Category Archives: France

Thursday 5th January 2023 – I HAVEN’T SET …

… any records today with preparing my radio programme. Unless it’s for the slowest one on record because I haven’t finished it yet. I’m a long way short. Everything is written and dictated and I’m in the middle of editing it.

Actually, I have an excuse for this. And that is that I didn’t leave the bed until lunchtime.

And I have an excuse for that too. Gradually, over the course of the evening the pain in my right foot became worse and worse. And by the time I went to bed I was having stabbing pains in the sole of my foot every couple of minutes or so.

That was disappointing of course because having tidied away all of the paperwork etc yesterday, I could fall into bed without actually having to move anything so I was looking forward to a nice, deep, comfortable sleep.

But this pain kept on going and going. I was certainly still awake at 04:30 because I checked the time, and I was awake long after that too. I’d dozed off by the time that the alarm went off, but only just and I just couldn’t haul myself out of bed.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone, which was surprising, so I must have gone off to sleep at some point. We started off on a Friday evening. I was working in an office and everyone started to go home. A group of people where I’d been working had been passing a box of biscuits around and for some unlnown reason no-one had offered me any. After they had left I went and found a box of biscuits, opened it and saw that it was empty. That was pretty bad newz. By now I was starving so I had a hunt around. Eventually I found a box of biscuits open on someone else’s desk. Just as I took 2 of them someone walked in and said that they were looking for a file. I had to act very nonchalantly and help them look for this file with these 2 chocolate biscuits melting away in my hand.

Later, I was working at a building company, something to do with old lorries. There was a discussion going on about some bungalows being built a few years ago that weren’t built correctly. My mother was going through a few things and showed me a packet of red liquid. I asked what it was and she replied that it had something to do with Morse Code that one of her distant relatives had found and sent to her because they thought that it might be of some kind of historical interest for her. She was interested in having a play around with it. There was a lot more to it than this but I can’t remember at all now.

Finally, I was in Shrewsbury last night driving around, having to dictate some kind of information about the route. These 3 roundabouts near the slaughterhouse were different than all the others because they had been installed in a different programme from a different budget. Of course I was having a laugh about this kind of thing. I was having a quiet 5 minutes trying to transcribe my notes but the vehicle was vibrating and rocking so much that I wasn’t able to do it. I could tell that my ribald comments were disturbing one or two other people in this vehicle. They weren’t happy about the levity in which I was treating the subject of these 3 roundabouts. It was just typical to me that there would be all this strange talk about different budgets for this and different budgets for that, different budgets for something else but they were all in fact doing the same thing

With all of that, the night can’t have been all that bad although when I finally awoke the pain was still there.

Once I’d sorted myself out somewhat, I had a shower. And getting into the bachtub was a little easier than it had been on Tuesday. I think that I must be right about this improvement that I’ve been noticing. It’s not much, and I still can’t walk very far at all, but it does seem to be a little easier.

This afternoon I made a start on the radio programme but had to stop because the physiotherapist came. I mentioned the problem with the foot and he showed me an exercise. And at least, fot the moment, it seems to have worked. Whether it will continue to work is another thing.

He also mentioned that the doctor is planning on coming to visit me again in due course. presumably he’ll be in touch with me.

The Mairie from Virlet has been in touch with me too. They need to talk to me about one or two things and will be in touch with me in due course.

Tea tonight was a vegan burger with pasta and veg. That was quite nice, as usual, especially as I put some chili powder in the tomato sauce. That will put hairs in places where I didn’t even realise that I had places.

Having had a late morning today, I can’t sleep now. It’s actually quite late – or early – and it’ll be dawn shortly. I may as well keep on going though because there’s no point going to bed and not sleeping. There’s always something that I can be doing that means that I don’t have to do it another time, but sleeping would be nice.

We’ll have to see how tomorrow unfolds but as long as I can finish my radio programme I’ll be no further behind than I already am.

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Wednesday 4th January 2023 – MY SHEPHERD’S PIE …

… was absolutely delicious this evening. With the left-over pie filling from Christmas, the left-over mushrooms from the weekend and topped with potato mashed in milk and butter( vegan, of course), and not to mention made with real shepherds, it was really nice with vegetables and gravy.

This is going to be something that I’ll have to work on for the future – although I doubt that it will be every day that I have a mugful of lentil and tofu pie-filling lying around left over from a previous project.

It was much better than the sleep that I had last night, that’s for sure. I have a problem with an ingrowing toenail on my left foot and last night it began to play up – to such an extent that I had first to take off my elastic stocking and seeing that it didn’t resolve the problem, to take off the plaster that was protecting the toe.

That didn’t seem to help very much either, but at some point I managed to doze off into sleep. I ended up with the guys off The Navy Lark, Pertwee, Johnson and someone else. It was my birthday so I’d been round to see if they would come out with me but for some unknown reason the 2 girls didn’t realise that it was my birthday, they were busy or they didn’t want to come or something so in the end it was just the 4 of us. Just as we were leaving Pertwee’s apartment the telephone rang so we nipped back upstairs to see if it was anything for him. No it wasn’t, and nothing to do with any of us. They asked me where I’d like to go so I suggested that in the Chaussée de Wavre down the road there was a good Italian restaurant. Actually there were 2 but I meant a different one. They said “yes, let’s go there”. We walked down the Boulevard towards the Chaussée de Wavre and suddenly ended up in a restaurant, just the 4 of us, no-one else. The place was empty but it looked really nice, nice paintwork, curtains, tablecloths etc, very much the pastoral Italian place. I thought that if the food’s as nice as this place looks we should be OK here. We settled down at a table where there were 4 chairs by a fire.

When the alarm went off at 07:30 I was already awake but I wasn’t in much of a mood to leave the bed. I missed the second alarm too but when the third one went off at 08:00 I was actually up and about. High time that I showed willing.

Once I’d managed to come round into the Land of the Living, whenever that was, I made a start on tidying up in here. I was hard at it too and managed not only to put everything away and file away the pile of papers that had accumulated over the last few months, I wrote a couple of letters that were necessary – a couple of bills had come in at some point and I’d overlooked them.

All of that was enough to make me crash out for half an hour and I didn’t feel any regret because it does look so much better in the bedroom and I won’t be afraid or embarrassed to let people see inside here. In the run up to going away I had rubbish just about everywhere and nothing had improved since I’d been back. Quite the contrary, in fact.

My freidnly neighbourhood cleaner came round at 14:30 and spent an hour here. And she accomplished far more in the apartment in an hour than I have accomplished in all the time that I’ve lived here. She found tons of stuff that I’d missed as well and that was good news. I did wonder where half the stuff in this apartment had gone.

So it’s looking quite nice in the place at the moment. And as she catches up with the arrears it’ll look even nicer. I can’t wait for this place to look as if someone lives here.

Just now I mentioned tea. It really was nice and as I said yesterday, I ought to spend more time looking after myself properly as far as food goes.

And while I was at at, I had another look at my shopping list. I’ve decided that Friday afternoon is when I’ll send off my order to the supermarket and see how I get on with that. I’ll probably order a delivery every couple of weeks and in the meantime ask my cleaner if she’ll pick up some mushrooms for me on the weeks when I don’t pass an order. That was I can keep on top of everything.

And who knows? At some point I might even have another go at going to the shops myself if my walking improves. You never know.

But that’s for later. Right now, much later than I was hoping, I’m off to bed. Whether I sleep or not is another thing because I now have a pain in the other foot. It’s non-stop, isn’t it?

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Tuesday 3rd January 2023 – I’M NOT SURE …

… whether I’m imagining this but I seem to be moving just a little easier today.

