Category Archives: France

Wednesday 21st December 2022 – I’VE HAD A …

… horrible, really horrible day today. In fact I’ve spent most of it fast asleep on my chair with no enthusiasm to do anything and much of the stuff that I planned to do today has remained undone.

It actually started off quite well too. Although I didn’t beat the second alarm to my feet, There wasn’t much in it and I was good and ready if the pharmacist decided to bring me my injections. But, as you might expect, she didn’t come past.

Someone who did come past though was one of my neighbours saying that she was going shopping. I passed an order for potatoes, carrots, sprouts, pears and clementines. It cost a fortune but now I’m set up with everything in the fruit and veg line for the next two or three weeks.

In the time that it took for her to go and come back, I was flat out asleep on the chair in here. I really have never felt so awful as I did this morning and I’ve no idea why. I reckon that the effects of yesterday were just far too much for me.

This afternoon I’ve been asleep for quite a while too but when you look at what I’ve managed to do, it looks impressive nevertheless. Like tidying up, for example. The place looks a little better now that I’ve cleared a few things away.

And a big load of washing too. Surprisingly that’s all up-to-date now and it’s been a while since I’ve been able to say that.

1kg of sprouts and 1.5kg of carrots took some peeling and blanching, but they are all done now too. The sprouts went into the freezer but there was no room for the carrots so for the moment they are in the ice box in the fridge. It’s not ideal but I wasn’t going to miss out on the opportunity to stock up.

For my Christmas meal, seeing as I don’t have anything special, I’ve decided that I will make a nice pie. So I put a cup full of lentils in the slow cooker. When they boiled up, I drained and rinsed them and put them back with some tofu and a pile of herbs and some garlic. They will marinade on a slow heat overnight and should be delicious.

Tomorrow I’ll fry some onions and add the tuff from the slow cooker and then add porridge oats to bind it all together. And when it’s cooled, I’ll make a nice tasty pie. But I can’t find the pie dish that I want to use and I have a feeling that I might have to invent something for that.

Ingrid telephoned me too and we had a chat. Not quite a Rosemaryesque chat but a long and interesting one nevertheless. She’s just as appalled as everyone else about what went on in the hospital in Leuven.

So this afternoon, I’ve been a really busy little beaver despite the fact that I didn’t feel at all like it and didn’t think that I’d done all that much.

Although I didn’t make any progress with the radio programme that I’ll be trying to prepare tomorrow, I managed to find the energy to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I started off taking a coach tour party to Blackpool. We made it as far as a motorway service area where we’d stop for half an hour although I forgot to tell everyone that it would be just half an hour. It was so tight in there that I had to get off the coach, shunt the other coaches around so I could find myself into a place to park. So there I was, heaving and mauling on these coaches. Eventually I put mine into a decent place. There was a guy with me who was looking at it. I said “it’s a good job that I can do this on my own, isn’t it? I used to be married”. We had a little chat. Gradually the passengers started to drift back. We ended up having another talk about monsters and that kind of thing, how gruesome and everything these slimy creatures were, the kind of stuff that I wouldn’t normally print on my blog but I seem to be doing it a lot just recently.

This next one is a story about a group of kids and adults, all extremely wealthy except 2 boys. 2 young girls move into their neighbourhood and the two boys seem to be more interested in the new girls than these women and girls who had been here before in this rich type of scenario. It starts to cause a load of problems.

So tomorrow I’ll be having a go with making my pie. I also have to make some more fruit buns as there are only enough for breakfast tomorrow. What i’m going to do with the ones that I don’t eat quickly I really don’t know as there is now no room in the freezer.

But that’s a problem for tomorrow. Right now I’m going to bed even if it is early. It’s been a horrible day – the kind that you just want to switch off and start again. But I’ve had a quick taste of my simmering pie filling and it is rather special. provided that I can find a pie dish it should work out really well.

Here’s hoping.

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Tuesday 20th December 2022 – THERE I WAS …

… deep in the arms of Morpheus observing some kind of exciting spaghetti western and someone rings the front doorbell.

Still, serves me right for deciding to have a lie-in this morning instead of springing to my feet with alacrity.

Last night, I’d even gone to bed reasonably early as well and was looking forward to a decnt 8 hours sleep but it never quite worked out like that. There was the usual tossing and turning that seems to have become a regular feature of the way things are these days.

So having kept my doorbell-ringer hanging on the door for several minutes while I threw on some clothes, I staggered (and I DO mean “staggered”) down the stairs to find the pharmacist who had brought me my medication. The doctor had dropped off the prescription at the pharmacy yesterday.

