myself up for a fall, such as going back to the crashing-out scenario, but on the other hand I could be thinking about work that I could be doing while I’m plugged in to the machine down there.

There’s no doubt about it – I’m certainly living in interesting times.

When the alarm sounded I crawled off into the bathroom for a scrub-up and then came back in here to carry on. First thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone. To my surprise there was something on it. I was with Nerina. We had a son who was about 7 or 8 or about 9 or something. I’d been doing something, working or something like that and come home to find that there was no-one in. They’d gone down to the club to meet her father so I went down there. She was down there chatting to everyone else so I went to have a chat to her about something – I can’t remember now. She was rather annoyed that I was interrupting so we had something of an argument. She stormed off and left the building. I went round to see what our son was doing. He was doing some homework with his grandfather. It was a Saturday night so I told the boy to make himself ready to go home. He was rather annoyed because he wanted to finish his homework so I told him that we’d finish it off at home together. He then wanted to talk about reading. I told him that if he were to finish off his homework tonight he’d have all day tomorrow to read. As usual with kids he had a grumble and a groan but I prepared him. The grandfather asked if I was in my car. I replied “yes”. He said “I have some tins here for you. Would you take them?”. I was in something of a bad mood so I went into the foyer. I couldn’t find my coat for ages, the big brown corduroy coat that I used to have. eventually I fund it, and still in a very bad mood I put on my coat ready to leave.

The likelihood of Nerina being in a club and having a son was of course extremely remote. In fact at first I dictated the name of another girl and corrected myself and she might have been a much more likely candidate. And back in those days I was constantly in a bad mood as I lurched from one crisis to the next to the next with hardly any sleep.

Isabelle the nurse is on duty for the next seven days and she’s much more lively. By some kind of miracle I found the prescription that the Dialysis Centre had given me, asking the nurse to take a blood sample so I handed it to her. She didn’t seem to be in the least perturbed.

That’s going to be done tomorrow – à jeun – but then again I don’t have my breakfast until the nurse has gone anyway.

After she left and I’d made breakfast I went to eat it and read MY BOOK. Our hero has now left the Welsh Marches and gone off to York and Yorkshire to poke around some abandoned Roman towns

Before he left though, he was extolling the hill-forts in the borders and making some kind of claim that many of them were not Roman or Iron Age but were in fact Anglo-Saxon strongholds.

In that, he will be disappointed to learn that in the subsequent 170 years, the evidence of Anglo-Saxon occupation uncovered to date is “slight” and in no way displaces the volume of artefacts from previous occupation, whether Roman or Iron Age.

He did however make some prescient comments about several Roman forts in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where it was not until over 100 years later that archaeological investigation gave credence to his observations

Back in here I revised for my Welsh class and then we went into the lesson. Very few of us here again but nevertheless once more it passed really well and I was pleased with what I did. And I made a vow that at the Dialysis Centre I shall read the notes of the previous lesson as soon as I’m left in peace.

Let’s see how long I can keep this up.

After a very late lunch, during which I was disturbed by the cleaner, I made a start on writing the notes for the next radio programme – interrupted of course by hot chocolate and coconut cake. It’s only four days per week now of course so I don’t want to miss out on that.

And I forgot to deduct from my earlier calculation the 3×20 minutes that I’m now no longer taking in that respect.

The hospital in Paris ‘phoned too. I thought that they might have something exciting to tell me but it was just a check-up with a nurse and an exchange of pleasantries. While they might not have forgotten all about me, they may as well have done. It’s tile to light a fire under a few people but it could simply be a case of “no news is good news”.

Tea tonight was a delicious taco roll with rice and veg followed by the last of the jam roly-poly. Tomorrow I can start on the apple cake that I made the other day.

And now it’s bed-time of course. And here’s hoping for a better night’s sleep. I shall probably be away with the fairies quite quickly but I bet that I don’t have the same amount of luck that the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine thought that Lewis Carroll had.

