Category Archives: France

Monday 11th December 2023 – IT LOOKS AS IF …

… showers might be back on the agenda at some point in the not-too-distant future.

The ergotherapist came around with a selection of useful gadgets and appliances for helping me and we managed to figure out something that I could adapt to help me into the bath and to stand up for a shower.

It’ll be a while until it arrives of course, because there are all kinds of hoops to jump through, and it’s a question first of awaiting her report and recommendations. That won’t be any time soon, I bet.

And then there’s also the question of whether I’ll be still here when it arrives. The way I felt today, that isn’t necessarily going to be the case.

It doesn’t seem to make any difference whether or not I go to bed early. Or whether I’m still fast asleep when the alarm goes off. Both of those situations took place through the night but the end result was still the same as usual – me flat out on my chair later on in the afternoon.

At least there was sparking water for my medication, flavoured with a dash of grape juice. And then back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was at home last night. I can’t remember what I was doing but all my brothers and sisters were slowly coming home from school. We were having the usual kinds of arguments. There was a dog there too, an old dog, probably one of the collies that we used to have as kids. She was there being quite quiet. When people came to the door they’d knock and wait until someone opened it which was very difficult for me being on crutches. Every time it happened I’d go and open the door and let in another sibling until one occasion when there was a knock on the door, I went to open it and it was my mother. She was there with 2 great big dogs. They came into the kitchen and began to jump up and down at me. I don’t like dogs at the best of times but when I’m on crutches and not very steady I don’t like them jumping up at me at all. This was something that I just couldn’t accept. I became rather angry. There was some mention at some point of one of the daughters of my niece who was there. She turned up in a Volkswagen saloon. Another one of my cousins on my father’s side asked “do you have one of these now?” in some kind of derogatory tone. She replied “yes. It’s a lovely car, especially when it has some power in it”. Apparently it also doubled as an autonomous standard lamp of table lamp that could be used to throw some light on whatever it was that you were working.

And then we were in the middle of Covid, the height of it and we were going to school in California somewhere. There were no school buses running so we had to walk. It was a long walk away. We set out to walk on this long grass verge, a couple of us, and slowly began to climb this embankment which led to a road that passed over the motorway When we reached the top and looked down, it was one of these 16-lane motorways. Of all the traffic going in one direction there wasn’t a single vehicle at all. Going in the other direction were all the cars in the world, all parked nose to tail and looked as if they hadn’t moved for weeks. We couldn’t understand the folly of these people who even in the middle of a pandemic had felt it necessary to go out in their car and just sit in a traffic queue as if things were back to normal. We carried on walking and came to the school. There weren’t very many people around but there were plenty of police officers there interrogating everyone about why they’d come. To us it seemed quite obvious that we’d come in order to attend our lessons

Later on I’d gone to night school. My partner, whoever she might have been, had gone too for her lesson. In our Welsh class there were only 3 of us there and no tutor so we just chatted amongst ourselves quite vaguely for a while, talking about the history of the group, how we were learning and how I was miles off the pace. I did my best to recount a long rambling conversation about how I once went from Brussels to Austria for a pizza and came back again the same night in the Opel. Afterwards when we came out I met my partner again. I asked her if she’d done anything exciting. She replied that she’d found a body. I asked her to repeat it. It turned out that they’d had to go into a dark recess of one of the storerooms in the school to look for some ink for something. While they were rummaging around in the back corner they came across the mummified remains of a new-born baby. It was probably there 40 years. You could see from the deformed skeleton that it had had a fall. There was very little hair on it which implied that it was new-born. She was wondering about it. To me it seemed quite obvious that some girl at the school had had a child without telling anyone and concealed the birth. It wouldn’t be the first time that that had happened. Later on, for some reason when the police came round to our house to take a statement they took me with them to go back to a clothes shop near the school which they said had something to do with the crime. I went with the policeman. He had a Volvo 740 estate, one of the flat square ones. He lifted up the bonnet to look for something . I had a look underneath it and saw how simple the layout was and how much room there was. I began to regret that I hadn’t had a couple of those on the taxis.

Finally I was with a boy from my class at school last night. He wasn’t anyone special and so i’ve no idea whey he would suddenly put in an appearance. Several weeks earlier I’d been to church with Marianne, a new modern church in the south part of the city centre of Brussels. It was a place that she’s wanted to visit before she died so I’d taken her there. Later, I decided for some reason to go again. That was when I met him. We walked down a road past a big brick-built church dating from probably the late Victorian period. There were a lot of roadworks outside. I explained to him that there was a statue of Jesus inside who was preaching to the congregation over a lake. The lake was actually a river of which the exit had been blocked. It looked to me as if they were freeing the exits so that the water could flow through the church and out the other side because of so many stories of Jesus preaching by running water. he wondered if that was the church to which we should be going but I explained that it wasn’t. We carried on walking. By now I had a young girl with me instead. She was asking questions about the church so I explained things to her. We eventually arrived just as the service was about to begin. I had STRAWBERRY MOOSE with me whom I was holding. The girl as soon as she saw from the top of the bank of seats the service starting she dashed to grab a seat with a spare one next to it so that I could sit down. There were some people whom we knew who were there who had 2 small girls. Of course the 2 girls were chatting to Strawberry Moose. Most of the women and girls were in bathing costumes It was something to do with blessing the swimming or something like that. I didn’t quite understand it at the time so many of the girls and women were in swimming costumes.

When Marianne was dying I did my best to take her to places that she wanted to visit but it wasn’t easy because her illness advanced so quickly. I sat by her side for 5 months and watched her die, and it was the most horrible thing that I could ever imagine. She was quite religious and her response to anything was “my Saviour will call me when he’s ready”. I’m not going to put anyone at all through that kind of torture, and the medical staff where I’m being treated know what to and when to do it.

It reminds me of a story about Sidney Smith, a Home Office pathologist who was giving a talk on this subject.
"If ever I begin to lose my faculties, my coherence and my dignity" he said "I’ve told my wife that she must “have an accident” while cleaning the shotgun"
"Blimey!" shouted a voice from the back of the hall. "She’s leaving it rather late, isn’t she?"

After my morning coffee and fruit bun I began the process of tidying up. There’s not much that I can do and it takes me forever to do it but I have to show willing.

It’s not as if I mind people seeing for themselves that I’m struggling to manage, especially someone whose job it it, but even I have my pride and my limits. However, as was said in Proverbs Chapter 16 Verse 18, "Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall"

When the ergotherapist came round we ran through my routine about cooking, eating, working and all of that kind of thing and she didn’t have too many suggestions in that respect. It was the bathroom that drew most of her attention and we spent a lot of time in there working out a few things.

She did ask me if I wanted a raised seat in the WC and that is probably the most humiliating incident yet with this illness.

One thing that she wanted to do was to watch me make a pot of coffee, but I suspect that that didn’t have very much to do ergotherapy. She declined my biscuits though.

After she left I came in here I had a phone all to make to one of my neighbours, and then I crashed out definitively for quite some time. So much so that when I finally did awaken I felt absolutely dreadful. But once I’d finally come back round into the Land of the Living, I paired off the music for the next radio programme.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg, just as nice as usual, and there’s plenty of stuffing left over for the next couple of days

Tomorrow I have the doctor coming around, the Welsh lesson (the last of the year) and then the Centre de Re-education in the afternoon. And right now, I have never ever felt less like it. I hope that I have a good sleep tonight.

It’s one of those things for which I have sore misgivings, and even worse, I have no ointment to rub on them.

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Sunday 10th December 2023 – MY VEGAN CHRISTMAS CAKE …

christmas cake vegan pizza vegan fruit buns Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo 10th December 2023 … now has some icing on it.

It’s not exactly the prettiest Christmas cake that you’ll ever see, but it looks much more like a Christmas cake this year than the one that I made two years ago, which looked more like Quatermass’s Experiment.

A great big thanks to Liz who dived deep into her memory and came up with a recipe for vegan royal icing using chick pea liquid, which I just happened to have, having made some hummus the other day.

And to Sean too who suggested that I treat the icing as if I was plastering a wall and do it in several thin layers. But I have to be honest and say that it does look rather like my plastering efforts used to before I discovered the trick of using a lump of wood thoroughly soaked in water.

Also in the photo is the batch of fruit buns that I made this afternoon for the next couple of weeks, and don’t they look much better these days than they used to when I was just setting out with my baking experiments?

Last week I’d used the last of the pizza dough that I had in the freezer so I made another batch. 2 lumps are in the freezer and I used the third to make a pizza tonight, which you can also see in the photo.

All of that effort today has worn me out, which is no surprise seeing as I had another turbulent night.

Being a Saturday night I was in bed late and didn’t have a great deal of sleep. By 10:00 I was up and about having my medication.

First thing that I did afterwards was to transcribe the piles of stuff on the dictaphone from the night. We started off with a Paul Temple mystery but no sooner had it started than my feet became tangled with each other and the elastic strap that I wear around my ankles. I awoke rather suddenly and quickly before anything had happened

Then there was a series of car races. One of the competitors found himself in hot water because his car had been mis-described. It had been described as one particular model when in fact it was a different one that was 10cm longer so maybe more powerful. This caused quite an uproar with various people commenting on how such a thing like this shouldn’t ever arise, how important it is for the correct details to be presented and what they would do in similar kinds of circumstances etc.

Later on I was up to my ears in work. It was about 04:00. The specimens had to go to the laboratory and normally I would take them but at the moment a girl was going to take them. She’d be here at any time. As well as having everything out I had pastry half-rolled out on a laboratory desk etc. I was generally thinking that I’d be hours late. She turned up. Today’s subject was a red pepper. It took me ages to find a pen and some kind of ad-hoc envelope in which to fit it. Then I had to tell her about the other things that needed doing, for example, when you are sending in blood tests of families, if there are more than 2 children you have to send in the blood tests of at least 2 of them and not distinguish whether they were masculine or feminine children. This list went on for hours. In the end all I could find was some kind of paper pochette in which to put the red pepper. I imagined that by the time she organises herself with this and whatever else she has to do, the laboratory will have closed at 04:00 and that would have been it. She’d have been too late.

There was also some story about a really expensive diamond. It begins in the Republic of Kyrgyzstan when the Khan gave the diamond to his daughter. Following the invasion by the Russian colonialists in the 19th Century it was lost. It turned up later in a European auction house in comparatively modern times. On one instance it fell into my hands. I had the task of not only trying to keep it safe from marauding pillagers but to make sure that it was handed back to the current Government of Kyrgyzstan. I was beset by all kinds of perils etc in an effort to move this stone to where it ought to go. I was really like something out of a James Bond novel. Unfortunately in the middle of dictating the notes I awoke and the whole lot of everything that was left evaporated away out of my head.

Did I dictate the dream about the precious stone from Kyrgyzstan? … "yes you did" – ed … but I fell asleep after I’d dictated it and had a visit from a couple of people who were looking for the stone. I set a trap for them, caught them and began to interrogate them about what they’d been doing, who they were doing it for and the reasons why they were here etc.

And later still I was taking my exam for my French citizenship. I came to the part about different Provinces, different peoples, different lifestyles. Of course I ended up writing reams of stuff about it, most of which was totally unnecessary for the article. With Cécile we’d created some kind of life as a couple living in her house. That was something comparatively new for me but as usual, most of the stuff that I wrote was pages and pages long and gave no advice to anyone really (just like what I used to write for our old “Radio Anglais” programmes). And then I awoke.

There was a story about medals in World War II. One particular medal was illustrated by 2 brothers who flew for the RAF as night fighter crew during the opening period of the Blitz in a 2-seater Defiant. They were on their way to Buckingham Palace to receive their medals before flying home to Ireland at the end of their engagement. Something happened to the ‘plane and they both baled out … "as is any rear gunner could ever bale out of a Defiant. It’s practically impossible" – ed. One of them, his ‘chute failed to open correctly and he was killed when he hit the ground. His parachute ripped on a tree and you could still see a morsel of parachute in the tree if you were to look carefully. The second brother, his parachute opened but he fell into the sea and was drowned before he could be rescued.

Finally we were working in the stores, bringing out piles of stuff for a huge project that was taking place. Suddenly, halfway through, we had word that the project was cancelled. It was coming up to weekend and everything needed to be put back, which meant that we would be hours late going home. My partner and I shrugged our shoulders and made a start. The other people in the building, including Jon Pertwee and the girl attached to him, didn’t seem to want to start, being too busy messing around and teasing each other. I knew exactly what would happen – the moment that I finished packing away my things I’d be called into putting away their things. I decided that I’d slow down to a crawl. The conversation carried on about all the bad habits of Pertwee and how this girl had even brought him a cup of coffee in bed once at 08:00. He’d given her a kiss that had upset her but she took it in her stride. Nothing whatever was being put away. People began to remark about Pertwee preparing things for his own tidying-up at the weekend. I had a look and there were tons of wires and cables etc out on my side of the warehouse lying around here. If they disappeared overnight I’d be the one who’d be in trouble. While it was very interesting and enlightening listening to all this banter that was going on, I was beginning to have a few serious misgivings about things that were happening and things that would be happening. It didn’t look at all healthy to me.

With all of that going on I must really stop listening to the Navy Lark on Old-Time Radio before going to bed.

After lunch I made a start on the radio programme, the notes for which I dictated before going to bed. And I’m right – I AM losing the co-ordination between my eyes, my brain and my mouth. I suppose that as this cancer marches on through my body, more and more things like this will happen.

Halfway through, I knocked off for a while and went to the kitchen for my baking session.

There’s no doubt whatever that my new FOOD PROCESSOR really is the business. It’s also nice to have a set of reliable kitchen scales, which made life so much easier too.