My injections haven’t come yet. They need to be ordered specially and will arrive when they arrive. But I’ll make sure that I’m up early tomorrow.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I had plenty of things that I needed to do but it didn’t quite work out like that today. There’s a project, quite a serious one, that I have on the go and about which I’ve alluded in the recent past and that has occupied much of my day today.

It’s something that if it comes off it will change my life dramatically for the better and so I’m keen to push things along as quickly as I can. So when people want to talk to me about it, I’m not going to be obstructive.

One thing that I promised to do was to try to go into town and the Carrefour supermarket at the port. So despite the heavy rain, I made an attempt.

Getting to the bus stop itself just 10 metres from the front door was enough to convince me that this was not one of my better ideas, but I pushed on all the same.

Hauling myself up onto the pavement by clinging onto the wall, I managed to board the bus. I even managed to alight but the walk to the supermarket, all 50 metres of it, was a nightmare.

Luckily I managed to find almost everything that I needed, except the vegan mushroom pâté. And then the walk back to the bus stop, even though it was only half the distance, was dreadful. When the bus came to pick me up and take me home, he stopped well away from the kerb and his wheelchair ramp wasn’t working. And so you can imagine how much of a problem it was to board the bus to come home.

That finished me off. The walk back from the bus to home even more difficult and I was glad to return home in the end. I had to have an energy drink to recover but at least I had my frozen peas and beans, tomatoes, taco rolls and a couple of other things too. There were a few carrots and sprouts too so when I’d recovered somewhat I peeled, diced and blanched them. They are now in the freezer freezing.

Rosemary and I had a chat too and the question of on-line shopping came up. And to my surprise Amazon came up with my mushroom pâté as well as a few other interesting things so I assembled an order. I even ordered one of those wheeled shopping bag things, thinking that I might be able to move a little better if I didn’t have things to carry and I had something on which I can lean.

There was plenty of stuff on the dictaphone too from the night. This was something of a nightmare. I was in a kind-of swamp and there were all these primeval small creatures in there that were trying to eat all of the human beings who were trying to wade their way through it. Eventually we managed to extricate ourselves from it and sit in trees etc while these small creatures prowled around underneath. Then these other animals started to appear out of the shrubbery when it was dark and we watched the animals start to attack those and carry them off into a quiet corner where they could eat them. In the end we were finally called to where we were supposed to be. We had to make a run for it and eventually reached some kind of safety. But this was a nightmare and horrible while we were sitting in these trees watching all of this going on.

And then we had a dream where I’d lost the use of my legs but had to go into town. I’d somehow got on the bus and bought some stuff and was on my way back. The bus did an emergency stop. A few of us went flying up the bus but held onto our possessions etc. When the bus finally stopped we were greeted with a round of applause for having been so good at doing that. Interestingly, that felt as if it was 03:00 in the middle of the night when I was trying to go to sleep rather than in the morning when it was supposed to have been and I was up and about going shopping with the bus and my things.

Later on we were back at Nantwich Grammar School again. Me, my German friend and a group of others. The whole system had changed. There wasn’t the assembly followed by the lesson – I don’t know what they were doing but we could see that everything had changed since our day. Even the school uniform was a kind-of pale green blazer. We decided that we weren’t going to take any interest in this. We would go and play cricket on the tarmac at the back of the gym. A group of us, 3 or 4 of us, set off and walked down the boys’ corridor past all the boys sitting in the changing rooms and out of the back. Suddenly this golf club came whizzing past. it was my brother playing golf. My German friend was going on about how it was obvious that all these changes about sport – no-one was playing any sport or games any more. It’s obvious that the school playing fields are going to be the next to go and the kids won’t have anywhere to play, never mind whether they wanted to or not. My German friend took up a position at some invisible stumps, my brother kept wicket and I took a nice long run up. I suddenly set off on my run down to what was the other wicket and my legs just gave way underneath me. I fell flat on my face.