But seeing as we have been discussing time just now … "well, one of us has" – ed … I’m reminded of the story about the two tourists on their way to Italy.
"I’m going to Pisa" said one. "I want to see the clock factory there."
"Where in Pisa is that?" asked the second
"It’s actually in the Leaning Tower itself"
"Really?"
"Absolutely. Yes"
"Why did they put it there?"
"It’s quite simple really" said the first tourist. "The owners thought that seeing as they had the inclination, they may as well make the time."

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Monday 7th October 2024 – MY APPLE CAKE …

… tastes absolutely delicious. I cut it up and put it in the fridge this evening and there were still some crumbs lying about so I was tempted to have a sample. And I’m glad that I did. I made a mental note to make this for pudding another time because it really was nice.

What made a big difference was to whizz up the ingredients instead of mixing them in a bowl with a spoon. Everything was properly and thoroughly mixed in, and that is definitely progress.

So what can I try to make next?

One thing that I can try to make is a concerted effort to be in bed at a reasonable time. Last night I actually managed it too, and with going to sleep fairly early I had a good sleep all the way through to … errr … 06:00

That might not seem much, but it’s a lot better than some nights have been just recently.

And then I managed to drift off back to sleep because when the alarm went off, I was miles away.

In fact there was a dream going on. I was working with a girl and she had this very irritating habit of whenever i said something she gave her agreement by using some phrase and she said it two or three times and it really got on my nerves. I wish that I could remember the phrase now but the dream had only just started when the alarm went off.

In the bathroom I had a good wash, a shave and a wash of the clothes, including the socks. And I applied plenty of deodorant in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant and you can laugh all you want to, I don’t care.

Back in here I transcribed the dictaphone notes from the night. We were all back at work and we had a military unit that had come along and been transplanted in. The General was one of these people who was a stickler for propriety. Everything had to be done absolutely perfectly so it was only natural that people began to mimic his actions, his way of saluting, his way of talking etc. It became something of a standing joke. One day he happened to come across a group of civilians, one of whom was one of his fiercest critics. After he’d talked to them for a couple of minutes he turned to that civilian and said “well, aren’t you going to salute me?”. The civilian, rising to the challenge, gave him an absolutely perfect military salute, an exact copy of what he would have done, and came out with a phrase that the General would have used, and exactly in the right accent. The General turned to the civilian and said “do you know, Mr so-and-so, that is probably the best thing that you have ever done” and walked away. Of course it became quite a subject for discussion in the office canteen about the General having seen to be the right kind of person for the people to take the mickey, and a person who would appreciate a good joke

We did have a Military Unit in the office and the General in charge was a Finnish General whose claim to fame was that he had been kidnapped by one of the groups of militia in Lebanon and held to ransom. When his chauffeur was away somewhere and my boss was in the USA I was given the task of driving him around for a week and after I finished he gave me a huge lumberjack’s axe which I have down on the farm. In his apartment just as you go in was a big stuffed brown bear in pouncing pose on its hind legs. "I shot that" he proudly announced.

But there’s a funny story related to that. There was a party at his place and people from all over Europe were there, all speaking English no matter where they came from. One woman asked him about the bear and when he said that he’d shot it, she asked what they did. He replied "we ate it". There is a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding when you are using a second language, and she went around telling the rest of the party how the General, having shot his bear, then sat down in the tundra under a tree and tucked in, presumably without cooking it.

There was then also something about me living at home and meeting up with a group of kids. There seemed to be a youngish girl who took something of a fancy to me. She would always seek me out and spend a lot of time chatting. I happened to quite like her so I used in some ways to encourage it. We ended up chatting to each other on the ‘phone quite a lot. On one particular occasion she went down to the swimming baths but I had to work until 14:00. I told her that I’d give her a ring when I’d finished to see how the water was. Round about 13:40 there was nothing else happening at all so I ‘phoned her and asked her about the water, asked her about everything and told her that I’d be down shortly. I put everything away and went to see my mother to tell her that I was going down to the swimming baths. She must have heard my conversation because she made some kind of remark. Then she brought me a cup of tea and I had the impression that it was almost as if she was preventing me from going. I wasn’t really sure why but out of politeness I sat and drank the tea. I know who this girl is too. I did actually quite like her and I’m trying to thing of her name but I just can’t

This girl is so familiar that when I saw her in my dream I didn’t mind that it was she rather than Zero who had come to see me. So I really wish that I knew who she was because I really have no idea and that is just so sad. And how familiar is it that a member of my family will try to spike my guns?