Even though the bearings burned out on the grinder on the old whizzer set that I had, the rest of it still works and it whipped up the chick pea juice and icing perfectly. Having the correct equipment really does make life so much easier.

For almost four hours I’d been on my feet working without a break. At about 19:00 I sat down for the first time and by 19:01 I was well away with the fairies.

The vegan pizza was delicious as usual, and so now that I’ve finished my notes I’ll check my cake again, have a nice hot drink and then go to bed.

Tomorrow I have to tidy up as the ergotherapist is coming round. Mind you, if she sees me living in chaos and disorder it might be a good thing because it might mean that I’ll qualify for more assistance.

Actually, I’m trying to avoid having any extra help. Past experience shows that if people start to let themselves go, they keep on going. I’m intending to keep on fighting and do as much for myself as I possibly can.

My autonomy is quite important and I want to hang onto it. I’m not quite ready yet to be helped into my grave by anyone.

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Saturday 9th December 2023 – MY CHRISTMAS CAKE …

… now has its marzipan cover.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look very pretty, but it’s for eating, not for exhibiting at the Royal Academy. And in any case, it’ll be a different proposition tomorrow evening when it has the icing on it.

Sean’s advice to fill up the obvious depressions with lumps of marzipan before marzipanning over the top seems to work because it actually does look quite level now, although I’m the first to admit that I have a lot to learn when it comes to marzipanning.

However, as it’s only the second cake that I’ve marzipanned, I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out.

The acid test will be tomorrow when I try to ice it. That should be something that will sort out the men from the boys.

But pleased as I might be with my marzipanning, that seems to be the only thing that did go according to some kind of plan today.

Once again I was wide awake at 05:00 and couldn’t go back to sleep. By 05:50 I was up and about having my medication.

For a change, I knew what it was that awoke me this morning. We’ve had high winds for most of the week but yesterday everything calmed down and it was nice to go out in the sun to the shops.

This morning though, the storm broke again and we were being lashed by the wind. It was the rain smashing against the bedroom window that awoke me

After the medication I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Somewhere in late 1940s London someone had stolen a rare stamp from a bank vault and had managed to evade the police who were pursuing him. He eventually made his way back to where the guy who had commissioned him to steal it was situated. He was there with another guy. The robber explained how come he’d managed to do all of this. They guy who commissioned him said “now we have to go back and enter the vault in daylight”. The robber couldn’t understand why on earth anyone would want to do that but the guy said that it was important to lay some kind of trail for the police. After a great deal of convincing they set off. By now I was attached to this party. We were walking through the streets. Coming towards us was a group of people going to a club. They guy who’d organised the robbery recognised them. At one time he’d been the owner of a club and had barred these people. He was expecting some kind of trouble in the street but they walked straight by. They went to the place to which they were going but couldn’t go in so came back. This was when some kind of confrontation arose between the organiser of the theft and this group of people. Someone suggested calling the police so at that moment one or two of the other people and I discreetly detached ourselves from the group and slipped away. We went around a corner and were somewhere in South-West London where there were 2 or 3 Underground stations very close to each other. A couple of other people with us, one of whom was Katherine Ayers, disappeared and left me on my own. I was suddenly aware of the fact that I had to return to the North of England somehow. I’d need to take the Tube and change at one of the stations to catch another Tube that would bring me to either Euston or another station that would take me North. This ended up with the kind of confusion that we’ve had in several dreams in the past when I’ve been wandering around London Tube stations either trying to find people or to find the correct train – back once more in that situation.

Later on I’d been out for a drive in Strider. We’d been going through the Appalachian Mountains on the border between New Brunswick and Québec. I thought that I’d better fuel up at a petrol station as they were very few and far between around here. I came to one where the next one was advertised as being 60 kilometres away so I fuelled up here and wished that I hadn’t when I saw the prices because I’d been doing very well up until them. Suddenly I awoke with the most enormous start and the whole of the rest of the dream disappeared

After that I must have gone back to sleep because I was at work. It was coming up to Christmas and I was planning to leave to go into retirement but things just kept popping up and I couldn’t ever get round to handing in my notice. I could see that come Christmas I’d just walk away without telling anyone and never go back. Everyone else was preparing for Christmas. One guy was asking me for the recipe for Simnel cake saying that the cake that I’d made for my birthday was really good etc. Eventually I managed to tear myself away to go home. I should have had things to do that evening but I decided that I wasn’t going to. I thought that I’d ring up Nicole to see if she fancied going ice skating or swimming etc but for some reason I couldn’t get through. I ended up back at home. There was talk about moving. The place was an absolutely despairing tip with all kinds of things lying around. I decided that I’d make a start and went through my workshop. All the little scraps of wood that I’d been saving for projects, I bundled them up and wondered if someone would like them for firewood or kindling etc. My mother then turned up and said that Cécile fancied fish for tea. How would we cook it? I told her to cook it in a bechamel sauce with a dash of lemon juice. The idea of Cécile having fish is crazy. She is as much a strict vegan as I am.

The idea of me tidying up and throwing things away shows you just how much of a dream this must have been. And Cécile eating fish too is something that would only ever happen in a nocturnal ramble.

This morning I spend several hours de-duplicating files that are in one of the back-up drives that is in the desktop array. Another 24GB of files had bitten the dust by the time that I’d finished.

For an hour or so I had a play around on the guitar and ran through a few numbers on my playlist just to keep in practice.

This afternoon I attacked the Christmas cake. There was some marzipan left over from last time but it was rather brittle so I used it to fill in the depressions once I’d kneaded it, and then used the fresh stuff that I’d bought the other day to do the job properly.

It looks rather strange, with the marzipan being in tricolour but as I said, once it’s iced it won’t make any difference and it will still taste just as nice.

And then the rest of the afternoon has been spent working on the notes for the photos from Canada 2022. I’m currently riding around the mouth of the Baie des Chaleurs and down the Straits of Northumberland on my way to Bathurst and Miramichi.

There’s still a very long way to go though. I can’t believe how slowly this train is travelling. For a developed country, what is left of Canada’s passenger rail network is an embarrassment.

Tea tonight was a baked potato with salad and one of those strange veggie burgers, made with real veg. They are really quite nice and I’ll be disappointed when they’ve all gone Noz was very kind to me with its bargain offers of strange vegan food and it’s a shame that I can’t go there any more.

The advantage is that it will encourage me to do more in the experimentation line.

On the list of things at which I want to have a go is bread-crumbing and battering. Battering is a question of flour and milk so there’s no reason why I can’t try that with plant-based milk but I shall have to have think about bread-crumbing.

Google might be our friend here and so I typed in “Breadcrumbing” – and had page after page after page of websites talking about stringing someone along in a pseudo-relationship and nothing at all about cookery. I’m clearly light years behind the times.

Tomorrow I have fruit buns to make, pizza dough to make and a Christmas cake to ice. There are radio notes that need dictating before I go to bed so there will be a programme to do too. It’ll be a busy day so I’m glad I had a rest today.

My new scales came today and I had to go downstairs to the post box in the entry to pick it up this evening. One of my neighbours was in the hall and we had a chat. I bet he was wondering what was going on.

Going downstairs was interesting because my slipper fell off so I resolved that issue by throwing it all the way up to my front door and went barefoot. And the climb back up froze my feet but it was surprisingly much easier than it has been just recently.

There’s no reason for that really. I don’t think that it’s the exercise. Maybe it’s because having sat around all day, I wasn’t tired. Or maybe my legs were lighter with no shoes on.

But whatever it is, I’ve given up trying to fathom it out. I’ve already crashed out half a dozen times today, sometimes quite definitively, so I’m going to have a hot drink and then dictate the radio notes before going to bed. I wonder what time I’ll awaken tomorrow.

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Friday 8th December 2023 – AFTER THIS MORNING’S …

… efforts I’m totally exhausted. I really don’t know how long I can keep this up .

At least last night when I went to bed I fell asleep quite quickly, judging by the timestamp on the first of the sound-files on the dictaphone.

It was another restless night though and once more I was up and about long before the alarm went off.

After the medication I came back in here and had things to do.

Firstly, there was a bill to pay. That involved writing out a cheque, finding a pre-paid envelope, etc – and that involved some tidying up of my stationery drawers.

Secondly, there was everything that I needed to print off for my demand for intervention from these Autonomy people. Having had the Social Services help me complete it the other week at the Centre de Re-education I now had everything that I needed.

Even down to the A4 manila envelopes. Fed up of trying to squeeze a whole rain-forest of papers into a standard-size envelope, I went berserk on the internet earlier in the week and ordered a packet of 50 envelopes into which I could fit every tree on the planet.

Thirdly, there was another letter that needed writing. This one was rather complicated because rather a lot depends on it, it has to be worded precisely and accurately, and in French too.

After a quick wash I headed out for the bus where I was swamped by a load of young teenagers heading from the High School across the square to the Ecole d’Hotellerie out at the Pointe de la Crête between Granville and St Pair sur Mer.

At St Nicolas I alighted from the bus and first port of call was the Post Office to send off all of my letters.

And there was some good news there too. They see no reason why I can’ open an account there, pay in some money from my Credit Agricole card, have a bank card and then draw cash out of their cash point outside whenever I need it.

Having been stranded for a day or two in Flagstaff in Arizona 20-odd years ago when my bank card was paused for “unusual expenditure” even though I’d told the bank where I was going and what I was doing, I’ve always had a couple of accounts and bank cards on the go “just in case”.

But with not being able to go any more to my bank in the town centre because of the lack of access to the bus back home, I need some way of laying my hands on some cash every now and again, even if it’s only to pay my cleaner for whatever she buys for me at the shops.

At Carrefour I had some luck. I was sure that I’d seen some gas cylinders tucked away somewhere on one of the shelves so I’d taken the empty one with me. Sure enough, they did have them on exchange, although they did cost les yeux de la tête as they say around here.

Imagine that – the highlight of my day is finding a gas cylinder in a shop.

As well as the usual stuff I bought another packet of icing sugar too. I’d had a quick look in my baking box and wasn’t sure if I had enough in stock.

But the cylinder was heavy and walking back for the bus after my coffee I was thoroughly exhausted even before I reached the bus stop.

The climb back up the stairs was another difficult problem that I found it had to solve but once in here and with everything put away I made my coffee and cheese on toast and came back in here.

Fighting off waves of sleep (quite unsuccessfully at times) I transcribed the notes from the dictaphone from last night. And “hello” to Nerina who put in an appearance last night. We I had been living together and for the first time for a considerable period I went through and carried out an inventory of the food that was on hand. I discovered to my surprise that we had almost next-to-nothing. When she came home from work I told her about the situation and that we’d have to be very careful about what we would do and what we would eat over the next few weeks but she went down to the kitchen and pulled out a box that was full of vegetables that I hadn’t seen before. I don’t know how I’d come to miss it. I was busy there examining the contents thinking about exciting things to make with it when she pushed two straws into a navet … "turnip" – ed. I thought “why has she done this? What is this going to be used for now?”.

I was in Scotland last night as well. I came across a family who had a couple of girls aged probably just in double figures, I suppose. They’d moved into a big new house and invited me to see it. It really was lovely, a quite modern 1960s-type split-level house, all square with flat roofs. The younger girl told me that they’d been living with the Scots in Glasgow prior to this. She was telling me all about her house and that didn’t seem to be quite bad afterwards. The subject of preparing the older girl for boarding school came up. She had to go to pack her things. I asked her if she needed help because I wasn’t actually doing anything at this time. She said “yes” so I answered “first of all, is there anything that you DON’T want me to touch?”. She replied “yes, my sister’s notebook”. That sounded like a strange request to me, why that would be the most important thing not to touch. I went down a corridor and through a maze of rooms, including the younger girl’s bedroom into the older one’s. It was huge. There was a lot of stuff lying around. She picked up an object and asked me what I thought it was. I replied that it was a bed cover. She began to fold it up so I found some similar ones lying around and folded them up too. She had some kind of plant like bamboo or something. It had obviously seen much better days. She said that it was 3 years old but she kept it because it was very nice and made an interesting shape. We carried on tidying up her room and putting aside the things that she was taking to boarding school.

These two girls actually had a history. The family reminded me very much of a woman and two girls whom I met at that Folk Festival in Scotland where I used to be the camp site Night Security Guard for a couple of years. That was where Louise, with whom I’m still in contact, had her first encounter with STRAWBERRY MOOSE

I was in that freight yard again, on the lowest level when the girls came past on the highest levels on a railway locomotive pulling a couple of lime-green coaches piped with yellow. And then we had exactly the same conversation that we’d had in the previous version of it. And if you’re wondering why that seems to make no sense whatsoever, don’t worry. You aren’t alone because I don’t understand it either

There was something about several files relating to a Paul Temple mystery that I had on my laptop or whatever that I’d transferred onto my watch. One of them was something to do with him him being in a cloak like a superhero so I had ideas about renaming all of them. However that was when I awoke with a severe attack of cramp so I can’t remember now where it went after that

And then I was with a girl from school last night. I can’t remember who she was but she lived out Audlem way, Buerton somewhere on the way to Newcastle under Lyme. I was wearing old clothes because I’d been doing some work. I’d ended up in that village where I met her, and we were chatting. We’d encountered a couple of yokels who had an old recoil-starter type of electric generator that you could carry around in one hand and would power a radio. They’d rigged up some kind of 1930s-type of valve radio and were trying to start this generator to power it. After they’d been playing with it for about 10 minutes I went to look as they wandered off. I could smell straight away that the petrol was probably 20 years old. I drained out the petrol, cleaned the carburettor, put fresh petrol in and fired it up. It ran, and we had the radio playing so I took it over to them. We carried on chatting. We were pointing out a Tudor house in this village that had been left to ruin, how the roof had sagged etc. Then the girl came back. We went into her house to continue to chat, just the 2 of us. All of her family was there except her mother and father. I was just sitting there, quietly listening to them talking, feeling very uncomfortable being in working clothes. When her mother came back they began to talk about knitting. The girl had been spending a lot of tie knitting just recently and just had one line to finish off on a cardigan that she’d made. One of the others in the house said that they’d finish it off in exchange for her doing something else which seemed to be a good idea for her. But time was dragging on and I was wondering how I was going to be able to leave but of course I was quite interested in this girl too. After a couple of minutes she looked at me and said “should we go?”. I thought “yes, we’ll go if she wants” but then I was going to have to think about what would happen. Obviously I would want to spend the evening with her, doing something exciting, going for a meal, going to the pub, going for a walk, but not in the clothes that I was wearing. I was stuck in a quandary yet again – how was I going to organise going home, changing my clothes and generally tidying myself up etc while I had the girl with me. But a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush, she was there, she wanted to go so why would I argue with that?