When I awoke a little later I had an enormous pain in my knee. That was strange.

later still I was back on the taxis last night. For some unknown reason I awoke really early and Nerina was organising one or two things. There were a couple of jobs in so I said that I would go and do them. First of all I had to go round to see the girl who drove for us in the daytime, if she was still ill. She lived in High Street, n°3. I drove round there in this beautiful sunny morning really early. There were 2 surnames on the door that were the same. I didn’t know which one so I pressed one of them but she answered. I could see that her issues, a lot of it was physical, some of it was psyschological. I had the impression that she just had a great depression so I started to talk to her to see if I could be of any help

Finally I was in the middle of a spaghetti western with the goodies shooting up the baddies and the baddies slowly disappearing into this old wooden shack like in any good Clint Eastwood film. There were a couple of women one of whom was holding a stash of jewels for one of the baddies but another woman found it and managed to hide it under her clothing. When it wame to the time for them all to leave she made sure that she had the fastest and best horse and began to out-ride the other one and make good her getaway. Just as we were getting to the climax when the front doorbell rang. It was the pharmacist.

But as you can see, my walking difficulties are now working their way into my dreams. That’s rather a worrying thought.

Tea was a stuffed pepper, and there’s enough stuffing left over for a taco roll, now that I have some. And now I’m off to bed. I want to be early because I might have the pharmacist coming round in the morning and I need to be ready. Things had all the potential of being rather embarrassing this morning if I’m in a state of only semi-awareness.

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Monday 19th December 2022 – APART FROM A …

… fruit bun thing at about 10:30 I’ve had nothing to eat all day until about 22:00 – and then it was a packet of crackers.

When it was teatime I was chatting to Liz on the internet but never mind, I can wait for half an hour. That’s what friends are for.

And the moment that we finished, Rosemary rang me (I’m convinced that she has a camera installed in this apartment, God help her!) and we had another one of our marathon ‘phone calls. By the time we finished, I was too tired to cook anything. I’ll be off to bed very shortly.

It’s actually been quite a busy day today, not the least activity of which was during the night. I was later going to bed than I had anticipated but even so I was awake a couple of times during the night and by 04:45 I’d given up completely.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I surprised myself by actually leaping out of bed (well, maybe not exactly but you understand what I mean) which considering just how difficult it has been just recently to raise myself from the dead at a normal time, is pretty astonishing.

After having had the medication and checked my mails and messages, I sat down to deal with the radio programme today.

No records were broken today – in fact, far from it. I had a break for about half an hour when I went for a shower as I’m having visitors later, and then the events that I mentioned towards the end of last week are starting to unwind and it won’t be long before my active involvement will be requested. I need to be prepared.

Once the radio programme was completed I actuallly fell asleep for a short while and then had to wait around for the doctor to arrive.

Trailing his student around with him, he came to examine me and to give me some advice about how things might unfold. e had quite a chat about a few other things too, more of which anon.

Later on, the Social Services department telephoned me. The woman to whom I spoke gave me a couple of phone numbers whom I need to contact so that I can have some assistance about the place. That’s a job for tomorrow as it was rather late in the afternoon.

A short while later, the physiotherapist came round. The doctor had contacted him too. He thinks that the problem lies in my thighs and hips and he gave me some exercises. He’ll be back in a week to see how I’m doing.

Once everyone had finished with me I could turn my attention to the dictaphone. There wasn’t an awful lot on there from last night. There was something about a block of flats where there was a place to sunbathe. Someone was pointing this out from quite a height, looking down onto it. We could see that a large glass carafe of water or something had fallen obviously from a great height and smashed to smithereens right in this place. If anyone had been sunbathing there they would have had the full weight of all of that right on their head.

Having spoken to Liz and Rosemary I’m now ready for bed. No Welsh lesson because we’re on holiday but if I remember, I’m going to do some revision.

What else I’m going to try to do is to catch the bus into town and try to find some frozen food to tide me over. It would have been a good day to take Caliburn out for a run with the temperatures having warmed up dramatically to 10°C today but there just wasn’t the time available and I’ll have to try that some other time.

Not right now though because I’m off to bed. Anyone would think that I’ve had an exhausting day but it’s just the way that things are going right now when I’m becoming tired out for no good reason. Let’s see how things unfold tomorrow.

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Sunday 18th December 2022 – JUST IN CASE …

… you were wondering, it was another miserable night last night.

It was actually fairly early when I went to bed and I managed to go to sleep fairly quickly but once I awoke later, then that was that. Staying in bed until 10:05 is all ver well, but not really if you’ve spent much of the preceding 6 hours wide awake.

Sleeping pills may well be the option for that of course, as someone will probably remind me, but the only pleasure that I have out of life at the moment is what goes on during the hours of when I’m asleep and I don’t want to miss out on that.