Getting into and out of the bath in order to have a shower didn’t take me as long as it has done in the recent past, but whether that’s because I’ve found a new way to do it or whether it really is easier is something that I haven’t quite worked out.

If it’s anything to do with the amount of rest that I’ve been having just recently, then that might explain something because it was at about 10:45 when I finally arose from the dead today. A little earlier than yesterday of course but seeing that I was actually in bed over 90 minutes earlier, then it’s nothing really that’s worth raising the roof.

Some stuff on the dictaphone too from during the night. The most astonishing thing during the night was like a deltaplane. There were probably 10 or 12 people underneath it pedalling away to get up some speed. All these people cycling, they were in a kind-of foot-forward position, 10 or 12 of them in a V-shape underneath this wing, really low down. Suddenly the rear end lifted off the ground, they went up this ramp and over the sea wall. The thing actually took off and flew. I was there with my camera trying to take photos of it but for some unknown reason the shutter wouldn’t click and I couldn’t take a photo of this most extraordinary thing that was going on during the night.

And then I was in Bangor in North Wales. There was a hurrican blowing absolutely everything about. I was waiting there for the Shearings coaches to turn up to see whether they needed a driver for something or other. There was someone there with a couple of pieces of paper and I noticed that he put one down but it blew away. Eventually I ran after it and caught it. I was actually addressed to me and concerned a coach trip that I’d taken a couple of weeks earlier where I’d had to collect some money off people. I’d collected the money but I couldn’t remember what I’d actually done with it. It was a huge piece of old dot-matrix computer print-out stuff that had been heavily edited and tippexed out or felt-penned out and overwritten, everything, listing the people, how much they should have paid etc. I seemed to remember that what I’d collected had been nothing like as complicated as this. But this wasn’t the right time to read this with all of the confusion etc so I folded it up and put it in my jacket pocket thinking that I’d find a quieter moment when I could concentrate, have another read of it and see what I could sort out and whether I could make head or tail of it.

Apart from having a shower today, I’ve tidied up the bathroom as well. Some stuff has been thrown away and if I could make it comfortably out to the rubbish bins more stuff would be gone too but that will have to wait.

However, having done the bedroom (after a fashion) yesterday and the bathroom today, whatever will I accomplish tomorrow?

The physiotherapist came round this afternoon too and put me through my paces. He seems to think that there’s a slight improvement too in how I’m moving about and has given me a few more tips and hints. Nevertheless, one swallow doesn’t make a summer and I’ve a feeling that if things are ever to improve (which is not certain) it’s going to be a long, long time.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with the left-over stuffing from yesterday. And tomorrow I’m going to have a curry made with the leftovers of everything that is in the fridge. High time that normal service is resumed around here. And then I can get on with ordering what I need for the next round of stuff.

Just one more slice of my Christmas cake to finish as well. That’s for tomorrow of course so I’ll then have to think about what to do next. I have some fruit buns in the freezer that will need defrosting and I’ll also have a think about baking some more bread as I’ve run out of that too and I’m not in a position to go out and buy a tasty baguette for the weekend – one of my rare luxuries.

With all of the foregoing, I can see that I need to begin to organise myself. I can’t sit around and mope and do nothing, even if I don’t feel like doing anything special. I still have to eat and I ought to devote more time to making myself some nice stuff.

But ohhh: For a decent oven instead of the one that I have here. That would make a nice difference.

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Monday 2nd January 2023 – I’M HAVING ANOTHER …

… late night tonight.

Not as late as it was last night and hopefully not as late a start as … errr … 11:30 this morning when I finally crawled out of bed, but I’m still not in any rush and I’m not really tired either.

And ?I’ve no idea why that might be because this afternoon I vacuumed the bedroom – the first time that i’ve done that for quite a while.

And if that might sound like a surprise, it certainly was as far as I was concerned because I had no idea just how tiring it was to do that. It didn’t take me long to do it, but I had to have a good sit down afterwards, and for quite a while too.

But I digress for the moment. There was tons of stuff on the dictaphone from last night. And surprisingly, several of my little voyages followed on one from another. There was a Carry On film going on last night. Most of the actors of the Carry On team had been arrested by some kind of Greek people going back to traditional times. Charles Hawtrey dressed as a Roman centurion was sent to rescue them. He landed ashore and walked up this valley with all these people lying in wait to capture him. When they leapt out from behind a rock they had the masks and sacks over their own heads rather than putting them over his head, so wondering why they never succeeded in being able to capture him. Of course he was taken aback and burst out laughing while these people were groping around trying to find out what had gone wrong.

Then later on there were these little girls about 8 or 9 dressed up in some kind of green and yellow dress like elves or something, dancing around this kiddies’ playground place where I was standing

And next time it was a similar scene with similar girls except that they were dressed in blue for the next time they ambushed another girl

Back here again and there was another bunch of similarly dressed kids, young girls in elvish clothes in Crewe somewhere round about North Street, somewhere like that, again dancing around on the station this time. And if anyone is wondering, which I’m sure they are, the railway station there was only there for three years – from 1837 to 1840. And yes, that is almost 200 years ago, not that I would remember it.

We still haven’t finished here yet. There was a small boy, about 3 or so, on the petrol station on North Street on the corner of Underwood Lane with another boy, a little older. They had all of these dancers as miniatures on white leather leads. He was holding a bunch of these leads. As I came out he held the leads up to me to show me what he’d caught

As for the final bit, I’m not quite sure what that was all about. But all of that on North Street was really impressively real, especially when it came to going to the Post Office with all of the dancers but I can’t remember much about that but it certainly seemed real to me.

There was a ‘phone call from Leuven this afternoon, but they hung up before I could actually answer the call which was just as well. I wasn’t in any mood to speak to them. And there was also a ‘phone call from the chemists about the bill that I haven’t paid. I shall have to get on with that, and quickly too

But really, that was all of the excitement. All of the Christmas food has now been eaten except for the last few crumbs of the Christmas cake, such as it was. The next two days will see the end of that and then I shall have to bake a loaf of bread.

That reminds me that I need to order some flour, and so I’ll need to send off my order for food from the supermarket. I shall have to do that on Friday too. So I shall have to have a further think just in case there is anything else that I might have forgotten. At €9:95 a delivery, I can’t afford to be doing this every day.

Tea was a stuffed pepper with some really nice stuffing. Not as nice as the stuffing that I made with kidney beans and I shall have to remember that for whenever I have no mushrooms, because that was really something special.

And now I’m off to bed. No alarm, because it’s late and I need to do my best to catch up with whatever it is that’s wearing me out. The physiotherapist is coming tomorrow and Thursday, the cleaner on Wednesday, so I need to have another think about doing some more cleaning so that the place looks at least respectable.

Not that “respectable” is a phrase that anyone might usually associate with me, but here we are.

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Sunday 1st January 2023 – EVEN AS I …

… type, it’s just coming up to 02:45 tomorrow.

Not that I’m complaining because having spent the last couple of months in such an air of indolence, if I end up doing something I may as well carry on as long as I can. After all, it’s high time that I did some work some time.

Not like last night though. I was busy doing nothing until about 00:30 when I finally staggered off into bed and there I stayed until 11:00 this morning. I’d awoken a couple of times during the night, including having another one of these night sweats that I used to have so regularly.

That was always something that worried me to a certain extent. Whenever I went to the hospital, they used to ask me the same 20 questions, one of which was “do you have night sweats?”. And whether I replied “yes” or “no”, it didn’t seem to make any difference with what they were doing to me so I didn’t know why they ask.