Not that that would ever have stopped me in the past. No-one has had more experience than me for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

There was also a dream at one point about I’d been walking and had come to a set of stairs, up which I just walked normally without having to cling on. I was so surprised that I went to find another set of stairs and walked up there normally too without hanging on to the handrail. I thought “if only I’d realised yesterday that I could do that”. That was of course quite obviously a dream and I wish that that had happened when I encountered the stairs on the way back to the apartment here after my shopping trip.

After I’d transcribed all of that I attacked the radio programme and finished off the notes for that ready for typing tomorrow night.

With the time left I carried on with the Canada 2022 photos. We’ve climbed out of the St Lawrence valley, over the Appalachians via the Matapedia Pass and we’ve now just rattled into Campbelltown Railway Station on the banks of the Baie des Chaleurs.

Jackie and I had a chat on the internet too. She’s actually quite worried about me, as are many people, so it seems. But there’s really no need to worry. I know what my fate is and I’m quite resigned to it and comfortable with the idea. I’m not worrying about it and there’ no reason for anyone else to either

Right at the beginning I was told that this illness has a lifespan of between 5 and 11 years and how long I keep going depends on how long my heart can keep on going, which is why there’s now all this concern about my cardiac issues. It’s now over 8 years so I’m “well in” and one day it will catch up with me.

Tea tonight was a burger on a bap with chips and salad – really delicious too.

For the rest of the evening I won’t be doing too much. Everything seems to be wearing me out so I’ll sit with my feet up.

Tomorrow I’ll be marzipanning my cake. Liz reckons that I should leave the marzipan to set for a while so that it doesn’t bleed through the icing and I seem to remember that I had that problem last time I made a Christmas cake.

Something else that I’ll be doing is to track down some recipes for vegan stuffing. I can’t have Christmas dinner without sprouts, roast potatoes and stuffing now, can I? I shall have to throw something together.

With not being able to buy my Seitan slices these days (I used to buy them at the Asian wholesalers in Leuven) I’m not sure what I’m going to have for a main course. I’ll probably have to throw something together there too.

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Thursday 7th December 2023 – I HAD ANOTHER …

… telephone call this afternoon.

"Mr Hall. Your appointment on 19th December is cancelled"
"And why is that?"
"We want you to come on Monday 18th December instead. And bring your jammies because you’ll be staying for a few days".

The appointment on the 19th was with the Cardiac Unit but this stay is with the Haematology Department. So things are definitely pushing along from that point of view. They did say “the beginning of the New Year” but events are unfolding quicker that I expected.

Getting out of bed wasn’t unfolding as quickly as it has done just now. It took me about 20 minutes to raise myself from the Dead this morning. But even so, I was still sitting at my desk working at 06:20, 40 minutes before the alarm went off

After I’d had my medication I came back here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I awoke with a really bad attack of cramp in the middle of a dream about events taking place in a village and so forgot most of this dream. It concerned certain goings-on in the village and in some localities. Some localities were only known by their informal name and there were many other names for some of these places so if someone had a secret about one of these places and it was known by its proper name no-one would ever find it. This was a question of these secrets that needed to be discovered. There was one thing that was very interesting. It was something concerning a girl’s bikini. I noticed in a house as I was passing through it doing something or other, that on top of a shelf in the sewing room was one of these mannequins that is used for adjusting clothes. There was a girl’s bikini on there. I was wondering whether this was in fact that particular girl’s bikini. Of course the easiest way to hide something is to hide it in plain sight and not draw anyone’s attention to it.

And then there was a plan to build new railway headquarters in Crewe. I was asked if I would like to supervise the overall control of the project. With nothing better to do I agreed and called for all the paperwork. I received a large box with almost nothing in it, no plans, no nothing. When I asked for it I was told that it was all arranged by photographs. That was the modern way of doing things these days. I thought that it was one of the most crazy things I’d ever heard. It’s quite simply not possible. And they hadn’t even sent the photographs in this box. A couple of days later someone from the Home Office came to see me and began to talk about the project. he asked how much they’d agreed to pay me. I said “they haven’t agreed anything”. He was surprised and said “you ought to be paid”. I answered “I thought that that was your job to pay me. These instructions came down from your department that I was to oversee it. I wasn’t told to contact the project managers for payment. The instructions came from the Home Office so I imagined they they would pick up the bill”. I told him about the complete and utter miserable state of affairs of this big box with almost nothing in it.

At another moment there had been a huge issue about some kind of property boundaries in the centre of a small town somewhere. I had a total feeling that it was all wrong. After a huge, lengthy investigation and battle I finally discovered that I was perfectly correct and that land that had been in dispute in the town centre was actually mine and I could move into it. It made me extremely happy because first of all I could park my car somewhere. I went for a walk after this with a girl friend of mine to celebrate. We came round a corner and in a yard was an axle that I recognised immediately as off a BMC half-ton van. I looked up and they had one attached to a crane that they were just going to winch off somewhere. I went to have a word with the guys to tell them that I’d been looking for one of these for years. Why hadn’t he told me anything about it? Of course, I had had BILL BADGER for a great length of time and travelled miles with him. The discussion then came round to a BMC FG pickup with a damaged cab and we talked about that. I explained that there was nothing wrong with it and the cab can be replaced on these anyway. We began to talk about Bill Badger again and those kinds of days back them.

I had that half-ton van for several years and went miles in it. But one of the rear leaf springs broke and being a very obsolete vehicle I couldn’t find another one. I had car springs on it for a while but the slightest load sagged the rear right down and after an uncomfortable moment with some of Cheshire Constabulary’s finest I decided that it was time to move it on.

When I awoke I was in bed but the cleaner had just come into the apartment bringing me a big mug of really hot coffee. I told her to put it on the kitchen worktop, wait a couple of minutes and I’ll be ready. I’ll come in and drink it. Then I awoke with cramp again.

Later on I had been at work all day. In my spare time I’d been doing something else. When I’d finished I’d gone to my University night classes and didn’t return home until 23:30. There was some bricklaying that needed doing so I began to sort out a few bricks prepare some stuff to mix some cement. My mother who was sitting around with her feet up and the other kids who were just sitting there playing around all said “you aren’t going to start work now, are you?”. I replied “this job has to be done. All you lot have been doing is sitting around here all day doing nothing”. My mother said something about the kids being delicate or something. I replied that they were all just bone-idle and that she was the woman who had made them. Whatever it is that her kids have turned out to be is a reflection on her more than anything else.

Actually, my University experience was nothing like that. It was usually a ‘phone call at 03:30 “My Hall, we have to go to Dusseldorf (or Bielefeld, or Berlin, or Den Haag or somewhere else like that)’
“Very good, Sir Brian. I’ll be round in half an hour”
And then into the boot went a flask of coffee, a pile of sandwiches and my course books. And while he was entertaining visiting dignitaries, putting the World to rights and dining on lavish slap-up dinners I was curled up on the back seat of the car on a draughty corner of a freezing military air base with a sandwich and a mug of coffee poring over a course book

When I was trying to do my degree it was one of the most crucial times in Western History in modern time and I had the misfortune to be associated with someone rather pivotal. We didn’t have a break for 18 months.

It meant that I wasn’t able to complete any of the practical work. Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its previous versions will recall that I had taken a week’s holiday to go and do some water sampling of a river. I’d hardly put on my wellingtons before a group of people flew a few aeroplanes into a couple of buildings, all leave was cancelled and we were recalled to work.

That didn’t just put paid to the practical work for that part of the course, it put paid to the exam too.

A couple of people have suggested that I ought to write a book about that period of my life. But it’s one of those situations where if the first impression isn’t published posthumously, the second impression certainly would be

But meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed there was also something somewhere about me being in Canada with my niece’s husband (but it wasn’t him). I was making a pot of tea and when I was rinsing the teapot in the sink it fell apart in my hands.

Next stop was the radio programme. I’ve chosen all of the music, some of which was complicated, and then I paired it off and wrote notes for some of it

There was an interruption – yet another phone call. This time it was the ergotherapist. She’s going to come to visit me here on Monday afternoon, inspect my apartment and suggest ways in which my life could be improved.

After a good wash and scrub up the car came for me and we went down to the Centre de Re-education.

And how the mighty have fallen! If it was depressing yesterday being taught how to go to bed and how to get up, today was even worse. Can you really imagine that it’s necessary for someone at my kind of age to need lessons on how to put on my socks?

The ergotherapist had noticed something with one of the muscles in my left thigh and she had a word with Severine, who spent our session working on that muscle to try to free it off. Not that it worked very much.

There are three lifts in the Centre de Re-education and two of them were broken down. As a result it was chaos trying to leave the building. In the end I climbed up the stairs and by the time that I was halfway up, that was me done for the rest of the day

Back here I bumped into my cleaner as I entered the building and she helped me up the stairs into my apartment.

The doctor rang me too. He’s already sent off the demand for the taxi to Paris but I wasn’t going to tell him to cancel it – at least, not until I have something in writing from the hospital.

But I’d told him that I was running low on medication when I’d written to him so he’s going to come to see me on Tuesday to check me over before he issues a new prescription.

And then I came in here and crashed out.

Tea tonight was something from the European Vegan Burger Mountain, with pasta and veg, and now that I’ve finished my notes I’m knocking off. As I’ve said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … all of this remedial treatment is al l very well but if the journey is killing me off it’s all pointless.

So right now I’m off to bed. Shopping tomorrow if the weather is better, and that’ll wear me out as well.

This weekend I’d better tidy up the apartment ready for all these visits next week. I seem to be in demand right now. It’s not usually like this, is it?

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Wednesday 6th December 2023 – THEY AREN’T LETTING …

… the grass grow under my feet.

It was only on Friday that I was at the hospital in Paris when they told me that they need to be sure that my heart can withstand the shock of this new medicine that they think might work.

This afternoon I had a mail from the hospital – “you are summoned to attend the cardiac unit for an echograph at 09:15 in the forenoon on Tuesday 19th December”.

So that means leaving here at about 04:30 and arriving at Paris bang in the middle of the morning rush hour. And how much am I not looking forward to that?

But it least it goes to show that I’m in good hands and people are taking an interest in my case. I wouldn’t have this service in many other places.

So I’ve had to dash off a letter to my doctor to ask for a bon de transport and hope that the Social Services agree to pay for it. While I was at it I wrote and asked for another prescription as I’m running short of medication.

That’s all now in the handbag of my cleaner who will drop it off at the medical centre on her way to her clients in town in the morning.

It seems that early mornings are going to become a regular feature, and not just when I go to Paris either. Once again, when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was half-way through editing the radio notes that I’d dictated before I went to bed. I’d been up since 05:10 this morning.

First thing that I did after the medication was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I started off with one of these North American road-movie type films with a couple of teenage girls sitting on some kind of embankment overlooking a motorway watching a big American articulated lorry come down a slip road onto the motorway. In front of them was some kind of large panel van. It came onto the motorway first and drifted right away across the lanes into what was effectively then the outside lane nearest the central reservation before heading off again. One thing that was interesting about this was that everyone was driving on the left.

Later on we had something about a wild dog. It was much more than a wild dog, terrorising a neighbourhood somewhere in the USA attacking just about everyone who went close to it and making a right mess of them, killing most of them. On one occasion it cornered a young woman. It had an object in its paw like a pillow and was continually hitting this woman who was trying to escape. It was gradually weakening her until she began to sag onto the floor and the wild beast was ready to leap on top of her and presumably tear out her throat.

And then I was in North America looking for some fermented human juice with which to make my evil Christmas pudding. In the end I established myself in some kind of corridor where I’d attack people who were walking along it and absorb them into the floor as they panicked etc. I’d have some kind of apparatus like a giant hypodermic with which I’d suck the life-blood out of the humans whom I was attacking. That was what I’d be adding to my Christmas cake.

As you can see, I’m back in the nightmares again. But then, I’ve had much worse than these in the past but I choose not to type them out. One or two that I’ve had at times have been so disturbing that I couldn’t even bring myself to dictate them

Caliburn and I had been out on an expedition somewhere in South-West UK. We’d met a guy and been talking to him for a while and then we’d set off along the road. Then he phoned me back to say that he had something else to say. We tried to find a place to perform a U-turn. In the end we’d drifted off the main road somehow and ended up on what basically was a farm track across the fields. It suddenly turned into the steepest road that I’d ever encountered. When we reached the top I could see railway lines that were all covered in weeds and overgrown. It seemed that I’d climbed up the end of a demolished railway viaduct that crossed over the river. While I was stopped, taking a photo of the rails, 2 guys went past on motor bikes. We said a couple of words . They told me that I was somewhere near Wells. Then I set off to go back to the guy’s house but ended up driving over a green field. I thought “I don’t remember this way at all”. As I looked closely the track that I was following did a U-turn and came back down the side of the hill about 100 yards from where I was. I thought to myself that I was completely and utterly lost at the moment. I’ve no idea where I am right now, I’ve no map or anything. I’m stuck in the middle of all these green fields without a clue of where I am.