And while we’re on the subject of what goes on during the night … “well, one of us is” – ed … I was out walking across London last night. I started off at the south-west and was heading into places like Brompton and the Royal Albert Hall, that area, and I could see everything in the distance. I came across a river but of course the river is nowhere near there. I had to walk around the river to find my way across on a bridge. By this time it had become Paris. I was walking again through Paris. There was something to do with a school where there were a couple of teachers and a few boys. At the end of the war the teachers had liberated themselves and abandoned the boys. The boys typed “Liberation” up on the door. By this time I was with someone else and we’d entered their apartment building and gone into their apartment. We could see the railway line at the back of their house. We were trying to find out what was the matter with them because it was quite obvious that things weren’t right

And then I was with Nerina. We were doing some kind of dissertation each. I was researching someone called the Duc d’Emory who was a French minister. He was someone renowned for being very thorough and going in depth into things. There was a certain legal case that came up at the time that he was in power. I’d managed to find a pile of notes that he’d written. I was going through this. She was doing something else and came towards near finishing. I was pretty much near finishing so I asked her how many pages she thought I ought to do. She replied “probably about eight”. I said “well, I’m cooked then” because I’d done probably double that and more. In the end she said something like “well it doesn’t really matter as long as you haven’t put in any superfluous words or anything like that”. I was really proud of what I’d managed to find out and write about him in this particular case.

Finally, there was a car race for small boys pushing cars around a circuit. I was asked to judge it. At first it was all going quite well but gradually the circuit became smaller as the boys started to cut the corner. I’d already worked out which one of them was going to win because he was better than the others but he was one who was taking so many short-cuts as well that I thought that I’d let him stew for a while before I actually announced the winner. He did far more than the 8 circuits going round but quite right too. I waited for a while before I called him the winner.

Once I was up and about I didn’t do too much at all (after all, it IS Sunday) and then I went for lunch. Coffee, toast and porridge.

The plan was that if the weather warmed up I was going to go outside and play with Caliburn after lunch. It was indeed warmer – we had a balmy 3°C outside – but it was gusting gale-force winds and it was teeming with rain. So I abandoned that idea for today. Instead I paired off the music fr the radio programme that I’ll be hopefully preparing tomorrow.

With it being Sunday, it’s pizza day today. There was no dough left over so I made another batch this afternoon and it ended up being quite a good mix too. Nice and smooth.

The dough was split into 3 lumps and two lots were put in the freezer. The third I put on the pizza tray, assembled it and when it was tea-time I baked it.

Delicious it was too. How I’ve missed not having a pizza this last few months.

Now it’s bedtime. Nice and early too because it’s an 06:00 start. But I better had feel better about it than I do right now. I can’t seem to get my motivation going for some reason – the story of my life these days – and I have to do better.

After all, let’s face it – I can’t be doing much worse.

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Saturday 17th December 2022 – I SUCCUMBED …

… to temptation today.

When the alarm went off at 07:30 I was actually fast asleep, as I was when it went off at 07:45. And for once, with no sense of shame or guilt, I just turned over and went back to sleep.

It was probably something to do with having one of my better (at least, in recent times) nights of sleep last night. Although I vaguely remember waking up a couple of times, I didn’t actually have to go for a stroll down the during the night.

It might also have something to do with the fact that I didn’t go to bed until after midnight, and that’s quite late for me these days. I’ve still not recovered from all of my exertions from while I was on the road back from Leuven and early nights seem to be the norm right now. It’s been several years since I could stay up until 02:00 and then be up and about as fit as a fiddle at 06:00.

There was a pile of stuff on the dictaphone too so it really must have been something of a disturbed night one way or another. I can’t remember much about this first little voyage except that I was suffering from whatever it was from which I’m suffering with all of the limited mobility as well yet there were other people who were completely fully mobile. Somehow I was able to move about but I don’t know how, why or when.

However I could remember something a little later. I found a stone or an extra something or other down the bed. That helped me add up to something more normal, more realistic.

There was an election taking place somewhere. I wrote a long eulogy for one of the candidates. After I’d prepared it I was told basically that it wasn’t needed. I was wasting my time and no-one liked my work anyway. Going back to the office afterwards I told whoever it was that I’d had enough. I was going to retire. They asked whether I was old enough to do it so I replied that to tell the truth I was past the retiring age by a couple of years and this is a recurring dream, isn’t it?. When we finally entered this room where this party was taking place, the kettle was boiling and the girl making the tea was running around. There were a couple of people whom I knew and I was trying to be nice to them but it wasn’t working. I was just generally fed up.