Still, they aren’t going to ask me tomorrow, for the simple reason that I’m not going to be there. Firstly, transport is quite limited today and secondly, I can’t walk that far.

Breakfast this morning was beans on toast with sausage and home-made hash browns followed by toast with mushroom paté. That’s almost all of my holiday food eaten. Just the last of the beans and some of the mushroom paté to finish off tomorrow.

Strange as it might seem, I fell asleep this afternoon. Even after all of the sleep that I had. But I did manage to pair of the music for the next radio programme that I’ll be preparing. Not that I’ll be doing it tomorrow though because I’m having another lie-in to catch up on the fact that it’s both a Sunday and a Bank Holiday today so I’ve really missed the Bank Holiday lie-in.

No neighbours today. In fact no-one disturbed me at all which makes a change considering the way that things have been just recently. It was quite a peaceful day.

Tea was nice – vegan pie with vegetables and gravy. That pie that I made for Christmas was a resounding success and I’l have to remember the recipe. There’s some stuffing left so I might even push the boat out and have a shepherd’s pie – made of real shepherds of course.

Some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. There was a group of us going out to visit some submarines last night, probably I dunno about 20 of us. We all boarded some kind of pilot boat and set out from shore to the deep water. The sea was quite rough and there was plenty of spray going about. We sailed over a couple of submarines that we could see below us and then a pile of World War II bomber aircraft that had obviously crashed into the sea for scrapping that we saw down below. Then we were out in the bay about a mile or two and it really was rough. We pulled up alongside some kind of submarine. I had to call out the full names of the submarines one after the other so that people could sit in the right kind of position on board this pilot boat. Everyone was becoming soaked to death being taken off their boat onto this submarine thing. There were people with dogs. I wanted to make sure that the dogs were on board first before I moved otherwise that would be chaotic. Eventually we managed to have everyone moving and sorted out

And later I was in Canada last night driving, somewhere down the coast. There was a girl or woman hitch-hiking so I stopped to pick her up. She was going to the local supermarket to buy some stuff So I said that I’d run her as I had time. As we drove a little way along this road to where she told me to turn off I could see the signs for Miramichi so I knew where I was and was able to drive some of the way. I was torrential, pouring down with rain, a downpour. I took her so far. By now this passenger had turned into a guy. We were talking about old cars. He took me to some kind of abandoned street where there was a whole row of derelict houses. He took me down a pathway in between two derelict houses. I could see an old American car that I thought at first was a Peugeot 403 parked there. The closer I looked, I could see that there was probably about a dozen old cars there like an MG Allegro, a BMC MG1100, all kinds of things, all in various stages of disrepair. Some were quite valuable and interesting. Others had been cut up with an angle grinder. We talked about these. I asked if I could take some photos of them. He told me that I could but to leave one particular car out. He was by now this woman again. She asked me why I didn’t come down here every Saturday to have a play with them. That idea appealed to me somewhat for a variety of reasons. By now there were lots of other people down there, members of my family, so I took my camera and asked them all to stand still while I took some photos. It had to be a very long exposure because it was dark. For some reason the photos wouldn’t take. I was there for several seconds with my finger on the shutter trying to take these photos but they were just coming out blurred because the shutter wasn’t clicking off. I had to try on several occasions but nothing that I coud do would help me take some really good photos of these old cars.

So now I’m going to bed, even if I’m not tired. No alarm tomorrow so I’ll wake up when I wake up, unless they ring me from the hospital to ask me why I’m not there. They probably ill do something like that, especially as I’ll be sleeping.

But it’s a silly idea to expect me to be there at 10:20 the day after a Bank Holiday when there’s no transport.

And a Happy New Year to everyone too. I’ve not said anything to celebrate the season because I’ve not been feeling very festive just recently and I’ve had plenty of other preoccupations.

I’m sure that you’ll all understand. It’s difficult for me to summon up any enthusiasm, when I have nothing to be enthusiastic about.

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Saturday 31st December 2022 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… miserable, rotten day today and how I’m fed up with these right now. Nothing seems to be working my way.

Yesterday was a fairly early night and for a change I had one of the better sleeps that I’ve had just recently. That’s probably the nicest thing that I could say about the events of the day.

There was time during the night for me to go off on my travels too. I was working at the Fish Processing Plant last night and a young family came up with some shellfish. They dumped their bucket on the counter so I showed them how to do it all, explained to them to put it in a sieve and shake the loose soil out and to weigh it on a balance. It came to 5 units of something at €0:39 per unit. There was a little girl there who was quite chatty. I asked her what was her favourite colour. She told me and I gave her a lollipop to suck that was that colour.

And then I went to the library but when I arrived the place was in darkness. I switched on a couple of lights and found that there were plenty of people working away in there, referring to the books. I went to look for a book and ended up with a book about steam locomotives up to 1940 that included a collaboration between the British railway companies and the French railway companies and how they diverged after the invasion of France. I took the book with me to a quiet corner but that meant climbing up a kind-of ladder or shelf things. I realised then why in the past I’d worn a backpack and not carried a bag in my hand. I settled down there to work and all the lights went off again. It looked to me as if I’d been locked in there for the night and everyone had gone home and not thought to find out about where I was.

Once again, I didn’t bother about the alarms and it was … errr … somewhat later when I finally arose from the bed. And from then on I didn’t do much else except slept because that’s how my day has been spent.

There have been a couple of interruptions though. Firstly my mushrooms and peppers came, brought by my neighbour of the fourth floor.

And then another neighbour ‘phoned me up to ask if he could come to see me. I wondered what on earth was going on and why would anyone want to come to see me but it turned out that it was simply for a chat and that’s quite surprising. I’m not usually the kind of person with whom people like to pass the time, not being of a sociable turn.

And so after he left I was still none-the-wiser. One thing that I did notice though was that I could ease myself out of the settee a little easier than I did on Thursday, and also that I seem to be walking slightly easier. Only slightly, but anything is an improvement.

So that’s that really. Nothing else of any importance has happened today and I don’t really care either. I’m going to bed with no alarm set for the morning because it’s Sunday and also a Bank Holiday and so it’s going to be a similar day to today.

But I’ve taken the stuff for brunch out of the freezer so that’s currently defrosting so I won’t be going hungry when I finally awaken – whenever that might be.

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Friday 30th December 2022 – I HAVE BEEN …

… out and about this evening socialising.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there’s something going on in the background here in this building that might burst out into the open at some point in the future. Consequently I’ve been out to see one or two people in the building for a meal and for a good chinwag while we work out a cunning plan.

It certainly pays dividends to have the right people on your side at moments like this because you end up on the inside track when it’s all filtering through. But how things develop, we shall have to see because there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.

One of the slips was that I nearly didn’t make it. When it was time for me to go I was actually asleep on the chair in the office and I had quite a job to drag myself out and upstairs.

Not that you would have thought so because I was in no rush this morning to leave my bed. WHen the alarm(s) went off I could hear the howling gale roaring around outside. And so in the words of the old song, REMEMBERING MORNINGS, SHILLINGS SPENT, MADE NO SENSE TO LEAVE THE BED.

It was actually about 09:00 when I finally did leave the bed and for a change I had no pangs of guilt whatsoever. It’s clearly getting to me, this strange mood in which I find myself.

First things first – I had to do the finances for the end of the year to see how I stand. And to my surprise, I can actually afford my little project without making too much of a special effort.

And no-one is more surprised than me. When I embarked on this plan back in early November while I was lying in hospital I thought that I might be pushing out the boat a little too far but apparently not. So let’s get on with it. Unfortunately it doesn’t really depend on me – I’ve done all that I can for the moment and I’m waiting on others to extricate their digits.