Apart from the fact that the scenery was green, the landscape of all of this was very similar to the recurring dream that I had on several occasions about the mountain pass in the snow.

Then I had a girl with me. It might have been Cécile. We’d been out for a drive somewhere in Caliburn and stopped in a lay-by at the side of the road. Once again, Caliburn this time was a right-hand drive vehicle. From a flask she poured me a mug of coffee which I sat and began to drink but I began to tidy up a few things (so it must have been a dream, me tidying up). There were loads of elastic straps just lying all over the place so I was tying then to attachments and coiling them up. She was eating a cheeseburger (and as if Cécile would ever have eaten a cheeseburger. When we first began to chat to each other at the Anglo-French Group in the Combrailles it was to exchange vegan recipes). While I was busy sorting this out we were having a little chat. Then we decided that we’d go. I can’t remember exactly what happened after that because I awoke quite suddenly but I know that there was a couple of younger girls walking past who were involved in this dream somewhere.

Finally I’d been away camping for a few days and was absolutely filthy. I don’t know why. I hadn’t washed for several days. I made it back home and Zero was there with her parents (so welcome back, Zero!). The first thing that I did was to go to the bathroom for a really good wash. Zero came in and brought a small portable TV with her. She was watching some kind of programme. While I was washing I was talking to her but she replied in grunts and monosyllables as if she wasn’t really taking much notice. We talked about the journey back and how in Cheadle I’d been stuck behind a row of PMT buses. Her father said “there won’t be any of them soon, and they won’t be red. All of PMT’s operations outside the core area of Stoke on Trent are being withdrawn. They are having to bring in taxis etc to cover the trips. I explained that that was probably why I’d seen a couple of strange buses wandering around there looking as if they were doing things but certainly weren’t part of the PMT fleet. The we began to talk about chip shops. I told him that there were 2 chip shops that had been the first in the UK to stop selling fish and chips at a fixed price. One was down Longton way which was where we were at that particular moment. The other was up in Burslem. After I’d finished washing I tuned in Zero’s TV for her which was slightly off its station and went back into the living room where I told everyone quite happily that I was so pleased to be clean – the first time for several days.

And then I made a start on the radio notes. The dictation was slightly better than just recently but I had tied myself up in knots in a few places and it took some entangling. With the final track and the notes, I ended up 10 seconds over but that was edited down quite easily. I always include in my speeches quite a lot of stuff that isn’t really vitally important and I can cut it out as I go along, if necessary.

Once I’d finished that I finished off the notes for the photos that I’d taken when I arrived in Montréal and those three days are now completely on line. If you START HERE and go forward for the next couple of days.

The car came early for me today, and I wasn’t ready, due to things that, no matter how rich and famous you might be, you can’t get anyone else to do on your behalf.

At the Centre de Re-education the first session was at the tapis roulant – the rolling carpet. Apart from walking as it rolled away underneath me and being given advice about how I’m carrying myself, there were two other tasks, both of them rather like computer games.

One was to catch a thrown paper ball in a waste basket. But you move the basket by adjusting the balance of your weight by using your feet. The farther to the extremes the paper ball is thrown, the harder you have to press with the appropriate foot. Extreme right was pretty impossible for me.

The second one was like a 1970s Space Invaders game but once again you control the paddle with your feet. Again, the extremes were difficult

In Ergotherapy the therapist ran me through a few tests (one or two of which I failed miserably) and then showed me a way of getting in and out of bed more comfortably. She’s going to come here one morning next week to inspect my apartment and suggest ways that I could improve my life.

Here’s hoping that she gives me advice about getting in and out of the shower.

Severine ran me through my paces afterwards. She noticed that I didn’t have the same improved force that I had yesterday and that was borne out by how I climbed back up the stairs to here afterwards.

She seems to think that the tapis roulant took too much out of me, and that might explain why it always seems to be more difficult to climb back up after I’ve been shopping.

Back here I had my hot chocolate and biscuits, sorted out the letter to the doctor and then regrettably fell asleep for a while, which was no surprise.

Tea was a delicious leftover curry but I lost concentration at one point and the naan bread ended up being overdone. Still, you can’t win a coconut every time.

Then I checked the mails and messages again. A big thank-you to Sean and Liz for sending me some useful tips abour marzipanning and icing. Every tip that I can receive will come in useful

Tomorrow morning I might have a relax ready for the Centre de Re-education tomorrow afternoon. I’m expecting a parcel delivery and that will need checking.

The cheap kitchen scales that I have eats batteries like they are going out of fashion and it’s very inconvenient. I’ve found one on line that has a built in 5-volt battery. 5 volts equals USB connection of course and that should hopefully work much better.

Adding 120 grammes of sugar to something, having a battery go flat at 90 grammes, hunting around for a new CR2032 battery and then forgetting how much sugar I’ve already put in is no way to run a chemical operation.

Alison has a beautiful set of Olde-Worlde analogue scales but they aren’t really practical.

The new scales will come in handy at the weekend when I have the pizza dough and more fruit buns to make, along with marzipanning and icing the cake.

What with the scales and my new FOOD PROCESSOR I’m definitely going up in the world. But if I can’t go out anywhere and can’t do anything outside, I may as well find a new hobby.

The right equipment will help of course, and then I can always eat the fruits of my labours.

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Tuesday 5th December 2023 – IN ANSWER TO …

ginger and orange biscuits christmas cake christmas pudding Granville Manche Normandy France Eric Hall photo December 2023 … the thousands … "well, maybe not thousands" – ed … of requests, here’s a photo of my weekend’s efforts.

On the left is the figgy pudding and on the right is the Christmas cake. You can see where the edges of the cake were stuck to the baking tin but once the cake is covered with marzipan and icing no-one will notice.

Marzipanning and icing are planned for this coming weekend so now is the time to send me a few handy hints. After the debâcle last time, I’ll remember to put the cake in the fridge before I ice it. Icing a warm cake produces some rather interesting and artistic results.

In the background is my box of ginger and orange biscuits. And believe me – they do taste as nice as they look.

Thinking on, I should have stuck a couple of fruit buns in the photo too. There are a couple floating around in one of the biscuit tins.

Anyway, I ended up going to bed reasonably early last night and awoke again at some kind of ridiculous time. But at least the person with the hatpin didn’t come back.

Although I did drift off back to sleep, Zero didn’t come to visit me. And neither did Castor nor TOTGA. But the sleep did me some kind of good.

When the alarm went off I staggered into the kitchen for my medication and my half-litre of flat water flavoured with a dash of orange juice. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve run out of C02

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I had a photo and was trying to identify the subject and the folder in which it belonged. I was strolling through the directory that seemed to me to be the correct one looking at all the photos but just couldn’t identify the subject at all by doing that. I began to wonder whether it might have been from another folder but at the moment there was still some stuff in the first folder to wade through so I just ploughed on regardless but still couldn’t find it

Later on I was back in the same dream looking again through a pile of photos when just at that moment the alarm went off. We all had to leave. There was a girl missing. When I looked up I could see the small girl way up somehow on a pile of tubing that had been arranged like a scaffolding. She’d somehow climbed up there but was unable to descend. One of the boys in the room took it upon himself to climb up there and rescue her. At first I didn’t understand what he was trying to do so I tried to stop him but then it suddenly occurred to me what he was doing so I let him on his way and helped him as much as I could.

And then I was working for an express bus company last night. I was given a job to go from London to Swansea Docks and Carmarthen. When I was going through the paperwork there was a woman there talking about Swansea Docks. I found out that she was going on the same route as me with a bus but to Swansea Docks and Llanelli. We were due to leave at about the same time so we decided to travel together as far as Swansea Docks because I didn’t know where the pick-up point there was. We talked about Gloucester Services – what time we’d arrive, how long we should stop. I made the remark that I’d have to let Zero down again. She asked “what do you mean?”. I replied “this is the 13th consecutive time that I’ve promised to pick Zero up and my working schedule has been changed so I’m not going to be able to do it”. The woman asked “what did she say?”. I replied “she doesn’t know yet. We’ve only just had the work schedule. Someone else will have to pick her up”. We set out to pick up our vehicles, across a very busy main road. She was nattering away about her husband and tyres etc. We reached the place to pick up our vehicles. They were 2 mark I Cortina estates. I thought “this can’t possibly be correct, this”.

After I’d slipped back into oblivion later on I had exactly the same dream again, word for word.

Finally I went to look at the new shopping complex near Goodall’s Corner in Shavington. It was dark and I’d had the lights on the car but couldn’t see anything at all so I’d had to increase the brightness of the dashboard lights which increased the brightness outside. I reached where I thought it would be, climbed out of my car and went in. It looked like the door to someone’s house. I wandered round and there was a yellow French pillar box just inside the door so I thought that it must be somewhere around here. I went round and round all these corners until I came to an enormous Post Office with about 2 dozen clerks sitting around. It looked as if there were 1 or 2 members of the public in so I asked if they were closed. She replied that they were. I said “that’s a pity. Could anyone sell me a stamp?”. Someone had a rummage round on the top of a desk and came up with a 1st class stamp

There was some more stuff too but you don’t really want to know about that, especially if you are having your tea.

Once I’d finished that I had a couple of chats on line with a couple of different people and then sat down to revise my Welsh, stopping for a good wash in between seeing as I’m going out.

Armed with a fruit bun and a full pot of black coffee I sat down for the lesson and to my surprise it went quite well.

We were discussing extreme weather today, so I told the class about the time when we were on the trail of Sir John Ross and a group of us walked across Philpot’s Island about 800 miles of so from the North Pole to map the far side in a temperature of minus something ridiculous and we were caught in a blizzard.

My friend Mike who was leading our group decided that this would be a good time to have a yoga session so there we were in a white-out lying on our backs in a snow bank.

What worried me most about that was that you really had to struggle to see your hand in front of your face. We could have come face-to-face with a polar bear and it would have been too late to have done anything about it.

We did have an armed guard with us but his job, so he told us, was that if he saw a polar bear in a confrontation with a human, his job was to shoot the human. "It’s far less paperwork" he said.

Actually, it’s a fallacy to suggest that the best way to survive a polar bear attack is to run faster than the bear. You just have to run faster than one other person in your group. Since my mobility has been … errr … restricted, I’ve been asked on several occasions by Mike and Jerry if I would like to return to the High Arctic and go exploring with them again.

After the lesson the car came to pick me up and take me to the Centre de Re-education.

My ergotherapy session was cancelled again so there were just the two sessions. And Severine told me that she is noticing an improvement in my muscles in my legs. So she must be doing some good somewhere.

In the musculation sessions there was just an old man and me and the therapist had us using our strength (or what we have of strength) against each other with whatever aids they had lying around – things like giant rubber balls, elastic straps and so on.

My upper body strength was better than his but he had more power in his legs.

Severine is probably right about the improvement. Coming back up the stairs later, I could actually lift my left leg high enough without any difficulty and it was the easiest climb back up the stairs that I’ve had for a good while.

Nevertheless, I was still exhausted and crashed out for a while once I sat down.

The radio notes are now finished off ready for dictating and I went for tea- a taco roll with rice and veg.

Before I go to bed tonight I’ll dictate the radio notes and I’ll prepare the programme tomorrow morning. The car will come for me at about 14:30 or so if I’m lucky so it should be finished by then.

And then I want to press on with these photos that I’m supposed to be annotating. It’s taking for ever and it shouldn’t be this complicated.

Right now I’m short of things to fire my enthusiasm which is hardly a surprise given everything that’s going on right now but whatever the answer is, feeling sorry for myself isn’t it. It’s not going to be finished if I just sit here and look at it.

There is the rest of my Christmas cooking too. I need stuffing, of course, but that’s not available over here. I suppose that I could invent something with breadcrumbs, onions, garlic and herbs so I’ll have to find a decent recipe. I have some gram flour somewhere in the kitchen.

And then there are the hash browns. When I’ve made them before, they have been a dismal failure so I need to work on those too ready for Christmas.

Something else that I need to think about is to restart the ginger beer factory that I had running here at one time. I still have the bits missing out of the wall to remind me about how powerful it was.

It actually worked very well until I had to restart Leuven on a monthly basis a couple of years ago. Brewing ginger beer requires constant attention and you can’t leave it fermenting for four days while you are away, as my walls will testify.

A powerful batch, that. Shame I never got to drink any of it.

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Monday 4th December 2023 – WHEN THE ALARM …

… went off at 07:00 this morning I was well on my way through preparing the radio programme notes for which I dictated on Saturday night.

The other day when I awoke at something like a ridiculously early time, I ended up going back to sleep and having a pleasant half hour in the company of Zero.

Today though, being awake at 04:30, I couldn’t go back to sleep no matter how hard I tried and in the end round about 05:10 I gave it up as a bad job and arose from the Dead.

Last night I’d actually had an early night for once and I don’t suppose that it took me too long to go off to sleep.

But then I hauled myself out of bed at 05:10 and went for my medication.