Later on I was in hospital busy trying to work out how I was going to go home. There was a shortfall of about half an hour in my journey and I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to move myself for that half-hour to complete the journey properly or whether I was just going to be falling short again. There was some famous footballer who came onto the wards and was walking around talking to all the patients. He was quite enjoying it and so were they. I had a few words with him but I can’t remember what I said now.

And then we were at a restaurant. I asked an innocent question of a woman on my table “what does your husband do?” which provoked piles of guffaws from everyone. I thought to myself afterwards and then I said “perhaps as well as several other tables in this restaurant they ought to have an ‘innocent babes’ table where we can go to sit and ask innocent questions without everyone taking them as double-entendres” but it was actually quite funny.

Finally, I should have gone to the hospital to hassle them over something or other but in the end I ended up having a nice, long lie-in in bed. I then decided that I was going to go home. I went out of the door to leave and found that my sister was round the back of the house tidying up in the garden from her birthday. I sneaked this kind-of barrel organ thing round to the back to start to serenade her but to play it was much more difficult than I thought. It ended up being a load of rubbish. She smiled and thought that it was funny. She showed me everything that she was having to clear up and put away from her birthday party the previous day. Considering that there hadn’t been many people there was an enormous pile of crockery and cutlery set out on these tables that she had piled up ready to bring into the house

It was actually just after 10:00 when I finally saw the light of day. And it’s a good job that I did because my neighbour rang me again. He was on the way to the market and did I need anything? So now I have some mushrooms and peppers too. I might go back into my old habits tomorrow and make a pizza. It’s been an age …

Another neighbour came round too – Pierre, the skipper of the Spirit of Conrad, the yacht on which we went down the Brittany coast another whole lifetime ago. He’d heard that I was back in town and wanted to see how I was. I seem to be quite popular just now.

After my toast and coffee I sat down to work on a letter that I need to write. And by the time that I was ready for tea, I’d written the first draft. It’s quite an incendiary letter because the events of the past few weeks have taught me that trying to be polite in a certain sphere has got me absolutely nowhere – except backwards – and I’m past caring now about whatever certain people might think.

Nothing much will change – I’m quite certain of that – but if I can blister the paint in a certain office then I’ll feel so much better. The knowledge that my doctor is coming to visit me on Monday inspires me with some kind of confidence that I can take drastic steps and have some element of support.

Tea was, as usual on a Saturday, some of these breaded quorn fillets with potatoes (now that I have some) and frozen veg. Only enough frozen veg now for one more meal so sometime either Monday or Tuesday I need to experiment by trying to catch a bus to the Carrefour supermarket.

That should be an exciting day out because not only do I have to make it to the supermarket, I have to make it back to the bus stop with my purchases and then climb up the stairs with them to my apartment.

The sooner I can knock all of this on the head, the better.

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Friday 16th December 2022 – I’VE DONE SOMETHING …

… today that I’m very probably going to regret doing, but I can’t go on like this much longer. Going downstairs took me an absolute age yet again, nothing on my body is freeing off and nothing is becoming any easier. And to give you an idea of how hard I tried, I’ve done 15% of my daily activity today.

And it’s been a very long time since I’ve done anything like that.

So what I have done today is that I have bitten the bullet – and if it comes off it will be for the largest sum of money that I have ever spent at one go in my life. And that’s not like me go go around spending any money, is it?

You’ll have to wait for a while to find out what it is because nothing is ever completed, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, until the ink is dry on the paper. But if we ever do reach that stage, then believe me, you lot will be the first to know.

We were a long way away from there though this morning.

It was another early night and for a change I managed to fall asleep quite quickly. But round about 01:45 I awoke and that was that for at least an hour and a half. And I know that because I checked.

Consequently when the alarm went off I was dead to the world once more and it was only the need to visit the bathroom that saw me beat the second alarm.

Plenty of stuff on the dictaphone and a welcome return for TOTGA who put in an appearance during the night. As I said yesterday, it’s been a long time since she paid me a visit during the night so it was very pleasant to see her again. I was on my way home down the Boulevard Lecampion and I saw her going past on the far side of the street. I stopped outside my apartment which was actually in Boulevard Lecampion, went into my building and started to unload my car, leaving the door open so that she could go past and see, which she did. She came over to talk about something or other. Alison was there and saw her, not saying anything at the time but after the conversation had finished and I’d gone upstairs she asked if that was TOTGA. I replied “yes”. She said “she’s only my age but yes! She was obviously appoving of whatever it was she approved. Something then was happening and I had to go out somewhere in the evening. Of course as soon as it was the case that I had to run this errand I dashed off outside because I was hoping that I could get to go to somwhere like Halifax and have a really nice evening meal and then come back. The times of trains made it extremely difficult for that. I reached the bus station just as a bus for Stockport pulled in. I thought that I could at least go to Stockport and have an Indian meal but that pulled through and drove round onto the other side of the bus station and I wouldn’t have time to walk over there before it would drive off again. I was sitting there then wondering what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to go to the office but that closed at 20:00. If I set off even then I wouldn’t be there for 20:00 so it seemed rather pointless in the end actually going out because there wasn’t really anywhere I could actually go that was of any real interest to me at that particular moment.