When the streets had quietened down for lunchtime, I went out for a play in the pouring rain with Caliburn. He struggled into life again so I took him for another good run, but it’s still not made starting any easier. It sounds to me as if the starter motor must be on its way out. I’ve put the spare battery on charge and at some point I’ll swap them over to see whether that improves things.

In case you are wondering (which I’m sure you are) I’m not going far in Caliburn in busy times because with having no force in my right leg, braking is proving to be something of an issue. I’m having to leave plenty of space in front of me just in case an emergency arises

This afternoon I’ve had to register with URSSAF, the body that deals with minor self-employed people. My “cleaner” (and how embarrassing is it for me to admit that I have one?) is actually employed under these regulations and so I have to pay URSSAF for her services and they deal with all of the paperwork and any tax liability for all of her clients.

There’s some good news about this too (and it’s been a long time since I’ve had any) and that is that because I’m over 65 and suffering from a serious illness, I can actually claim part of my payments to be offset against my income tax. The French Social Security system is certainly up to the mark.

Although it had taken me ages to go off to sleep last night, I must have fallen asleep at some point because there was this huge, long rambling dream about me being in Crewe with STRAWBERRY MOOSE, my three sisters and all their kids and dozens of cats etc. I even ended up at a couple of their houses. I’ve no idea what was going on there but it was one of these things that went on for just about ever.

And then I’d been on my travels later on last night. I bumped into Claude and his daughter and her kids. It turned out that there had been some kind of water fair near where I’d been living and they’d been to see it that morning. They’d even bought some boats and had been sailing around on the canal. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t gone, never mind not seen them. One of the things that was taking place was the throwing of some kind of mechanic’s tool like a set of Stilsons and embedding it in a door. This had all finished but I was throwing one or two things about and having some good results. I felt a shame that I’d missed the early part of this where it had been competitive and I might have had a good score. In the end after much messing around someone gave me a set of Stilsons to try. I threw it and it bounced off the door into the canal. I had to go to fish it out. Eventually I had to leave. It was like leaving one of these spaghetti western type of things with the plains and the shot in the distance, riding on a horse across the plains up the side of a hill into the mountains and disappearing out of the shot.

When the alarm went off for the first time I was with Beth I used to know from my time on the Scottish borders trying to relax her for an interview that she was due to take. I would have loved to know how all of this unfolded.

When I came back from my evening out I watched the football. Y Drenewydd were playing Aberystwyth and the least said about this the better as Aberystwyth were simply swept aside. It was really no contest and how the score was only 1-0 at half-time was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

But 10 minutes of madness shortly after the restart saw Y Drenewydd rattle in 4 more goals and they scored a sixh later in the game that was the result of some of the worst defending that I have ever seen in my life. Aberystwyth scored a goal out of nothing in the dying minutes of the game but the game was long-since finished by then.

Tomorrow I’m having a little shopping done for me. Some mushrooms and peppers ready for my meals next week but that’s about it. Walking around today, I seemed to be moving a little easier and I might have been tempted to have another go on the bus into town had it not been a day when we might have the crowds out in the streets doing their shopping for the New Year.

And i’ll try to make an effort to haul myself out of bed at some reasonable time too, except that its already much later than it ought to be. I’m going to have to organise myself much better than this.

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Thursday 29th December 2022 – I HAVEN’T SET …

… any records today for the preparation of a radio programme – except, maybe, for the slowest time on record. It was nothing more than a leisurely stroll through the undergrowth, stopping along the way to pick a few flowers and to smel the air as I wandered along on my way.

It was as you might expect a very leisurely start to the day as well. I didn’t manage to beat the two alarms at 07:30 and 07:45 but to my surprise, and to yours as well I bet, I managed to beat the alarm that went off at 08:00.

And having gone to bed fairly early (at least, for just recently) I had a reasonable night’s sleep once I finally managed to drop off into the Arms of Morpheus. There wasn’t all that much on the dictaphone. I had been in North America. We were talking about cars. My brother (again!) was saying that hire cars had never been particularly good but I explained that that was because they probably hadn’t had a good run out for several years. I told him about the one that I had rented that i’d picked up in New York and then driven non-stop all the way to Colorado and how much better it was once it was thoroughly warmed up. This conversation went on for quite some time. Suddenly my brother had a look at his watch. It was 08:50 and I had to be in work at 09:00 so I had to run all the way down the stairs and out into the car park then get into my car which was a Crown Victoria saloon. It struggled to start but I set off driving at about 50mph across the car park. There was a noise coming from the rear end as if there was a tyre that was flat. I thought to myself “here we go now. I’m definitely going to be late for work if that’s the case. I’ll probably even be late for work if I stop to have a look”.

Now what would I be doing with a Crown Victoria?

So the leisurely stroll through the day was interrupted by a shower at some point early in the afternoon. And clambering into and out of the bath to take a shower is becoming more and more difficult. I’m really going to have to take some dramatic, drastic action about this at some point in the near future otherwise I’ll be restricted to stand-up wahing. That’s no recipe for a long-term programme.

There were a couple of visitors today. Firstly, I have to say, with some kind of sigh of despair, that I’m having a cleaner starting here on Wednesday. The lady upstairs came round and we had a chat with the result that every Wednesday at 14:30 she’ll be round to clean up after me.

It’s a horrible thought having to depend on someone to to the basics of what I ought to be able to do for myself, but the fact is that if something falls on the floor around here, I can’t pick it up and have to go through all kinds of manoeuvres if it’s anything important.

And then the physiotherapist came round. Strangely enough he put his hand on a place on the right-hand side of my lower back and asked if ever it hurt there. In fact, if I walk for any kind of distance or if I sit awkwardly for a while, that was indeed exactly where it hurts.

He reckons that it’s a symptom of how I use (or don’t use) my right knee when I’m moving around or sitting on a chair. But anyway, at least it shows that he has a good idea of what he’s talking about.

While we’re on the subject of making things easier for myself I’ve signed up for a home delivery shopping service from LeClerc. I’ve had a look through the site and I’m busy making some kind of desultory list of what I need ready to have it delivered.

This idea of trying to hitch a ride to the shops with local neighbours hasn’t worked, I can’t go on the bus as well as I would like, and so I have to think of another plan. It might cost much more in the long run but I have to eat. I’m not going to send it off yet because I keep on thinking of other things that I need. And in any case the delivery charges are so expensive that I need to make sure that I have a decent order to make it worthwhile.

The vegan selection there isn’t all that interesting and so I’m going to have to hunt around for a good source of mail-order vegan food. Amazon’s isn’t all that much better so I’m going to have to cast my net wider and wider for that kind of stuff.

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta and veg, and then I came in here where I … errr … crashed out for a while.

Tomorrow I have an appointment for tea and I also have to sort out the money side of things. Things are going to become rather different here over the next few months and I need to make sure that things might happen as I would like them to.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight I’m off to bed and hopefully I can have another decent sleep. At least I actually managed to accomplish something today. Here’s hoping that I can keep it up.

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Wednesday 28th December 2022 – I’VE JUST BEEN …

… completely crashed out on my chair in the office. Out of my tree completely.

Anyone would thing that I must have had a hectic day but actually nothing could be farther from the truth. The most strenuous thing that I’ve done today is to eat my taco roll and rice for tea.

Strangely enough, I’d had a lie-in this morning too. never mind the 07:30 alarm going off – I didn’t get out of bed until the wrong side of 08:30 and if I hadn’t had to go for a ride on the porcelain horse I’d probably still be in bed.