Back in here the first thing that I did was to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I was being taken somewhere, either on board or off a ship. I was in a wheelchair and like that Brazilian company that I knew, they had 3 groups of numbers and lots of individual ranges in each group. They were checking through one particular group to see if I was in there because I was either leaving or joining the ship. I was dying to go to the bathroom but that wouldn’t make them hurry up this task any quicker and it looked as if I’d be there for ever

Later on I’d been back to visit Alison again. I was with a guy and a couple of his children, girls who were probably aged about 5 and 6. Just a couple of doors away from where Alison was living was a sign about some kind of Theme park of “Enchanted Magic” etc. I often wondered what happened there so seeing as I had 2 small children with me we took ourselves off. Eventually we managed to find the entrance because it wasn’t straightforward. We paid for the entrances – we could either have paid or opened an account which we’d settle on leaving but I preferred to pay as we went round. I went for a glass of water. There were several carafes of water that were in the direct sunlight on the windowsill so I went to look for one that was in the shade. We even talked about staying the night in this place because it was possible and the girls would love it. I happened to mention Alison and the guy said “yes we could even go out for a meal with Alison tonight”. I didn’t know what his plans were and what his intentions were but they were his daughters so I let him decide what was going on.

Finally, some famous travel author or similar was going on a walking tour through the mountains of one of these South Asian republics east of the Caucasus. He was looking for volunteers. In the end I decided after much thought that I’d like to volunteer and was accepted. It was something of a cheat in a sense because we travelled extremely light and had a support vehicle that carried the luggage for us for our overnight stops. We were walking through the foothills of these mountains. It was something of a disappointment in a certain respect because if we wanted to follow his exact route and stop exactly where he wanted it was great but if we saw something that was a little off the beaten track that interested us, he wouldn’t stop. We would either have to go ourselves and then run after him, which was complicated, or else ignore it. It happened to me on a couple of occasions, things that I would otherwise have stopped to photograph were left behind. We suddenly came round a bend in the track and came across some headstones. Most of them were American Army headstones from 1977 but a couple were American Army headstones from 1844, in the days before there was really an American Army of course. We could understand the 1977 ones but the earlier ones were a complete puzzle. I was determined to photograph them even if it led to an argument. In the end he set off and I took out my camera to photograph them but somehow a load of mud had come onto the lens. No matter how I tried I couldn’t clean the mud off the lens. I was there for ages trying to do this and he was going further and further away.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that having dreams about camera failures was something that happened quite often at one time in the recent past but we’ve not had one for a while.

Armed with a mug of instant coffee to fire up my enthusiasm I made a start on the radio programme that I mentioned. And once I’d added in the final track and the speech it over-ran by 3.6 seconds. But that didn’t take too long to edit down

Then I took myself off to look at the results of my labours yesterday.

One lesson that I learnt was that I should have lined my cake tin with baking paper before putting in the contents. When I sprung the hinge it left a few lumps stuck to the side.

Not that anyone will notice once it has the marzipan and icing on it of course. And in any case, I’ve made it to eat, not to look at.

Another lesson that I learnt was that my pudding steamer doesn’t make a perfect seal and I hadn’t wrapped up the pudding sufficiently. Steam get everywhere, into the smallest gaps, and my pudding looked rather damper than I would have liked.

In the end, I put the oven on low for an hour and gently dried the pudding inside it. Now it looks much more like a Christmas pudding.

That’s one of the (many) reasons why I keep these notes. You’ve probably noticed that there’s an index with keywords for each entry and there’s an *.sql database that controls all of the keywords.

So next year, I can just search the database for “Christmas Pudding” and call up all of the notes that I’ve made on the subject, read them to find out how I could have done better, and hopefully improve on everything next time.

With a memory like mine, you’ve no idea how much of a necessity it is.

One thing that I can say, however, is that the Christmas Cake is delicious. Those bits that stuck to the side of the tin didn’t go to waste. They made a nice breakfast.

Much of the rest of the day has been spent, when I haven’t been sleeping off my early start, finishing off the tidying up from yesterday and then sorting out the music for the next radio programme that I’ll be preparing.

The music took longer than it might have done because the programme will be broadcast on Rinus Gerritsen’s birthday. As far as I can tell, he never sang the lead on any of Golden Earring’s songs and he only wrote one or two of them.

With it being his birthday I ought to include something. It took me an age to identify a track that he wrote on his own, and even longer to actually find it and convert it for radio.

When I moved to Brussels and started running again, I had a huge cassette tape with all kinds of Golden Earring tracks that were the right speed for my running, but can I find it?

When I started running again here at night after Covid began, I think that I ran to the accompaniment of the Dead March.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg – just as good as ever. And there’s stuffing left for a taco roll tomorrow and probably to go into a leftover curry on Wednesday.

But we’ve hit a crisis in that my gas cylinder is empty, so no more sparkling water for me. Cylinders are available on line of course, but you have to pay the full whack, not just the exchange refill. And I can’t ask my cleaner to struggle back on foot from LeClerc with a refill

Tomorrow there’s the Welsh class and if the car comes for me, the Centre de Re-education. There are three sessions organised for me so I’ll be fit for nothing when I return.

If I have the chance, I’ll finish off writing the notes for this radio programme. After I’d finally sorted out the music I wrote half of them so it won’t take me long to finish them.

But right now I’m off to bed. I still haven’t recovered from my early start and I need to be on form tomorrow. But coming back up the stairs after three sessions at the Centre de Re-education will finish me off for good.

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Sunday 3rd December 2023 – IF MY CHRISTMAS …

… cake tastes as nice as did the bits that bubbled over the top of the cake tin onto the base of the oven, I shall be extremely pleased. It was phenomenal!

And yes, Liz, “bubbled over”.

Trying to bake a cake with no self-raising flour or eggs and just using sodium bicarbonate and red wine vinegar to produce a chemical reaction is very much a hit-and-miss process.

The last time I tried, when I made my bread-and-butter pudding, it exploded in my face, presumably because it was insufficiently cooled and mixed before I added the vinegar, but today it went perfectly and I was so impressed

But I was also so tired too.

Not that a really late night had much to do with it, but the fact that all through the night I had the Return Of The Stabbing Pain.

It defies my understanding, all this that goes on with my body. I’ve mentioned in the past … "and on many occasions too" – ed … the fact that at times during the night there’s a stabbing pain in my right foot as if someone is pushing a hatpin into the sole of my foot, and last night it occurred probably almost every 5 minutes

It went on for ages too and when I finally brought myself into the Land of the Living today at about 11:40, it was still going on.

After I’d had the medication I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. A group of resistance fighters of undercover British soldiers had been parachuted into the Occupied Territories to attack the headquarters of a German General. One of the people who worked in that office was a member of the Allied resistance and had been feeding them information. What they did was to make sure that this person made good her escape. Then they walked in and hauled a hand grenade through the door into the other office where the German General would normally work. The hand grenade exploded and there was a cry of agony from in there so they dashed inside. The General’s secretary was there. She’d been very badly injured by the bomb. She staggered out of the room into the office and saw that the office was empty save for these British soldiers. Her first thought was “where’s Madame So-and-so?”. It quickly became clear to her what had happened but no-one in the party of Allied soldiers had the courage to finish her off. 5 minutes later the German General came back in his car with a load of companions who’d been out somewhere. They stepped right into the middle of this carnage, rounded up the soldiers easily and led them away to be shot. During the whole of this dream the British soldiers made absolutely no effort whatever to resist capture and no effort whatever to try to escape or evade.

Several young children, both boys and girls, who had been dancing had come together under the tutelage of a well-known ballerina and were planning to put on a concert. It was called “The Icepedia of Madame Clifford”. She was busily arranging them into groups and teams etc, choreographing dances etc. These children were due to start any day now having their formal tuition in whatever this Madame Clifford wanted to do but just as they began, I awoke.

Later on, a group of 4 or us, 3 girls and me, had been away for a while on a kind-of touring holiday or road trip. As usual there was one girl whom I particularly liked but she was far too busy being friendly with the other 2 girls than she was spending any time alone with me, which was rather disappointing. When we reached the end of our journey there was some kind of issue or confrontation. The girl whom I liked ended up having lost her clothes so she was there basically with all that she had on. I noticed that she was wandering off to the car of one of the other girls so I went over to ask her if she was going to borrow some clothes from her. She replied “no” so I wondered if there was anything that I could do for her or to help her, give her a lift somewhere as she had no clothes, no money etc but she assured me that she’d be OK. I couldn’t actually see how but she was quite adamant. In the end I could hear the 3 girls making up some other kind of plans to meet somewhere on the way home. I felt rather annoyed that I was being left out of everything but I didn’t say anything. I got into my car, and then realised that I was going to be rather short of money for going home. Someone passing by pointed out that one of my tyres had a slow puncture so I wondered how I’d manage to resolve that too. Then the girl pulled up in her car alongside me so I began to talk to her. I had it in my mind to say that I was jealous of the fact that she spent more time with the others than she had with me etc but for some reason I just could not push the words out of my head and out of my mouth to say them. It ended up really unsatisfactory from my point of view. Then the other 2 girls turned up and talked about meeting somewhere in Munich or wherever. I realised that my timetable was going to be really tight and I couldn’t even make it if I was invited. I wondered how these girls were going to do it too. It turned out that they were going to be flying so where was the one with no clothes and no money going to find the money for that? I set off anyway, disappointedly and came to a road junction where there was a car waiting. I waited behind it but it didn’t move. I suddenly realised thet there was no driver in it so I pulled around it, checked that the road junction was clear and began to drive away.

A disabled boy with whom I used to work appeared in a dream somewhere and we talked about my illness. I told him that I had a lot of appointments unofficially registered on 22nd October and I was going to go to the hospital to talk to a few people about how things were going on. We’d been parked in Shavington outside the small parade of shops talking, then he pulled out of the parade without looking and nearly hit another car that was coming our way. Luckily he managed to stop in time but the car carried on driving. We ended up following it for a while then both it and we turned into Chestnut Avenue and began to go down the hill. He’d completely lost the thread of what he’d been saying and told me that that was a problem when his concentration was disturbed. He lost track of just about everything.

And then I was with Alison, Hans and Jackie. We were in Germany somewhere going for a meal. We all piled into one of the cars and someone drove to this restaurant out in the countryside. We went in and the restaurant was actually up some stairs but I struggled up. We eventually managed to find a place to sit. We had quite a good time talking about all kinds of different things. When the bill came mine was €30:06. While I was sorting out my money everyone disappeared. I heard them downstairs. Someone was saying something to Jackie about “shall I run you to the station now?”. That took me by surprise because I understood that we would all be staying together for the weekend. I went downstairs and to my surprise I walked down the stairs without my crutches. We were all milling around in the cloakroom gathering our clothes together. Hans told a joke that made everyone laugh. he said “that was one of Eric’s”. We collected all our coats and set off outside. It was pouring down with rain. Hans made a remark about how lucky we were that we had hats with us. He would be soaked to death walking to the car.

A group of us from the radio had gone to watch Man play in Brussels. The auditorium was packed but I managed to find a little place at the side of one of the mixing tables to put the ZOOM H1 so that it would record the sounds of the group. I wandered off to do something but when I came back there was a family sitting around this table so I went up to tell them that they needed to be very quiet because there was a live microphone recording taking place. They apologised and said that they hadn’t known that it was my seat. They stood up and left. Taking advantage of the empty seat I sat down. I suddenly realised that I hadn’t brought any spare batteries for the Zoom. it it goes flat I’ll be having a real problem. I switched off the machine while the preliminaries were taking place but just them all of the musicians came onstage. I had to switch it on again hurriedly. I’d done it so quickly that I wasn’t sure whether it was on or off. I had the feeling that this was turning into another complete mess. After the first couple of numbers I was chatting to one of the guys from the radio. I told him that if we have issues about space there are only two numbers that are absolutely essential in the recording. I told him of one but I couldn’t remember the name of the second. At that point the dictaphone began to go flat so I gathered up my things and left. After I’d been walking home after 10 minutes I realised first of all that I still had the elastic strap around my ankles and secondly, I didn’t have my crutches. I walked past the street fair and the place where people left food out for the live slugs and fish. I came to a set of steps but I thought that I better hadn’t push my luck too much with these steps without my crutches. I walked the long way round and headed home. I remember thinking that I hope that everything would be fine from now on because if I lose my crutches that’s really the end of everything. I’ve no idea what I’d do then. That was the thought that was worrying me for the rest of the way home.

Something like that actually did happen to me once while I was recording an outside broadcast. The batteries in the ZOOM H8 went flat and the spare batteries were just as dead.

Of course, I haven’t done any outside broadcasts since last Summer before I went to Canada, and for obvious reasons too.

Another reason why I’m exhausted, and probably the most relevant one, is that I’ve been on my feet all afternoon. So much so that my back, my thighs and the muscles in my calves are aching in places where I didn’t even know that I had places.

Firstly, I prepared the mix for the next batch of biscuits. Fresh ginger, fleur d’orange and ground almonds together with the usual spices

And anyone who has been following these pages for any length of time won’t need to be told about what happened just as I was up to my elbows in flour and vegan margarine. For the benefit of new readers, the telephone rang.

There was no other option but to answer it. It was my neighbour, the President of the Residents’ Committee, wanting to know how I was and what happened on Friday so I cleaned myself up and had a good, lengthy chat with her.

She was the one who tipped me the wink about the apartment downstairs. At one of the residents’ meetings the owner of the apartment just happened to mention quite casually that he was thinking about selling up.

She told me and the owner and I had negotiated a price, agreed a deal and I’d paid the deposit to purchase all before he’d even had time to consult an estate agent.