And later, I was keeping shop somewhere in an old industrial town. I’d had a Press Release that some camping gear and exploive equipment had been found on an industrial estate at the back of an arms manufacturer and one or two other places like that. I was busy writing out a note to display in my shop when some guy walked in. I asked him if he could hang on for a minute while I wrote out my sign and he made some comment. Then he asked for the “big gasket” for a tractor. We eventually found out what tractor it was but he was being extremely vague about the gasket. I had to run through all of the gaskets with him and talk to him about them and what he might find where, everything, to try to satisfy myself exactly what gasket he’d want. To make things worse I hadn’t taken over this shop long. There was a pile of gaskets of all sorts and I hadn’t had time to go through them and find out to what they related. There was probably one in this pile somewhere but heaven alone knows which one it was.

Once I was up and about it took me, as you might expect, a good while to come round to my senses which, seeing how few I have these days, is rather remarkable. But I eventually struggled to some form of life and even managed to make some bread dough because I’m right out of bread.

And then I had a phone call. A few weeks ago I’d heaved a stone into a rather large pool and the ripples were still rolloing outwards. Nevertheless I was surprised to receive the call and it ended up being something of a considerable amount of horse-trading that took quite a while.

So now we’ll see what happens.

The weather had warmed up dramatically today and we were in the balmy semi-tropical realms of 5°C. Caliburn once more struggled to life and wo I went on another one of these 20km runabouts in the hope of pumping some life into the battery. I don’t know whether or not he would have started again had I stopped at the shops – I didn’t want to tempt fate.

But I have managed to work out a way of getting onto the pavement by the bus stop so at a push I might be able to board the bus. Now if only I could walk we might be back in business in this respect too.

Back here I had another ‘phone call to make. If you’ve experienced any difficulty getting into this site just recently, there has been a major server change that involves a new mainframe host and there’s always a lag between changing the DNS settings and them actually taking effect. So that will explain that.

And that phone call took much longer than it ought to have done too, but for reasons which you really don’t want to know. I certainly didn’t.

After tea, we had football on the internet. In the Welsh Premier League most of the matches were postponed because of the freezing weather in Wales, including the featured match, but there was one match taking place, conveniently just down the road from “Sgorio” headquarters in Cardiff.

We had Cardiff Metro v Haverfordwest in minus 2°C and everyone, including the referee, was feeling the cold. The Met went one goal up early one through a penalty but honestly neither side looked as if they could hit the nether regions of a ruminant animal with a stringed musical instrument.

In fact the commentator made the point that in the Met’s last 6 home goames, they have scored 4 goals, namely – own goal – penalty – penalty – penalty- and only three of their players have actually had their names on the scoresheet all season.

And how cruel is your luck? Former Hull boss Tony Pennock finally managed to find his team’s on/off switch with 5 minutes to go and they sprang into life, only to be undone again by a breakaway down the whole length of the field with just 30 seconds remaining on the clock.

A 2-0 defeat was something of an exaggeration.

But I’m off to bed now anyway. I have to think of several cunning plans to raise a few quid here and there. I shall probably end up selling my body on Boots Corner. Not like the lady who tried it once and came home with £19:10.
“Who gave you the 10p?” asked her husband.
“Why, all of them” she replied.

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Thursday 15th December 2022 – TONIGHT’S TEA …

… was sausage, beans and chips. And how beautiful it was too. I really enjoyed it.

One of my neighbours was going for a walk down to the shops this afternoon and he saw my note on the door so he came by to ask if I needed anything. Of course, if someone is going down to town on foot they can’t bring back very much of anything so a bag of potatoes it was.

At least my desire for chips is satiated for now and there’s enough for tea on Saturday night.

And in other news, I’ve had to make a start in tidying up the apartment as I’m going to have a visitor on Monday at lunchtime. I’ve finally managed to contact the doctor and he’s going to make a house call on Monday.