During the night I’d been on my travels too, although nothing like the travels of yesterday. We started off at some kind of school, a science laboratory or something. I can’t remember anything like all of this at all but there was someone involved in this who shouldn’t have been involved like a Mafia boss or something. It all had very strange complications. Something had happened in there and they asked me for my opinion of it. That was that seeing as the lab was currently closed for investigation they should develop some kind of rocket-assisted propulsion, use it and get back to sync with it and propose to that Mafia boss some kind of advantage from the invention like a getaway vehicle so he would see a need for the lab to keep on his good side etc without any issues that they might expect once the investigation had gone under way and all things were covered. But there was much more to it than this that I can’t remember.

And then I was round on the Pyms Lane area of Crewe on a few council estates with a bus picking up and dropping off schoolkids. It was lunchtime and there were school buses parked everywhere. It was quite a nightmare to get through. In the end we ended up being on board a dustbin lorry. The driver tried a short cut but there was a bus blocking the end of that so he had to reverse out. I had to get out and direct him. The bus wouldn’t move and a Thames Trader lorry came along and got in the way again. I finally managed to climb back aboard this dustcart. It was brand new and was really nicely trimmed inside. One of the girls said that we out to get the group’s van trimmed like this but I mouthed “new vans” because the vans that they had were old. It was my plan to split the gear into two, first of all the heavy stage gear that would go in one van and then the musicians, their instruments and light stage gear in the other. The one wouldn’t have to be dependent upon the other. That led to a bit of a discussion.

Finally, there had been a bus route that had gone out of town down Victoria Avenue and round to West Street back into town that way. I was trying to have this bus rerouted so instead of going down Wistaston Road it would run down Gainsborough Road past my house. That seemed to be some kind of logical way to go, where there were more passengers but I wasn’t having any luck with that at the moment.

The highlight of my day was chatting to Liz on the internet. And then one of my neighbours rang to ask if I needed anything from the shops – so I now have a kilo of onions. Pretty vital stuff as far as I’m concerned. I can’t live without them.

And that is that. All the excitement of my day today. No reason whatever for me to be so tired, except presumably that I’m not very well. Although I ought to be doing so much better than this.

One of these days I’ll have the answer to all of this, but right now I can’t even work out whet the question is. I’ll just go to bed instead and start again tomorrow. When I’m feeling like this, things can only get better.

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Tuesday 27th December 2022 – I HAVE BEEN …

… a little more motivated today.

Not by very much, I have to say, but at least I’ve managed to do a couple of things today.

Not that you would have thought so the way the morning unfolded because I spent more of it in bed than I ought to have done. No chance whatever of me leaving the bed when the alarm went off at 07:30. It was much more like 09:00 when I finally broke surface today.

Mind you, that’s not a surprise judging by the amount of travelling that I did during the night. I was running some kind of school but it wasn’t a boarding school, it was a front for something else. However it was such fun having this boarding school teaching the kids English etc that it actually became the principal occupation rather than whatever it was that we were intending to do. We taught the boys and girls poetry. We had a couple of them write out poems. I had to go to print them so I sent one boy down to the printer while I printed them off so he could bring them back. For some unknown reason I couldn’t remember the key combination to print and the screen was too far away for me to read. It took me ages to remember the CTRL+P shortcut to make these things print off

Later on, I stepped back into this dream, took the school up again and these pupils there. One of the pupils had to write out a poem so I let him do it. He was comfortably over the limit of words but it sounded so good that I tried to have him write another. His parents were away with the British Civil Service so he was staying at our boarding school. He sat down to write a second one but was shot in the rigging as he did so and all his possessions that he’d found had all been wiped out and broken

Then later still I was back in there yet again. We were checking photos of these kids at this school. There was one of a boy and girl. They each had a sticker in their ear. One had a green sticker, one had a red sticker in it. The girl’s said “gaffer” or “boss” and I can’t remember the boy’s but it implied that the girl was in charge and he was just her servant or something.

And now for something completely different. When I went into the shed after having been out for a day or two I found this motorbike and sidecar in there. It was an old fore-and-aft V-twin that somehow I had an impression that it was a BMW although it wasn’t. I was trying hard to identify it but but I couldn’t see any maker’s name on it at all. It was black and quite old, probably from the 60s and looked as if Laurent and Xavier had dropped it off on me. It was really the most impressive beast that I’d ever seen. I’d been talking to them about motor bikes a few days ago. I’d no idea how come this had appeared in my shed but it was an unidentified V-twin fore-and-aft. Everything about it said BMW but there was no plate on the engine or on the frame or tank to say what it might be. It was completely blank.

After that I was with a boy and a girl. We ended up at a cottage. There was a huge pile of Mary’s paperwork. While the boy and girl were sitting in front of the fire keeping warm I was going through the paperwork finding all kinds of things. I sorted out as much as I could but there was still a big pile of unsorted stuff. It was 03:00 and I said that I had to go. I said to these two “whatever you do, you mustn’t leave until the fire had gone right down because we don’t want the place burning down”. They agreed to stay. I couldn’t find my guitars. They thought that they had been taken by someone else into the hall so I had to hunt around for them at the very last minute before leaving. It was about 03:15 before I was finally ready to go.

Surprisingly, I stepped back into this dream too. One of the things that we found in these papers was a document dated April 1940, a handbook for farmers issued by the Farmers’ Union. For a start, the back pages were in Dutch so it was intended for an audience of Dutch farmers coming to settle in Nantwich. It included articles like “love your slave” and all kinds of outdated stuff like that which even for the 1940s was extremely near the knuckle. I read it out to these people with me and they were astonished. Then it became time for me to go and do a couple of deliveries and then I’d been told that I could go home after that so I prepared myself to go. But this document was astonishing, 1940 as well and aimed for everyone in the Farmers Union in the Nantwich area.

Once I’d finally managed to drag myself round into the Land of the Living, the first thing that I had to do was to deal with the questionnaire that I had been sent yesterday.

That involved printing it out, completing it, scanning it, scouring around for the supporting documents and then sending off everything. By e-mail of course because I can’t walk down into town and the Post Office.

You’d be surprised how long all of that took to do as well. Nothing is as easy or as straightforward as it might be and I have a variety of good and valid reasons why my information is not as easy or as straightforward as anyone else’s.

Next stop was the bathroom and a shower. And you have no idea how difficult it’s becoming to climb into the bath in order to take a shower. This can’t go on for much longer and something certainly needs to happen in order that I can deal with this, and quite soon too.

There is plenty of rubbish that has accumulated around here and that needed to go to the bins across the road. It was a nice sunny day, if a little windy, so I decided to have a bash. It was a little easier to head that way but I was soon exhausted and the rest of the trip was a nightmare. But I made it in the end.

On the way back I passed by Caliburn and wound him up. He struggled into life so I let him run for a while. While he was ticking over I disconnected all of the ancillary electrical circuits that I wired in when I bought him. I want to see if the battery will charge better with it all disconnected.

We had a few bright sparks while I was doing it, and shame as it is to say it, a job that would usually take me just 2 or 3 minutes with no complications whatever took me half an hour.

The woman who lives upstairs who does cleaning too was in the corridor so I mentioned to her that I’ll be needing her services in due course. She’ll make arrangements to come to see me.

Back in here I sent off that incendiary letter that I’d written a few days ago, mentioning in passing that I’m not going for my appointments next week. Half an hour to the bins is longer than it used to take me to walk to the station. How on earth can I make it as far as Leuven, and on a Bank Holiday too?