All I have to do now is to wait for the lease to end and the tenant leaves the property, and then I won’t have all these stairs to climb and I can install a proper kitchen and shower. And, it goes without saying, find a cat to adopt me

Of course, the tenant can always leave before the lease expires. “Negotiations are proceeding”.

Next step was to make my Christmas pudding. That was quite straightforward and it was all placed in the steaming container that I’d greased and lined with baking paper. Three hours of steaming in a bain marie to cook it, and seeing as I didn’t have one, I had to invent something.

But that’s now steamed and it’s currently cooling down before I open it to see how it’s looking. And I hope that it works.

Then there was the Christmas cake. That really took some mixing too but I do have to admit that my soaked fruit looked and smelt delicious. Anyway, it all went together, thanks to everything that I’d bought from LeClerc and fitted quite nicely into my moule à charnière.

You’ve no idea how difficult it is to find proper cake tins here in France so when LeClerc had brought in a pile of stuff for a baking sale a couple of years ago I bought two – a large one and a small one that fits into an air fryer.

Yes, I have a cunning plan about that.

Earlier on I’d taken out of the freezer the last of the pizza dough, and while the cake was baking I was busy defrosting and then assembling my pizza.

When I was satisfied that the cake was baked properly I put the pizza in to bake and while it was baking I rolled out the biscuit dough and cut out the biscuits.

Once the pizza was cooked I put the biscuits in the oven and while they were baking I ate the pizza.

So now I have a Christmas Cake, a Christmas pudding, 40 ginger and orange biscuits and a partridge in a pear tree and I’m totally exhausted. I really am.

What I should have done today is to edit a radio programme but I’ve not had time as yet and right now I don’t have the energy to even move. I’ll have a hot drink and then go to bed.

But while I was making my hot drink the phone rang yet again. For several years in the early 1970s I had a girlfriend whom I knew from school. However we ended up going our separate ways, as you do when you’re that kind of age.

In 2006 Liz (not “this” Liz but “that” Liz”) and I were on our way from a meeting of the Disabled Students Group in Bristol (Liz was in charge of Student Support and I was on the Disability Committee) to a University Region 9 Meeting in Newcastle upon Tyne.

We stopped off at a pub in between Shrewsbury and Oswestry for a meal, and who should walk in?

Quite honestly, you could have put her in her school uniform and she would have been exactly as I remembered her – not a single day older.

Since then, we’ve kept in some kind of desultory touch.

So now that I’ve had my hot drink I’m going to go to bed. A good sleep will do me good, as long as I don’t have the person with the hatpin again.

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Saturday 2nd December 2023 – I AWOKE THIS …

… morning at 05:30, even after all of my exertions last night. And I was feeling so awake that by 05:40 I was seriously thinking about leaving the stinking pit.

But I’m glad I didn’t.

Some time later I must have fallen asleep again. And I’m glad that I did because during that little period I had a visitor. Zero came to visit me.

In fact her presence so startled me that I awoke bolt upright. And this time I actually did leave the bed before the alarm went off. Not my much, it has to be said, but any period of time is worth noting.

First port of call was to take my medication. And that was especially important seeing as how I’d abstained yesterday.

Second port of call was to check the temperature. When I lived in the Auvergne the temperature was just one of the several dozen records that I took twice a day so I could make graphs that would hopefully show a correlation between the different types of weather and the different types of energy that was being produced and consumed but I don’t do anything at all like that here.

What was important today was the fact that even though we’re so close to the sea, everything was iced up outside.

And sure enough, at 07:00 this morning the temperature was minus 3.5°C. That’s the lowest temperature that I’ve seen here, but it’s still a far cry from how things were in the Auvergne. Rosemary rang up for a chat later on (as you will find out in due course) and she told me that the temperature in the Combrailles had dropped to minus 7°C and as things had warmed up in the morning they’d had a fall of snow.

But as for my temperature (well, the temperature outside actually) it was enough to put me off going out.

After yesterday’s exertions I was really exhausted but I wondered whether I should force myself to go out but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, if I fall over I can’t pick myself up again and staggering about on the ice in sub-zero temperatures is a recipe for disaster.

Instead, I came in here and finished off my order for LeClerc. I was going to send it off on Monday but instead I added in everything that I would otherwise buy at the Carrefour and it was on its way even before I’d had my morning coffee.

There were no tomatoes on delivery today but my cleaner usually goes to the market in town on Saturday morning so I sent her a message and she duly obliged.

Next stop was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And, more importantly, who had come with me. I’d been collecting up tools, the kind that you’d find on market stalls in the northern UK. I’d been making a collection of all kinds of stuff. Then I’d been going through it and deciding what I wanted to keep and what I didn’t, and maybe I would advertise the rest for sale or something like that, maybe even visit a market stall to try to sell them or even try to have a market stall myself so much of last night was spent going through this collection of tools and making decisions. There were things like hammers and drifts, taps and dies, files etc that I would have loved to have had at another moment.

And in a certain region of India a man was having an extreme amount of difficulty trying to buy many items that would be considered to be normal, average everyday use in the rest of the World. At a certain moment he won £721 in a lottery for deprived areas so used his winnings to place an internet order to buy stuff on line that he could have sent to him. He went on one of these reality TV programmes to talk about his winnings and his order. Some visiting dignitary from his Province’s Government climbed onto the stage without invitation and immediately began to denounce everything that he’d ordered that had not yet been delivered, claiming that it was all Chinese warmongering equipment, even things like barbecue grills, and had no place in an ordinary decent home in his Province. he was picking up these things and throwing them about on the stage, coming out with all kinds of rhetoric. I tried to calm him down but he wasn’t going to have anything about this so in the end I reluctantly decided that the only way to deal with this matter is to have a huge confrontation with him on the TV and embarrass him by his lack of knowledge and obvious prejudice.

Later on there was a couple of domineering parents who had 4 teenage children. One day they decided that they would assassinate some kind of Russian emigré noblewoman. He knew where this noble emigré woman went to relax so the arranged to be present with rifles. As the woman was leaning against a wall smoking, the father gave a signal and everyone levelled their rifles across the room at this woman relaxing in the doorway. At the very last moment she saw them and swayed to one side as they fired. Instead of being killed outright one hit her in the cheek, another hit her in the shoulder and the other 4 missed. In a fit of anger she stormed over to this table where these 6 people were sitting and tore an absolute strip off the father and demanded that he give her a glass of gin. He was astonished that she was still moving and insisting on a glass of gin, which he poured for her. First he took a mouthful himself before giving it to her. One of this children piped up “just look at that! Now you can see what it is that we as kids have had to suffer for all our lives. He can’t even give someone a drink without having to take a drink of it himself. You’ve just met him for 10 minutes and he’s treated you like this but this is how he’s treated us all out lives”.

This was when I awoke at 05:30 and as I said just now, when I went back to sleep Zero put in an appearance. I was at school and it was the middle of summer. There were loads of kids milling around. I’d been working on a few of the radio programmes. One of the guys who ran the radio asked me if I’d put together a pile of programmes that had been broadcast previously which were my favourites. I had an enormous amount of difficulty trying to find the ones. I was looking for some certain live concerts but every time I opened a folder it was the wrong one. Eventually I put 4 or 5 together onto a memory stick and walked out of my classroom ready to go downstairs. I was wearing a shirt with no sleeves that was completely open, a tie that was actually around my neck and not around the collar of the shirt and a pair of shorts which I never ever wear. You could see the skin imperfections on my legs and you could also a great big scar running down the inside of my right arm. As I walked down the steps there were all these girls sitting down there. One or two made a remark about my sartorial elegance. I explained that if they thought that I would wear full school uniform on the hottest day of the year they are totally mistaken. One of the girls talking to me had a very white pasty face and hair as if she’d been covered in flour. There was another one, a much younger girl, who was flirting around with me as she was talking so naturally I was flirting around with her too as I was replying. Then I set off and ended up in Market Street in Crewe in the period before they demolished it all. Zero came in at some point as I was going through the directories looking for these particular files. Whether she was helping me or whether she was actually involved in one of the programmes I can’t remember now but she was certainly there as I was searching through these directories looking for the specific files.

But what is going on here? I’m flirting around with another girl while Zero is in the immediate vicinity? I really must be losing my touch these days!

By this time the shopping – including my bigarreaux confits – had arrived and I was in time to watch the delivery guy go head over heels on the stairs up to my apartment. No bones broken so he was lucky. Slabs of solid granite are really hard when you fall on them.

Before I’d sent off the order I checked the promotions to see what was on special offer, and they had broccoli heads at 99 cents so I’d ordered one.

It was more stalk than florets so after I’d trimmed it and blanched the florets ready for freezing, I decided to have a broccoli stalk soup for lunch.

  • Cut up an onion and fry it in oil in the base of a heavy saucepan
  • Add in your herbs. I used
    • chervil
    • tarragon
    • coriander
  • add in a sliced lump of garlic
  • dice your broccoli stalk finely and add it in
  • dice a potato ditto
  • fry it all up nicely for a few minutes
  • add back enough of the water in which you blanched the broccoli florets
  • Simmer it until everything in there is extremely soft, and then add in some cream. I used soya yoghurt as I have plenty that needs eating quickly
  • whizz it up with your magic wand
  • eat it with some of the crusty bread that you remembered to add onto your order with LeClerc

Fighting off (sometimes unsuccessfully) a few waves of sleep I carried on writing the notes for Canada 2022. I’m still wandering around the vieux port – I had no idea that I’d taken so many photos there.

Rosemary rang me up too (as I said just now) to find out how things went yesterday so I told her the bad news. She tells me that in the Spring next year she’ll come to visit if her operation passes ok.

If she does, I hope that she remembers to bring with her my big bass combo amp that’s sitting in her shed. That’s the one that I found in a pawn shop around the corner from Sandra’s in Ottawa in 2019.

And while we’re on the subject, sometime in the future I’ll be expecting another parcel delivery from Canada. In the back of Strider were a Fender bass and combo amp that travelled around North America with me. Now that Strider is, apparently, no more, it’ll be in the way at my niece’s house and I need to bring it here.

Apparently my talk about Christmas cake earlier in the week inspired Rosemary and she checked in her cupboard where she found that she had all of the important ingredients for a Christmas Cake.

She’s had all of her fruit soaking since then but now she can’t find her baking tin. And at least I can smile because although I moved to the Auvergne in 2006 and still haven’t unpacked yet, Rosemary moved to France more than 30 years ago and she is far from being unpacked even yet.

Anyway we agreed that cooking and baking is a fine hobby to have if your mobility is restricted. You don’t need to move around much and you can really enjoy the fruits of your labours – in the literal sense of the word.

Tea tonight was a burger on a bap, which I can enjoy now that I’ve found that I can order on-line the special burgers that I like. With a baked potato and salad it was delicious.

So tomorrow I have a lot to do. Before I go to bed I’ll be dictating the radio notes that I prepared the other day (if I get pull my head round in the right direction) so that I can prepare a programme tomorrow.

Then there’s the Christmas Cake and Pudding that need baking too.

Finally too, I have biscuits to bake. I had a couple of store-bought packets lying around but while the first packet was fine, the odour that came from the second one that I opened today convinced me that I didn’t need to taste them.

There’s some freh ginger lying around, some almonds and a few other bits and pieces so that looks as if it will make a really nice biscuit mix. It’s a good job that the vegan butter was on special offer today and I took full advantage by buying an extra packet.

So before I go to bed I’ll have a play about on the guitar and work my way through some more of my playlist. I might have a good run through RECOVERING THE SATELLITES

"We only stay in orbit
For a moment of time
And then you’re everybody’s satellite
I wish that you were mine"

Now who does that remind me of?

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Friday 1st December 2023 – THE BAD NEWS …

… is that my carcinogenic protein has now been found in my nervous system

The good news is that the doctor whom I saw in Paris at lunchtime is keen to have a go at tackling it. And who am I to object to that? What do I have to lose? My marbles – I lost them a long time ago. In fact, I doubt if I ever found them.

But it’s nice to have some good news. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any, and that’s not a cue to talk about those three days that are missing from my blog at the end of August 2019 aboard THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR either.

But while we’re on the subject of good news … "well, one of us is" – ed … I had a really good session on the acoustic guitar working my way through part of my playlist. I reckoned that if I was going to spend 4 hours sitting in a car going to Paris, that would be as good a time as any to catch up on my beauty sleep so I may as well make the most of my own personal time.

The trouble is that most of my playlist is nostalgia-based and I have a lot of stories to tell about the songs on it. For example, in REAL LIFE my heroine comes from the Outaouais with black curly hair and, quite probably, regular readers of this rubbish will recall the name by which she might be known.

Then there’s MARY JANE’S LAST DANCE. "I’m tired of screwing up, tired of going down, tired of myself, tired of this town". I remember singing this to myself driving down from Crewe to Dover Docks through the night with all of my life that remained packed into the back of an old Cortina Estate

And I could go on … "not with a pickaxe through your neck, you couldn’t" – ed …

So abandoning yet another good rant for a while, I hauled myself off to bed.

As usual, being a very light sleeper and having to make sure that I’m out of bed promptly, I had an enormous amount of trouble going to sleep.

But in between the spells of wakefulness I must have gone off to sleep because the alarm awoke me.

First things first – I had a good wash and put on some clean clothes. If I’m going to be poked and prodded about I might as well make an effort.

Second thing was to check the papers in my backpack to make sure that I had them all. My sandwiches were in there too – I’d made them up the night before. It’s always a good plan to have a few bits of bread in the freezer.