Telephones in the baths is a novel idea too. In my day it was wristwatches that caused the most problems. I flooded one or two beyond repair and so did many others. How many ‘phones would be flooded these days? I’ve not been to the swimming baths since the happy days at Commentry when I used to go every Saturday afternoon on my way home from the shops at Montluçon.

The nurse came round and we had an even quicker record time today. He’s really got the wind up about something. Maybe it’s my deodorant, I dunno.

But after he left I had breakfast and read MY BOOK. Our author, Thomas Wright is still poking around the Iron Age Hillforts on the Shropshire-Herefordshire-Radnorshire-Montgomeryshire border

On our way round we inspected a megalith that was standing in a field near the village of Whitcott Keysett. Sad to say, it was flattened and smashed as recently as 1944. I could weep.

Back in here I attacked the next radio programme and all of the music has now been chosen, paired off and segued. Next task was to review the programme that will be broadcast on Friday and then send it off. Finally I made a start on my Welsh homework.

There was also a moment to ‘phone up the Dialysis Centre to confirm that they had my headphones. And I hadn’t, until then, realised that I was entitled to a locker in the dressing room.

All of that took me up to 12:10 when my cleaner came to fit the anaesthetic patches on my arm. We had a chat and then she departed hence and I made a start on cutting up my apple cake, but once more the taxi came early.

We had a good chat all the way down to the centre where I arrived really early so they could start quite quickly. One of the needles was fairly painful but the other, I hardly felt at all.

They had put me in a room today, presumably because I misbehaved last time, I dunno, but it did mean that I was hardly interrupted and I could crack on.

My Welsh homework was finished quite quickly and I could carry on reading Lewis Carroll’s biography.

And what do you make of this paragraph? It was written by the editor of “Aunt Judy’s Magazine” reviewing one of Carroll’s works
"Some of the touches are so exquisite, one would have thought nothing short of intercourse with fairies could have put them into your head"

Of course when we look at words like “brilliant” and “fantastic”, they have long-since lost their literal meaning and modern usage has given them a completely different meaning

Emilie the Cute Consultant was there today and although she gave me a wave, she kept well away from my lair. The chief of the unit came to see me and try to pitch me on this home dialysis. Instead I told him about the issues with my foot and he agreed that it’s probably a trapped nerve. He’s going to arrange a body scan and an IRM.

Eventually they unplugged me, weighed me and threw me out. Half of the weight that I had lost last time had stayed lost and today I lost another 1.7kg.

The driver who brought me home was another candidate for The Driver From Hell. As fast as it was possible to go and driving so close to the car in front that we would have all been done for if someone further in front had applied the brakes. I was glad to be home.

This evening I could only manage one step without using my hand to lift up my leg, and it was a struggle to make the last two stairs. That’s a backward step … "very good" – ed … and I’m disappointed by that.

After my cleaner had sorted me out and left, I checked the Welsh homework that I’d done and then sent it off.

Tea was as usual a stuffed pepper. And I’m going to stop buying tomatoes from LeClerc. They are going bad quicker than I can use them.

So now having finished my notes, I’m off to bed, later than I would have liked.

But seeing as we have been talking about second languages … "well, one of us is" – ed …what’s even funnier though is when people come out with something that you wouldn’t expect when they are speaking a foreign language. I have learned in many, many different languages of Europe certain phrases that would never be taught at school and many of my colleagues have learnt them in English, seeing as I was the only English-speaker in the whole of my unit.
One day I was looking for one of my Italian colleagues, and saw him down the far end of a crowded corridor.
"Domenico" I shouted. "What are you doing right now?"
"Eric" he shouted back in his lovely Italian accent "I am doing bugger all"
And there was a deathly silence in the corridor. How was I supposed to know that a committee from the British Permanent Representation, including the Ambassador, was being shown around the building?

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