The physiotherapist came round later and gave me a little work-out. He thinks that he might have found something and gave me a few instructions about massaging a muscle in my upper thigh.

Tea tonight, power cuts included, was a little different. Stuffed pepper with veg and rice but with no mushrooms I tried a small tin of kidney beans. It certainly made a difference, and a pleasant one too. I’ll try this again.

But I’m running short of onions now and that’s fatal. It looks as if another struggle to the Carrefour is on the agenda at some point.

However that’s for again. Right now I’m going to go to bed for (hopefully) some pleasant dreams. Tomorrow is a day with nothing planned so I might go round to see my neighbour and pay her for the shopping that she did for me last week. I need to pay my debts.

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Monday 26th December 2022 – WELL THAT WAS A …

… waste of a morning.

It’s not every Bank Holiday where I set an alarm to awaken me, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, but today it was something of a necessity because the physiotherapist was due to come round at 09:00 or so.

But where he got to I really don’t know because he never actually came here and I could have had an extra couple of hours in bed. It would have been much more comfortable than the hour or so that I spent curled up asleep on the chair.

It’s not really a surprise though that I crashed out because I didn’t go to bed until after midnight (I was too buy letting it all hang out, I suppose) and I was wide awake at 07:00.

Some stuff on the dictaphone too from during the night. I can’t remember very much about the first one but I was off on my travels again. I should have gone by car but I ended up walking but that’s all that I remember about that

Later I was working on my old Cortinas. I had the blue one and the green one somewhere and I wanted to finish things. I had the engine out and everything. When Nerina came home I asked her if she knew where I could find a rotisserie from, where I could drive the cars in and tilt them up and down to weld them while I was standing up rather than lying on my back underneath. She couldn’t see the advantages of this even though her mother worked buying and selling garage equipment but the advantages of that for me were evident. Of course my father was involved as well. We all went out of the house and got into one of my Cortinas to go somewhere. This discussion about this rotisserie went on and on and on.

As it happens, a rotisserie was high on my list when I was thinking about equipping my garage to rebuild the cars in there. I’d seen a home-made one where the pivots simply bot into the chassis where the bunmpers would normally fasten and you can spin cars round so you can weld on them standing up. When I used to weld cars back in the 80s, I’ve done far more than my fair share of lying on my back welding up underneath a car.

But all of that was a very long time ago.

This morning I didn’t do anything at all except sleep, and I didn’t really do all that much more this afternoon. Certainly not a radio programme.

There has been a ‘phone call though. I mentioned a few days ago that I have a project on the go that if it actually comes off it would be a fantastic coup. And judging by the ‘phone call and the mail that I had to follow it up, it looks as if it actually might heppen too.

There’s a lot of water that needs to flow under the bridge though, and it won’t happen overnight , but things are certainly moving forward.

Tea tonight was another slice of pie with vegetables and gravy and it is certainly impressive. There’s plenty more that’s gone into the freezer for sometime in the future and it seems to me that the quicker I try to empty the freezer, the quicker I end up filling it again. Emptying the freezer is rather the reverse of Cleaning the Augean stables.

Perhaps I should also have mentioned the football this afternoon. Connah’s Quay Nomads v Y Fflint.

Played in a hurricane on a swamp, it was always going to be the kind of game where the ball in the air would be blown out of the ground so you would keep it on the floor and it would stick in the mud. Not a game for the purists and a rather sad throwback to how things used to be in the league 20 years ago before the money from the national side’s cup runs was ploughed back into a dramatic upgrade of facilities.

Even though Akpa-Akpro had a fantastic effort well-saved by Andy Firth early in the game, there was only ever going to be one team in this game and it was all a question of time.

Nevertheless it took the Nomads long enough to break down the Flint defence and the two late goals that the Nomads scored were no more than they deserved.

But the Nomads need to do much better than this if they want to push TNS closer for the title. There is nothing much wrong with their defence particularly since they signed Andy Firth from Glasgow Rangers to stand between the sticks, but the lack of firepower up front has been a worrying factor for several years. The only time they ever mounted a serious challenge was when they had Jamie Insall up front but those days have long-since gone too.

And so have I too. I’ve gone to bed ready to make a new start tomorrow. I have a couple of things to do and I need a good sleep to do it but I’m still not as well as I have been. I’ve been going downhill dramatically for quite a while and I’m not able to pull myself back up.

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Sunday 25th December 2022 – A MERRY CHRISTMAS …

… to all of my readers. And no mention of the public conveniences on Crewe Bus Station this year because they are just a dim and distant memory.

There was a story going round about how someone filmed a film about a nuclear explosion where the explosion was created without any CGI whatsoever. It’s a little-know fact that the aftermath of the nuclear explosion was filmed in Crewe Town centre, also without any CGI. The modern shopping centre in Crewe that I remember being built when I was a small child has how been completely flattened in an act that even the Luftwaffe would have been proud to accomplish.

Talking of the Luftwaffe, another little-known fact is that in 1941 there was a Luftwaffe attack on Crewe that caused £14,000,000 worth of improvements.

Anyway, I digress.

Today I have emulated my namesake the mathematician and done three-fifths of five-eights of … errr … nothing. It is Christmas Day after all and with nothing whatever happening anywhere that I can go to see, there wasn’t really much point in doing anything else.

In fact my most exciting activities took place during the night. I was involved in another fight or argument with my brother over all kinds of stuff, usually about breakfast food. I ended up insisting that I was going to have what I wanted to have and it was too bad if he didn’t like it or wanted it himself. We were in a big house and it was full of people and pets and very unhygenic sitting there trying to eat this breakfast cereal in the middle of all of this was extremely uncomfortable. I wished that I was somewhere else without having to put up with all of this nonsense that I was having.

Later on I was trying to bake some bread or something. In the end it ended up erupting like sourdough and going all over the place making an absolute mess. It took me ages to clear it all up away from everywhere. Then I threw it into the fire as a way of disposing of it. It was awful, a horrible mess. At that moment there was a knock on the back door. I went to open it and the 4 little girls who had been to dancing class came in. They went to sit in the living room. I thought “thank God I managed to dispose of the worst of the stuff”. I asked them how they got on. The eldest one who was about 11 said that she hadn’t done very well. She’d ended up biting people. I thought that I’d find a quiet moment and have her sit on my knee and she can tell me all about it. I’ll see if I can’t come up with some suggestions about what the problem is.

Finally there was me, the parents of Zero and someone else round at Zero’s’s bungalow somewhere. We’d all been working and were quite dirty. The question of a bath came up. Zero’s mother made a bath in the living room by the fire but told me not to go in it until the agenda was covered. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. We prepared to go into the bath. I went to go in but she said that the agenda wasn’t covered yet, which probably meant that people could still see. I said that I’d wait. She passed me a couple of items of clothing,including a T-shirt. She asked me to put the T-shirt in the bin as it was dirty on both sides. I went outside to the bin to put the T-shirt away.

How many times is this now that a dream has shuddered to a halt without Zero putting in an appearance when the rest of her family has been there? Someone is trying to tell me something and I wish that I knew who it was and what was going on. Somehow, though, members of my family manage to rear their ugly heads uninvited and I can’t seem to shake them off.

For brunch I had toast with beans, sausage and potato cakes followed by chocolate cake and for tea I had my vegan pie with veg and gravy.

So that’s it. I hope that you all had a more exciting day than I did. Tomorrow I have a few things going on, not the least of which is the physiotherapist coming to see me. I’m supposed to be radioing as usual but not on your Nelly when it’s a Bank Holiday. I’ll still have to be up early though but I shall be having a little rest at some point. I had a brief 15 minutes doze before tea and I don’t mind having another tomorrow.