Finally, there were the dictaphone notes. Something had gone wrong and we’d had a calamity. As a result everyone in our house had to go out on some kind of visit to someone important at some ridiculous hour of night in the middle of winter. There was a big storm raging. This meeting went on apparently much longer that it was supposed to and it was gone midnight when we all finally struggled back. I was in front having to feel my way along the wall and along the clothes line etc in order to arrive at the building. I eventually ended up in the outhouse to the house. I eventually managed to put the key into the door and open it. I threw on the light switch but there was very little power in the batteries so there was barely a glimmer of light illuminating anything. I could see that this was just going from bad to worse to worse.

Later I was at the University of Duluth in Minnesota last night watching a strange kind of game, something of a cross between basketball and ice hockey. Each team consists of both males and females. The aim was as in basketball or ice hockey to work the ball down towards the goal area where you could lob the ball over the crossbar. If it hit the ground you’d have a free shot at scoring a point, similar to basketball. The net was a kind-of thick arrangement where it was quite easy for the ball to be lost inside. Then it would vibrate and shake around, then dart out in all kinds of strange directions and everyone would run after it. I was watching from behind one of the goals because I knew someone from Duluth who was taking part. Duluth was leading up until the final minute when the opposition managed to get the ball over the bar and bounce on the ground behind which meant that they could have a free shot. However their free shot was held up in the net and the whistle blew before it was ejected. I went to have a chat to my friend afterwards but he couldn’t stay around because he’d only turned up to play the game. He was busy with his harvest back on his own farm.

Strangely enough, I’ve never been to Duluth. I did actually have a passage booked on a freighter going from Ijmuijen to Chicago and Duluth once but at the outbreak of Covid all ad-hoc passengers were excluded from freight sailings and as far as I’m aware they haven’t restarted.

Finally I went into work on Monday but half the cars wouldn’t start and there was a big meeting taking place. The boss asked me to go to the Centre des Urgences to explain and arrange for some assistance. All of a sudden I had a mental blank and couldn’t remember where it was. For about 10 minutes I was wandering aimlessly about the building even ending up down in the basement again in the stores with Henri. Eventually someone explained to me where it was and I found it but it seemed to be for people who were having to travel at last-minute rather than anything else Nevertheless I went over and began to explain the problem but a girl sitting behind one of the desks shouted at me “can’t you see that I’m busy? Can’t you see that I have plenty of other things to do?”. I stormed right over to her and gave her a complete and utter mouthful of exactly what I thought of her interruption and then went over to find someone else with whom I could speak at another desk.

The car came for me bang on time and as I was struggling downstairs the visiting nurse was running up on his way to attend to my neighbour.
"Do you want a Covid injection?" he asked. "I have one left over"
Do bears have picnics in the woods?

So there I was, a taxi driver at the bottom of the stairs, the nurse and I halfway up, me with no clothes on my upper body receiving an injection. It must have made a wonderful sight, but I wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity.

The drive to Paris was uneventful apart from the traffic around the Péripherique of course. And finding the correct building in the hospital complex (because it really is a maze) was quite straightforward.

Finding the entrance however was another thing, and once we found it, finding the reception was even more complicated.

And then I had the doctor, and we had quite an interesting discussion.
"Do you know why the hospital at Montlucon took out your spleen?" he asked.
"To be honest" I replied "I don’t think that even they knew why they did it"

And then I recounted my tale of woe about the events that took place between November 2015 and March 2016 with which regular readers of this rubbish will recall being regaled at the time.

But retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, and he told me that the last lumbar puncture revealed traces of the carcinogenic protein in the liquid that flows around my nervous system

So that, dear reader, is that.

But I’ve had to fight all my life and even if I were ready to stop, I wouldn’t know how to.

Over 30 years ago I met the old blues singer TS McPhee in a snooker club in Crewe and we had a good chat. He wrote A SONG ABOUT DYING "I’m like a ship on the ocean that’s rolling from side to side".

He goes on to say "I’ve done everything that I ever set out to do". Well, he might, but I’m a long way short of that and so I’m going to keep on keeping on, as BOB DYLAN WOULD SAY

He’s keen to get in there and fight too, which is good news. It’s always nice to have allies and I don’t have many of them.

His plan is to call me in after the New Year and have me stay for a few days. He plans another one of these really agonising lumbar punctures to check the results, and then he’s going to spend some time examining my heart.

What he reckons is that following the disastrous sessions of chemotherapy that I had and which were rapidly abandoned, there might be some kind of tablet that might stimulate the nerve cells to fight back in the same way that Aranesp stimulates the red blood cells.

However it’s not for the faint-hearted – and he means that in the literal sense. He needs to know if my heart will withstand the strain. If not, he’ll have to think of a Plan B.

He told me about the side effect too, one of which is “bad attacks of cramp” however I don’t really know whether I have any vacant spaces in which to fit any more attacks of cramp.

At one time I started recording the attacks of cramp that I was having but for quite a while now, the only recording of attacks of cramp that takes place is when I go for a day without any, and I bet that you’ve not noticed too many instances of that.

After he threw me out I thought that I’d find a quiet place to eat my butties undisturbed and then phone the driver to say that I was ready but I’d hardly taken the first bite out of my bread before I was caught in flagrante delicto

Apart from the traffic leaving Paris and on the péripherique de Caen we had a straightforward drive home and I drifted away with the fairies now and again.

We were back here at 17:50 and the first thing that I did was to have an energy drink and then make a massive mug of hot chocolate. I’d had nothing whatever to drink all day.

After a rest I had another helping of sausage beans and chips. Something quick and easy.

But after my exertions today I’m off to bed. I’m not going shopping tomorrow. I really can’t haul myself off outside after today.

Instead I’ll send off my supermarket order and add onto it the things that I’d usually buy at the Carrefour.

Discretion is the better part of valour after the events of today.

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Thursday 30th November 2023 – THE PERISHING CAR …

… never came to pick me up today to take me to the Centre de Re-education.

There I was, just like Martin Adey and "all revved up with no place to go", sitting on the chair in the dining area by the door wearing my coat and shoes and nothing happened.

After a while I rang them up. It seems that yesterday’s driver had forgotten to pass on to the dispatching the new schedule that I’d received because my trips for next week weren’t recorded either.

We had the issue about the trip to Paris tomorrow not being recorded and having to ring up to remind them earlier in the week. It seems that despite their ultra-modern fleet of Skoda saloons, the wheels are coming off their operation.

Mind you, it’s probably as well that I didn’t go out because the weather has finally turned. It’s freezing outside, threatening snow, and snow is promised for Paris tomorrow.

Mind you, snow round here is nothing like what we’re used to.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we lived back in the Auvergne temperatures of minus 18°C were not uncommon. We’d have a metre of snow overnight and be snowed in for a couple of weeks. Every year round about the end of October we’d go into the big city and stock up with supplies because you never knew when you’d be able to go out again.

And then into the forest with the chainsaw to cut your wood, store your water somewhere because your well would freeze over and then finally make sure that you had plenty of good books and films.

The winter of 2012/13 is the one that we’ll all remember. The first snow was 27th October and the last snow was 25th May. I went round to Cecile’s to help her hang a door and didn’t make it back home for 6 months. However, the snow didn’t have a great deal to do with that, I have to admit.

They were exciting times and I enjoyed every minute of it, and had I still had my health I’d be down there now. But I’m going all nostalgic again and I really have to stop doing this

But while we’re on the subject of nostalgia … "well, one of us is" – ed … I ended up going to bed quite late again last night. Once I’d picked up the guitar I carried on until quite late working my way through my old acoustic playlist.

That of course is the advantage of living in a building where the walls are 1.20m thick of solid granite – grès de chausey. I can make as much noise as I like and no-one can hear a thing. Much better than when I lived in Expo and the neighbours used to complain about the noise from my headphones.

But eventually I staggered off to bed and that was that.

When the alarm went off I wandered off into the dining area for my medication and then came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was sorting through my images and came across a folder. When I looked I found another folder with other photos in from the same situation. I was going to merge it in but found yet another one. I kept on finding all these folders. All the while that I was doing this I was hearing that “Jeeves and Wooster” music that was going on in my head. I wasn’t sure why. But this de-duplicating my backup drives is really getting to me at the moment isn’t it?

But the music is explained quite easily. While I was eating my tea I was watching a JEEVES AND WOOSTER episode starring Steven Fry and Hugh Laurie, and then back in here on the Old-Time Radio an episode with Richard Briers and Michael Hordern came round straight away.

Then there was one of these garden parties taking place. There were a lot of children there dressed in ball gowns etc. There was one particular small boy who was very keen on talking to a small girl but she didn’t want anything to do with boys so she kept on running away. It made everyone laugh which really upset him. As the evening drew on, up on the podium someone from the crowd began to recite a poem about a boy and a girl. At that moment a butterfly appeared. It hovered around the boy’s face for a while so he breathed out gently. His breath wafted it towards the girl. She looked at it and began to smile. You could feel the hush of anticipation from the crowd as they saw this. Suddenly the girl had an incredible fit of coughing and swallowed the butterfly. Once again, everyone burst out laughing and the boy and this time the girl too were extremely distraught.

And finally I was back at the kids’ garden party last night, going through the images. All of the sudden I gave a cough and wiped out a whole directory full of images that I’d taken of the young girl in her very nice ball gown.

Once I’d awoken I sat down to make a start on the next radio programme.

While I was in hospital I’d used the time to select the music for several programmes and this one was one of them. Consequently, it didn’t take long to pair them up.

And then in a mad fit of bravado that came from I’ve no idea where I sat down and wrote out the notes for all of it – well, all of the 10 tracks that have been selected so far. I don’t choose the last track and write the notes for that until the day that I assemble to bits.

Nothing nostalgic about anything in this one, which makes a change. In fact, I seem to have run out of steam in this respect.

The cleaner came round after lunch so I stayed in here and wrote out the notes for a few more photographs from Canada 2022 but I’ve run aground at the moment.

The big difficulty is that I can’t remember why I took a few of the photos. I always travel with a dictaphone and make a few verbal notes of most of them but sometimes some of the subjects of the photos are so evident that they need no contemporary notes.

But two things happen when you reach my age. The first thing is that you forget absolutely everything.
"And what’s the second thing?" – ed
"I don’t know. I can’t remember"

That’s how things are. I can remember verbatim the words to any obscure rock song from the late 1960s that you can care to mention, but ask me why I’ve just walked into the kitchen ….

My best friend in this apartment is my white board and washable markers.

With no Centre de Re-education I did some more work on the back-up drive and then went for tea. Something from the European Vegan Burger Mountain with pasta and veg in spicy tomato sauce.

Rosemary and I had a quick chat too. She’d found some wild mushrooms and wanted to know if they were edible. I explained to her that everything is edible once but I’ve no idea about subsequently.

While I was at it I told her about the delicious mushroom soup that Nerina once made for me
"This is delicious" I said. "Where did you find the recipe?"
"In an Agatha Christie novel" she replied.

Tomorrow I’m off to Paris for my appointment with Destiny. We’ll see how that works out but we’ll have to be pragmatic. An 8-hour car drive in bad winter weather is not ideal but at least I don’t have to do the driving.

There will be no medication, no breakfast and nothing to drink before I go, on the basis that what doesn’t go in won’t want to come out, but I’ll make some sandwiches all the same. My appointment is at 12:40 so there will be a moment for me to have a bite to eat before we set off for home.

There are plenty of cafés and restaurants there at the hospital but I won’t be able to walk there, especially if we have snow and ice covering the paths.

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Wednesday 29th November 2023 – TONIGHT’S LEFTOVER CURRY …

… was the best that I’ve ever made. And I’m not sure why because there were just the usual ingredients in it and nothing else.

Mind you, having said that, the garlic naan was one of the best too. So all that I can think of is that the soya yoghurt with which I made it is different from the usual type, and that might account for it.

The naan bread was rather flat though, but as I mentioned the other day, I made the dough the wrong size and that will probably account for that. If it’s less dough, it’ll be less thick in the frying pan

Anyway, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, I almost went to bed without dictating the radio notes last night. It was very much a last-minute thing and I ended up going to bed considerably later than planned

And there’s something going on that I can’t explain and which I noticed the last time I dictated the radio notes that even with the text right before my very eyes, I ended up once more making a total pig’s ear of it. I seem to be losing the ability to read out loud right now

When the alarm went off I was out of bed fairly quickly and staggered off into the dining area for my medication.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. I was working on a 3D project last night, having to track down various poses that I needed to create for part of it. Someone had sent me a link so I was busy looking through these poses to find out which ones would be the best to incorporate that I could amend easily to give the effect that I wanted. All of this became some kind of confusion between what was going on with this project and what was going on in real life during the dream. The outlines became rather blurred about it. At one point there was a report that someone had reported one of my posts on the subject to a moderator but I couldn’t think of what it was that I’d posted that could possibly be contentious no matter how much I racked my brains. In the end I still hadn’t finished this project at all. I was a long way from the end.

And later on a new factory had opened. I’d obtained a job there in technology so I went along to start. The very first task was that the company had a fleet of old lorries and the idea was to fill in the seams with resin and put plastic beading in to prevent them from rusting. This was something that I’d never done before so I wasn’t very quick. The guy supervising was having something of a moan. I was doing the best that I could but I thought to myself “well it can only get better than this”. We carried on doing jobs like this. I ended up talking to another new recruit doing a similar kind of job to me. We talked about our home life and the usual things you’d discuss at work. All of a sudden I noticed that everyone was disappearing from the floor so I followed them. It was break-time and there was a canteen but the food in there was astonishing. It was like a wedding buffet. Of course there was coffee etc but there were cakes, pastries, sandwiches, cheese, etc. I thought to myself that I’d never seen anything at all like this in a factory or office setting. I was thinking of all the people whom I knew who would really like to be there and how much weight would I put on after having worked here for a couple of weeks with all of this.