It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out once he comes round. What he’s going to say and what he’s going to suggest. At least it’s a start, but then again as I used to say back in the 70s when I was attending auctions as a buyer, it’s not where we start that’s important, it’s where we finish.

And to tell the honest truth, I’m probably finished already.

While we’re on the subject of finishing … “well, one of us is” – ed … I finished early last night and was in bed quite promptly looking forward to a good sleep.

Not that it worked out that way because I still had to leave the bed to go for a stroll down the corridor, and then apart from that I went off on quite a few little voyages during the night. We were living in Shavington and it was all quite primitive. We only had a cold water tap in the downstairs sink so I was trying to work out how I could make some kind of hot water tank underneath the sink with a candle to heat the water. I had a rough idea in my head but but it wouldn’t be particularly good. I spoke to my brother and said that maybe we ought to give it a go. My mother and my sister had been out somewhere. They came back in. We’d been watching a cowboy film but they switched over to watch The Clitheroe Kid. Then the two of them were in bed and were fighting over a sandwich that my sister was trying to eat in bed so I said something like “fancy swapping the TV over on our programme and then not going to watch it”. She said that we could swap back. It was right at the end, a Western something similar to one of the EL DORADO trilogy of films where the fight was over and the young boy was leaving. A young girl who had obviosly been close to this boy was practically in tears about him going but he said that he had to leave. “We’ve had 3 or 4 years of good times but it’s time to move on”. She was totally distraught about the whole idea of him leaving and rather than it being a happy ending it was a really sad, dramatic one. Even in my sleep I could feel how powerful the ending was.

Later on I had some money so I was going to invest it by buying a property in PIonsat, some apartments but it had to be a good quality apartment (not that there’s anything quite like that in Pionsat). I didn’t want to buy any old rubbish. There were several decent buildings in the town so I had a wander around and ended up at the bank. That was almost fraught because there was a traffic hold-up and a lorry decided that it would reverse down the High Street, nearly knocking me over as I crossed the road. In the bank I had to queue. It looked as if someone had forgotten his carrots but he walked off without them so I asked the guy in front of me if they were his. He said “no”. It was then my turn and I started to chat to this girl. This guy slipped a piece of paper “I know all about you” it said. “Don’t do it”. I asked “what on earth is this about?”. He said that someone chatted up a bank cashier and ended up meeting her in an alleyway and finished by murdering her. I said “I don’t remember this”. He replied “no, it was in 1968 so just you be careful”. I couldn’t understand what this guy was talking about. He was clearly not in the same world as the rest of us.

And then it was this summer and I was deciding to go into work very early, having spoken to someone who worked the early shift once this year. It would start at about 05:45 that meant that I would be in there by then. Of course my mother threw a fit, saying that I was never at home to help out. I told her that I was at home 24 hours per day 7 days per week except when I was at work, and going to work was normal. We had quite a row about it. When I arrived at work, rather than find the place empty there was someone around sticking up posters about the Roman excavations taking place in the wood. I was expected to go to work on some kind of bricklaying supervision. I tok myself out and was watching these bricklayers work while I was supervising this little group that I had with me. I felt that I was talking to myself all the time about what these bricklayers were doing. I thought that these few people here must have thought me totally crazy. When I concentrated on the work I found that we had a dip in one of the courses, a quite bad dip. There was no way that it could be rectified and we were going to have to take it all out again. There was one woman from work whom I came across as I was on my way into work who was sitting in a chair at the side of the road. She said “hello” to me so I said “hello” to her and didn’t think anything of it. Then I saw in the paper that she’s actually been in prison and was on some kind of rehabilitation course so I don’t know what she was doing at that particular moment, just sitting by the side of the street saying hello to passers-by unless it was part of her rehabilitation.

As you might expect, we have the family back in the equation but none of my favourite characters. That’s something that I find quite depressing.

When the alarm went off, I was in no mood to leave the bed. In fact if I hadn’t had to go down the corridor one more time I’d probably still be in there now.

Having slowly come round, I made a start on the radio programme that I wasn going to do, but my heart wasn’t in it. It took me much longer than anyone could ever imagine to complete it, not helped by crashing out on a couple of occasions and then a break to call the doctor.

When my neighbour called, I was fast asleep yet again. That seems to have been the story of my day, but I’m glad that he awoke me because tonight’s tea really was delicious.

After tea I had a long chat with Liz on the internet where we put the world to rights for a good while.