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Saturday 24th December 2022 – I WAS REALLY …

… late going to bed last night. That’s because before retiring last night I changed al lthe bedding.

And while it smelled rather damp, it was beautiful to nestle down into something clean and comfortable for a change and I must do this more often.

It therefore goes without saying that I took no notice whatsoever of the alarms this morning and it was round about 09:40 when I finally crawled out of bed. And quite right too.

Some of the morning was spent tidying up in the kitchen. Not very much though. I could do about 10 minutes and then I’d have to go and sit down for an hour to recover and, on at least one occasion, crash out for 20 mintes.

There was a pile of plastic, metal and glass rubbish that needed to be taken down to the bins. I put it in the new shopping trolley and set off. And I do have to say that that’s not going to work as well as I would like either. In fact it took me over half an hour and it’s only just across the road from here.

However, when Laurent from the radio came round to see me the place did actually look better and I felt much more comfortable in having people round.

That’s just the living room and part of the kitchen though. The rest is pretty appalling. I’m hoping that Social Services will contact me soon about having some assistance because I can’t manage on my own.

But I’ve had another ‘phone call. A different physiotherapist wants to come to see me on Tuesdays and Thursdays in addition (apparently) to the first one who wants to come round on Mondays. So what’s kindled his excitement?

Tea was a baked potato with veg and a couple of these small breaded quorn fillets that are really nice. And on that subject the delivery from Amazon with the vegan food in it turned up today too. So mushroo pâté on my toast for breakfast tomorrow.

Some stuff on the dictaphone too. I was retiring from work (and that’s a recurring dream, isn’t it?). With getting everything ready I wanted to go to say goodbye to the people with whom I used to work in Chester years ago in the early 70s. I recalled that I’d bumped into one of them a couple of years ago telling him that I was thinking of moving on. He said not to forget to call in. It was a fraught journey. I had to catch a train to Chester that arrived at about 08:20 but with all of the roadworks and diversion and new one-way systems it took an age and an age to actually make our way across the city to Stanley Place where the insurance company used to be situated. I thought at one time that we would never ever arrive. Some woman had come with me, a girl, and I was talking to her about it. I kept on having flashbacks to remember different bits of this story. All the time we were walking I was gradually piecing things together about how it had come about that i’d met this guy again after all these years and he’d invited me back. Even then I couldn’t recall the complete story and we were still wandering around the city trying to find a way to reach where we wanted to be with things having changed so much that I hardly recognised anything of the route these days.

And then it all became confusing. The next thing on the list was that I was back in this dream again – but which dream again – about going on this camping thing. We’d stopped at the side of the road to have something to eat and to check all of our possessions. By now the vehicle in which we were travelling had become a 4-seater saloon rather than a 2-seater van with a guy sitting in the back. We couldn’t find half of the stuff. Some of it was missing etc and we couldn’t find anything that we needed for certain tasks. The woman suddenly remembered that on one occasion we’d even taken the doors off the railway carriages to construct a shelter. I said “for God’s sake don’t mention that to anyone or you’ll have no idea what they are going to take off. Let’s hope that no-one else on this trip actually remembers .

A little later I remembered some more of this other dream that I’d woken up back into. It was about me showing some people around the southern part of Brussels. There was a mural on a wall about someone who had been killed in a trapeze accident. We ended up back in my apartment which was a tip even worse than it normally is. I’d made these people a coffee but it was as weak as hell, there was no sugar etc. We decided that we would set off somewhere to go on a camping trip, me and a woman sitting in the front of this Escort van and a guy who was sitting in the back of it. There was much more to it than this but I can’t remember now.

So I was clearly becoming all mixed up in my wanderings last night, which is no surprise.

It’s Christmas Day tomorrow and I want to apologise in advance for my lack of festive spirit. I’m not feeling in the least bit Christmassy with all of this going on right now and it’s all too much of an effort.

Rest assured though that I appreciate all of your help and support and wish you all a very Merry Christmas, even if I’m not feeling much like it myself.

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Friday 23rd December 2022 – I’VE HAD ANOTHER …

… miserable, depressing, dismal day today.

This is probably the worst that I’ve had for years. Not only did I fail dismally to beat the second alarm, I have spent most of the day curled up on my seat not moving, and even asleep for considerable periods.

The fact is that moving is so much effort. That’s part of the problem. Instead of things easing up the more I walk, things seem to be deteriorating. Being in an awkward position with my right leg, I now have aches in my right foot that weren’t there before.

And when I try to ease the knee joint, I just have a pain in my back. So I’ve no idea what’s happening here.

And just walking around is becoming pretty much impossible. I may well have treated myself to a shopping trolley but I wonder if I’m going to have the opportunity to use it.

Having said yesterday how much of a better night I’d had and how much I was looking forward to another one, it goes without saying that last night was quite miserable and is probably the reason why I was so exhausted.

Although I was asleep early, I wasn’t asleep for long and spent several hours later tossing and turning around trying to make myself comfortable – without any appreciable degree of success. It ws for that reason that I wasn’t rushed to leave the bed this morning, although any excuse will probably do.

As for work and the like, all I’ve done today is to have a shower, cut my hair (the first time since late September) and ice my sponge cake. The icing didn’t work particularly well, but then again it never really does. I don’t have the hang of doing the icing. However with having let the cake cool down overnight, at least the icing didn’t go all over the place and slide off.

The chemist came as well and brought me a couple more injections. With there being an increased doze, the price has gone through the roof.

Tea tonight was pasta with falafel and it was quite delicious as usual. The freezer is slowly thinning out and if I’m not careful I might even be able to fit these frozen carrots in there instead of leaving them in the ridge’s freezer compartment. I’m really going to have to buy a different, bigger freezer.

Next plan was to type out the dictaphone notes. I was somewhere in Europe planning on travelling. It was the mdweek sometime and there were a few people loitering around who were travelling too. We ended up standing by a bus stop somewhere in the street. Far below us, lower down in the street, a door opened and a train came through. I said to these people that if they want to catch a train they were standing in the wrong place. This is a bus station. We all picked up our things and moved a bit further down the hill where this other group of people were waiting. There was a huge crowd there. This train pulled in and I swarmed on board. I couldn’t see any of these other people so I wondered if they were all having some kind of fun at my expense or whether they were still going by bus regardless or something. I felt that I was the only one of this group of people who had been together at the beginning who had actually boarded. Someone else said something and I realised that a girl and her daughter had boarded the train too. The train set off and I was having to stand going to Montreal, that I had to stand until 23:00 tomorrow. For some reason we ended up around a Council estate in Crewe, the Brookhouse Drive estate, on foot. We were heading towards another bus stop. I was taking this girl and her daughter. I knew all the short cuts so I was taking them through these short cuts on this council estate. She said “we’ll get well ahead of all the others by the time we reach the bus stop”. We were having to go somewhere like Wybunbury or Audlem or Market Drayton. I couldn’t remember the times of the buses but I thought that even if there wasn’t a direct bus we could take a bus from here that would take us to Nantwich and then work our way on from that way to see how we could progress. But I was certain that we’d make progress and quite rapidly too going like this.

Later on I stepped right back into this dream again. We’d been on this train and I alighted at some point with this woman and her daughter. We were walking towards the bus stop to catch the bus to go the rest of the way. I remember hoping that my leg would hold out because I was starting to have these pains and cramps in my right leg again, the type that I have been having. I thought that this isn’t really the time to go down with a cramp like this when we are in between bus stops in a rush to catch the bus to take us further on.