While I was checking my mails I had a listen to the radio programme that will be broadcast this coming weekend, and then sent it off for inserting in the stream.

And then I attacked the one for which I dictated the notes last night and, as I expected, editing it took longer than it ought. By the time that I’d added in the final track and the notes for that I had overrun by 10 seconds or so but that didn’t take long to edit out

Although you won’t be able to hear it for 8 months, it’ll be one of nostalgia.

At one point not long after I’d left school I had a girlfriend whose father ran a pub in the wilds of South Cheshire. Her brother was a big pal of a guy who played drums in a local rock band that had a couple of LPs but never actually went anywhere.

A couple of years ago, quite by accident, I bumped into the drummer and he sent me copies of the albums. I’ve been gradually inserting the odd track here and there in my programmes as I go along and there will be one coming up in this programme

When I finished I had a good scrub up at the sink and then printed out the paperwork that I needed to give to the driver about my trip to Paris.

And, of course, no matter how many papers I actually produce, I’m always going to be short of one. But anyone who has ever lived in France will know all about that.

There were two sessions today at the Centre de Re-education. A physiotherapy session with Severine of course, but also a group relaxation session which struck me as being rather pointless but it costs me nothing so who am I to complain?

Severine had me working hard though and I was totally exhausted by the time that I returned and in fact once I’d had my hot chocolate I crashed out.

But despite being exhausted, I made it up the stairs with fewer issues than Friday so it can’t be a question of fatigue.

It can’t be a question of what’s in my backpack when I’ve been shopping either because taking it off last Friday made no difference. So I dunno.

During whatever time was left today I finished off the photos from Canada 2022 and I’m now busy writing up the notes. Right now I’m walking down from the Basilique through the old town to the port to watch the shipping sailing up the St Lawrence River.

Tea has already been mentioned, so right now I’m going to have a hot drink and then I’ll be off to bed.

Tomorrow the cleaner is coming (she swapped her day from today) and I have another couple of sessions at the Centre de Re-education. There are plenty of other things to do too and I’ll have to chase down this missing paperwork for Paris

A decent night’s sleep will do me the world of good, especially if I can have some pleasant company during the night. Not that it ever seems to work out like that.

One of these days Castor will come back to visit me so I’m going to have a bash on the guitar and let RICHARD THOMPSON HELP ME CHASE AWAY A FEW OF MY DEMONS

"It’s a dangerous game I played
I threw my soul and life away "

It was a mistake to rake up this nostalgia thing today.

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Tuesday 28th November 2023 – MY BREAD AND BUTTER …

… pudding went the Way of the West this morning.

It was looking rather suspicious yesterday and this morning when I opened the cake tin my suspicions were confirmed.

Either it wasn’t cooked through thoroughly enough or else my cake tin isn’t air-tight or, more likely, it’s a combination of them both.

It has to be said that I’m actually baking with a cheap table-top oven and I’ve long-known that it’s pretty much hit and miss. To cook anything in it I have to increase the temperature 20° and increase the cooking time by 50%

What’s sad about all of this is that in the back of Caliburn not only do I have a proper built-in oven that I picked up in Macon from Jean-Marc last summer after he and Jacqueline remodelled their kitchen, I also have the units to fit it that I picked up from IKEA in Munich. It’s handy having friends who live next door to the largest IKEA in Europe.

But be that as it may, in the van they are and in the van they’ll stay because there is no way on this earth that I can bring them up here in the state in which I find myself.

As for airtight containers, I have quite a few more and better ones of those too but they are up on the top shelf in the kitchen and I can’t reach them. What kind of state am I in that I have a set of steps here but I can’t climb up them?.

Anyway, that’s enough of my moaning. Life isn’t all about being dealt a good hand of cards, it’s all about how you play the cards that you’ve been dealt and instead of worrying about problems, I ought to be thinking about solutions.

All of that will give me something about which I can think while I’m in bed tonight, so I’m hoping that it will be a longer night than last night because what with one thing and another (and once you make a start you’ll be surprised at how many other things there are) I ended up going to bed late last night.

And having spent all that time talking about garlic keeping away vampires and my three favourite young ladies, I had a visitor last night. TOTGA came to see me.

When the alarm went off at 07:00 I staggered to my feet and wobbled off into the dining area for my medication. And back here afterwards I listened to the dictaphone notes. I’d been a guest in someone’s house and had been interested on one or two items in someone’s collection. Every time I went to have a closer look at them I was suspected of stealing them. The whole situation in this country house-type of place became very complicated. There was one of the guests, a girl with one leg. She was wearing a pair of trousers. She asked me if I’d change the trousers and put a pair of shorts on her. Of course that would be something that I would find extremely difficult to do so I tried to hedge. In the end she explained to me that I was the only person here so it had to be me who would do it. The girl and I had to think of a way in which it would be possible to do it. Every idea with which I came up seemed to have a pitfall in it that wouldn’t make it work. And that seems to be par for the course these days.

And then later on TOTGA turned up, as I mentioned earlier. I’d gone with someone to some kind of club meeting because a guy had some Land Rover wheels and some kind of jacket for sale. My friend was very interested in them so I agreed to go with him to have a look and to help him. We arrived there and he found the person whom he was wanting to see so he wandered off for a chat. While I was wandering around on my own I came across TOTGA and we began to talk. What had actually happened was that there was some kind of snake slithering along the ground. All of a sudden its tongue darted out and caught a most enormous beetle, swallowed it, and slithered off on its way. I pointed it out to TOTGA and asked her if it was a snake or a slow worm. She didn’t know and neither did it. I’d taken some photos of it but the colours looked rather weak and insipid so we ended up talking about colours, palettes etc for photography and images. She told me that she used a palette that was called something like “City of Oklahoma”. I began to do some research and found out a few things about it but couldn’t find out how to load it up. In the meantime my friend came over to me, handed me his glasses in the glasses case and told me to put them in my pocket. I put them in my pocket but just the something hit me really hard on the foot. I thought that the glasses had fallen through a hole and dropped on my foot that way but they were still in my coat. It can’t have been them. I couldn’t see anything at all around there that might have dropped onto my foot. My friend gave me one or two other things, said “come on, give me a hand” and began to collect up the wheels and this jacket. Obviously he’d had a successful negotiation and was now prepared to carry away his prizes.

And wouldn’t I have liked to have carried away my prize too? But as I have explained before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … TOTGA always had far more sense than to allow herself to be swept up in my evil clutches.

Fighting off (sometimes unsuccessfully) waves of sleep I prepared for my Welsh lesson and to my surprise it passed off quite well, which took me by surprise. We spent much of the morning discussing shipwrecks and ocean travel, and I spent time talking about trailing along in the wake of John Ross.

Something else that we had to do today was to produce something from our day-to-day life and talk about it.

Of course, it goes without saying that I produced STRAWBERRY MOOSE and we discussed the events surrounding his confrontation with the Minister of Education, an unexpected death and the issue that arose with a group of students in Scotland, all of which led to his expulsion from the University.

Mind you, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, had he had different friends and companions, the eventual outcome would have been much different.

This afternoon, despite falling asleep on several occasions (and I don’t know why because it’s not as if I’ve done much) I finished off the radio notes ready for dictating later tonight, and then carried on with the photos from Canada 2022.

That latter task is taking far longer than it ought but I’m hoping that tomorrow after I finish the radio programme I can finish those off too. And then I have the notes to write, which will probably take me another 3 months.

And if you think that that’s a long time, I still haven’t finished the post-production of the … gulp … 6,000 photos that I took in the High Arctic in 2019.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice and veg, and there’s still some stuffing left to make a left-over curry tomorrow

So tomorrow I have a radio programme to prepare, photos to finish off, forms to print out and a physiotherapy session down at the Centre de Re-education. And then I have to think about what I’m going to do about Friday and my trip to Paris.

One thing’s for sure, and that is that you won’t get much sense out of me on Saturday. But then again, why should Saturday be any different from any other day anyway?

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Monday 27th November 2023 – IT WAS A GOOD …

… job that I rang up the taxi company to tell them that the authorisation for my journey to Paris had been received from the Social Services.

It seems that the letter that I gave to the driver the other day hasn’t found its way into Head Office so they hadn’t reserved a car for me. But that’s now arranged and at about 08:30 on Friday I shall be on my way to the Haematology department at the Hôpital Salpetrière in Paris.

This is presumably when they’ll decide whether or not to take over the case of my cancer from Leuven. If they do, then all well and good.

If on the other hand they don’t, then we’ll be at an impasse. The last time that I was in Leuven was in September and the travelling was total and utter agony. Had I not had the support of Alison, Jackie and Hans while I was there I would have been finished.

My health has deteriorated since then and I won’t be able to undertake the journey.

It goes without saying that no matter how good the treatment might be in Leuven, it’s all totally pointless if the strain of travelling is going to make me worse. I’m quickly reaching the point where the best and most comfortable way of proceeding is to do nothing and let nature run its course

Obviously, staggering down the stairs into a taxi and being driven to Paris is the lesser of several evils, but then we have the climb back up the stairs when I return home that will negate the effects of whatever treatment I might have had.

At least, last night was rather less mobile than some have been just recently so I could have a good relax, even though I was quite late going to bed.

And there were some strange goings-on during the night too. I was awake early this morning and after a while I looked at the time on my phone – it was 06:00 so it must have been about 05:30 that I’d awoken. At some point I must have gone back to sleep because my brother awoke and asked me what time it was. I told him that it was 05:00 and to shut up and go to sleep. He obviously didn’t believe me because he got out of bed, switched on the light disturbing everyone else in the room and went to look. Once he’d satisfied himself that I was correct he went back to bed and began to listen to his radio. After a few minutes of this I told him to put an earpiece in. Then I must have gone to sleep in the dream because I began to dream about some child who was ill but at that moment the alarm went off and awoke me.

It’s actually been a while since I’ve dreamed that I’ve fallen asleep and dreamed that I was dreaming in a dream – if that makes sense

From the bedroom I tottered into the dining area and had my medication, and then came back in here to check my mails.

After a while when I’d come round into the Land of the Living I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was at a beach seaside resort with a small port last night with a couple of girls. We were standing on the cliffs watching the storm. There were some kayakers in the port, in individual or in North American canoes in which could fit several people. They were being tossed around like corks in there. It looked really interesting so in the end went to arrange for one of them. We climbed into two and were having fun in the storm. By now the boats had grown into more like canal barges and were having an enormous amount of fun either trying to ram each other or trying to pass each other. In the end it developed into a race on foot between me and someone else with a couple of shopping trolleys dashing through the centre of a town going through roadworks etc. I was in the lead but the other guy kept trying to overtake me. I was all like something out of a Formula 1 car race.

Later on I was in Crewe waiting to turn left into Nantwich Road at the traffic lights. As I pulled up to the lights an Austin Healey Sprite with Swedish number plates and huge tyres pulled up in front of me. The guy in it, an older type of guy with a young girl sitting next to him was doing wheelies in this Sprite and generally showing off. As usual I thought tl myself ‘this is a recipe for disaster”. With the lights being on red he left his car and went for a walk around. I was itching for the lights to change before he came back so that I could give him a full blast on the horn. Just then a load of Austin Cambridge MkII cars pulled up. There must have been 4 or 5 of them. They all looked in really good condition except that the paint was missing on part of the bodywork. I left my car and began to paint the bodywork with the old BMC maroon-type paint and a brush. I ended up painting the wheels with it too.

After I’d had my coffee and bread-and-butter pudding I sat down to make the next batch of hummus for the next few weeks.

And my new FOOD PROCESSOR really is the business. It made pretty short work of grinding and mixing everything up, much better than the little machine that I’ve been using up until recently.

There are now 5 small containers of hummus, four in the freezer and one in the fridge for current use.

For the benefit of new readers, of which there are a few just recently, a decent hummus is quite easy to make if you have a decent food processor or way of whizzing things up. The recipe is

  • 50% chick peas, drained
  • 25% tahini (sesame seed paste)
  • 10% olive oil
  • 10% chick pea juice
  • A large handful of fresh garlic
  • some sea salt
  • plenty of black pepper

Whizz all of that together into a nice purée and then add your extras. Whizz that in just enough to break the extras into pieces but not so much that it dissolves into the purée.

Half of my batch has chilis added to it. The other half has olives and there should have been sun-dried tomatoes in there too but I didn’t like the look of them.

Having been to Transylvania and walked the parapets of Castle Bran (and I have, too) I can confirm that garlic is a very important ingredient in my cooking, for all kinds of reasons.

After lunch I had to telephone the hospital at Caen about this IRM that they want me to have on my heart and then to telephone the ambulance company about my trip to Paris.

The cleaner came by too to drop off my mail and we had a chat too. It seems that my neighbour who is ill isn’t going too well right now and people are becoming worried about her. The nurse also put in an appearance and we had a chat about my next Covid injection.

And in between falling asleep I made a start on another radio programme. I’ve chosen the music, paired it off and written over half of the notes. I can finish off the rest of them tomorrow and dictate them tomorrow night.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg and there’s plenty of stuffing left for my taco roll tomorrow and a leftover curry for Wednesday along with one of the naan breads the dough of which I made on Sunday.

Plenty of garlic in there too, and soaked in the garlic butter that I made the other week, that should be really good. I won’t ever be worried about vampires coming to see me in the dead of night, although it might actually explain why Zero, Castor and TOTGA have been keeping their distance.

So now I’m going to have a hot drink and go to bed. Welsh lesson in the morning so I need to be on my best form.

At least I can have a good sleep in the afternoon afterwards.

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