And then I can’t remember very much about this but there was a woman who had run down some animal or something. She was extremely distraught. Some of my friends from Canada were in it but I don’t know why or what they were doing

Finally we had football. Y Fflint v Caernarfon. Y Fflint are on a woeful run despite having looked really good at the start of the season. They took the lead early in the game but gradually Caernarfon pulled themselves back into the game and equalised after 55 minutes.

But what a different story it might have been had the two stonewall penalties that I would have awarded to Y Fflint had been awarded by the referee. In fact I was convinced that there were times when I was convinced that the referee was officiating at a different game to the one that I was watching.

With 20 minutes to go, a couple of substitutions on either side ignited the game and we were treated to a really exciting spell of football as the game swung from one end to the other. A deciding goal was well on the cards but it was all a case of who would score it as either team looked quite likely.

Y Fflint’s centre forward from the Cote d’Ivoire had missed a couple of good chances and when another of his attempts was well-blocked by Josh Tibbetts in the Caernarfon’s goal just as we came up to injury time, I thought “here we go again” but Akpa-Akpro stuck out a foot and just about managed to divert it back to the far post where Larnell Cole sidefooted it into the net.

So justice was done because Y Fflint were in my opinion the better side and deserved something from the game, especially after some of the decisions that went again them.

Tomorrow I have to summon up some energy and tidy up as I’m expecting visitors. I’ve no idea how I’m going to do this after the past couple of days but I’ll have to do my best. Let’s hope that my best is good enough.

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Thursday 22nd December 2022 – WHAT CAN BE EASIER …

… than buying something, arranging for it to be picked up and shipped to a different address?

Absolutely everything, by the looks of things.

This blasted sunroof that I ordered, paid for and collected (one of my reasons for going to Canada just now) and then arranged to be taken away and delivered to France by a freighting company has now turned up back at the point of collection.

The box has been opened too and all of the special packaging that kept it safe from damage all the way from the manufacturer is “missing”.

It already took 6 weeks for it to be collected by the freighter and then it was away for just about a week or so before it ended up back.

The story (for what it’s worth) is that Customs had to inspect it before it went on board the aeroplane (I’m not quite sure why) and as a result it missed its flight. The freighter will “arrange for it to be picked up again” but we shall see about that.

What is quite upsetting is that it’s no longer in its secure factory packaging, and sending a glass sunroof by air mail without the proper packaging is going to be somewhat problematic.

This shoud have been something sooooooo easy to arrange but that’s not the case. I keep on saying that I ought to stop doing things for other people as I find it so stressful but I always manage to find myself “suckered in” because it’s “so easy”. But for reasons that I don’t understand, it never is.

At least I’d had a decent sleep for a change. I remembered being awake for two or three moments here and there but not for any significant time. Once again I didn’t manage to beat the second alarm but there wasn’t all that much in it. I suppose that that’s optimistic for the way things have been just recently.

Once I’d come round into the Land of the Living I made a start on the radio programme that I wanted to prepare for today. There were several interruptions though so I didn’t set any records today.

Firstly, I have joined the rank of the Old Biddies. My shopping trolley has arrived so I had to go downstairs to collect it, and then assemble it. But although it makes me feel as if I’m about 100, it’s safe to lean on when I’m walking and gives me a little support here and there.

It’s quite large too so doing some shopping in the town may well prove to be a little more easy in the future. We’ll have to see after Christmas when I’ll make another foray down to the Carrefour.

Liz was on line too so we had another long chat, and then I prepared the onions and garlic and mixed up all the filling for my pie. It needs to be cooled before I can put it in the pie shell so I thought that if I were to do it early, it would have time to cool down.

And then, rather regrettably, I dozed off for half an hour at some point too.

This afternoon I’ve had a baking fit, but not, I have to say, with a great deal of success.

My pastry wasn’t up to all that much. I’m out of practice, I reckon, and it wouldn’t roll out properly. It ended up as something of a bit og a bodge but it worked.

Next was to make a chocolate sponge cake. That rose quite nicely in the oven but then it collapsed again in the centre. However it’s better than nothing and I’ll cut it in half, join the two halves together with a layer of jam and then ice it. That’s going to be my Christmas cake for this year. It’s the best that I can do.

Next stop was a pile of fruit buns, and I forgot that I had no bananas. Nevertheless, that lot looked as if it might have worked.

Finally, I had a go at making potato cakes for breakfast over the Christmas period. These aren’t a great success but then I’ve never had very much luck with these. But making them in little silicone muffin cases in the air fryer was a good idea.

It was while all of this was going on that I had to deal with the fall-out from this parcels delivery and it’s all very confusing.

For tea tonight, I had something different. While I was searching through the stores I came across a couple of packets of instant chick-pea curry. I tried one with some rice and veg. It was different and I’ve tasted better, but things like this need to be used. I tried to make myself an ad-hoc naan bread to try with it. And while that wasn’t a success either, it wasn’t disagreeable.

There were a couple of things on the dictaphone too from last night. I was on board a ship serving as a crew and the telephone rang. Someone answered it although it was my job to do so so I took it to interrupt him. In the end he said the name of the ship and he said my name and then passed the ‘phone over to me. It was the Institute of Diabetics inviting me to a meeting. Basically I had no interest whatever going to see the Institute of Diabetics. It turned out that these were taking place on board a submarine and I had absolutely no interest whatever in going on board a submarine either but this other sailor had. He was having to work out his plans etc to see how he could possibly fit it all in etc in order to negotiate an invitation for himself. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than going on board a submarine for something like this.

Later on there was a girl called Dianne, a Ukrainian girl with black hair who wanted a portfolio of photos taking. I’d looked on a website and she’d done plenty of portfolios before but I couldn’t actually see what it was that she needed. I was wondering whether it was a case of her redoing some of the earlier ones. I had a sort-around and tried to get a few things together but we had an appointment at 20:00 that was quite important, a contentious one. I had a few things to finish and round about 19:40 I’d done that so I said to Nerina “we have 20 minutes before this appointment so while I make a few sandwiches, can we talk about our plan”. She was puzzled about the sandwiches so I asked what we were going to eat. It seemed that she hadn’t thought anything about sandwiches at all or any food. She could think vaguely about where she could find a sandwich but not anyone else. I could see that this whole situation was going to turn into a nightmare. I knew that the night before I’d been out somewhere. It was really late when I was coming home, in the small hours of the morning. As I walked past Warner’s shop in Shavington there were some lights on and some people in the shop. I stuck my head in and opened the door to ask if they were open. They replied “not really” but what did I want? I just had a bar of chocolate just to get me home. They sold me a Mars bar. This was when I first started thinking about thse photos, when I was on my way home with my Mars bar after that. The rest took place the following day. But I was amazed that no-one else was prepared or had a plan or had anything organised – all down to me again and I only had 20 minutes. It was plenty of time for what I wanted to do but for what everyone else wanted it was nothing at all and it was going to be chaos.

Later on I got back into that dream about Dianne with the two “n”s. That flared up again from the very beginning and we went through that again.

Strangely enough I once met a girl, many years ago, called Dianne (with two “n”s and long black hair) but she was from South Asia somewhere like the Philippines or Indonesia, somewhere like that. Whatever would she be doing suddenly making an appearance in my travels?

So now I’m going to try to have another early night. I’m pretty much ready for this too and see if I can manage another decent sleep. Tomorrow I’m going to have a shower and change my bedding, and then I have a neighbour to see. I have to pay her for the stuff that she bought for me the other day. I’d better have a really good clean-up.

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