So right now I’m off to bed early again, in the hope that one night at least I’ll have a really good night and a good sleep to go with it. And if one of my three favourite young ladies could come and keep me company, then so much the better.

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Wednesday 14th December 2022 – MY LITTLE NOTICE …

… on the door didn’t produce any response today, regrettably. But it’s early days yet and I remain optimistic. Where there’s life, there’s hope.

But one of the reasons why is probably the same reason why I haven’t set foot out of the door at all today. And that is because overnight we’ve had a snowfall and just like in HOLY GRAIL “the snows of winter cover the land”.

Not anything like an epic Auvergnat snowfall. There’s a light dusting on the roads. Nevertheless that’s enough to bring all public transport to a shuddering halt. No service buses, no school buses and it’s all been as quiet as the grave. God alone knows how these people would function in a metre of snow and -16°C.

But I’m going soft in my old age. It was really cold when I awoke and, for a change, I awoke a good while before the alarm went off. That’s what comes of going to bed an hour early but I was wasted last night. So much so that I still couldn’t drag myself out of bed when the alarm went off.

During the night I’d been on my travels as well. I was with my friend from the Wirral last night. I’d seen all of the flyers and a lot of the leaflets and publicity for the Cropredy Festival so I asked him “how do you fancy a weekend away this coming weekend?”. He replied immediately “yes” – in fact he was going away. He and his wife were flying to New York on Friday. He asked me why so I told him what I’d seen. He said that really that’s all that there is to Cropredy. He started to tell me all about it. You just turn up on Friday evening and pitch your tent where you fancy, sometimes around a raconteur who is well-known, sometimes with a group of people who you know and gradually things start to happen with music etc throughout the weekend. I made up my mind that I was going to watch it. Then of course I had the question of my health issue. What do I do about that? But I didn’t get that far, unfortunately.

Once I’d vaguely come round into the Land of the Living I went for another gymnastic display in the batchoorm as I tried to put my sooty foot into the bath so that I could have a shower and look something like clean in case a neighbour knocked on my door.

After the shower I had a chat with Liz and then I had some work to do. There’s an important e-mail that needs writing – well, quite a few actually but I mean one in particular – and that also meant speaking to someone from this building, which resulted in a series of e-mails. All in all it was quite a “brisk exchange”.

But one thing is certain, and that is that the more I learn, the less I understand.

Having dealt with all of that I organised some more stuff relating to the radio and paired off another selection of tracks because I’m going to have a go at doing another programme tomorrow. I’ve been letting my stock run down and I need to build up a healthy reserve.

No 06:00 start though – I’m not that dedicated. It’ll be the usual 07:30 start and I’ll see how I get on.

For tea tonight I fancied something different. And so a tin of mushrooms, a tin of chick peas, a tin of veg and I made an impromptu curry. Not as good as my vindaloo from the other day but it was different.

And so if I’m lucky I’ll be having another early night. Totally wasted yet again – these days of 3% effort on the fitbit are killing me off. God knows what I’ll be like if I ever go back to living anything like a normal life.

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Tuesday 13th December 2022 – WHAT A STATE …

… to be in! Downstairs on the front door there’s a notice “if anyone is going to the shops, could they take me with them?” Can you imagine how things have worked out for me over the last few months?

This afternoon I went out to try to start Caliburn and eventually after much coaxing, he staggered into life. I set off for a drive and probably went about 30 kms trying to warm him up and charge up the battery.

However it didn’t seem to do much good because when I pulled into LIDL car park to see whether I could stagger over to the trolleys, I tried the starter and it was a desperate moment as I almost ended up walking home.

That was enough for me and I decided that if I didn’t leave the engine running and go home now, I never ever would get home. I can’t believe that I’d gone so far and the battery was even more dead than when I started.

As well as that I had to park where there was a kerb because I don’t have the strength to haul myself into the cab off the ground.

And so you can see, there’s a very fine line to walk between discretion and valour and God knows where it is right now.

Last night was another miserable, depressing night with me tossing and turning and I really don’t know what’s happening here either. When the alarm went off at 07:30 I was in no fit state to leave the bed and it was a real struggle for me to sort myself out.

The Welsh lesson though went reasonably well because I managed to prepare for it and I feel so much better when I can do that. However I’m not making the kind of progress that I would like. I’d be the first to admit that.

After the lesson I went for my run around in Caliburn and then came back to listen to the dictaphone. And there was tons of stuff on there from the night. There was a group of us packing to go somewhere. The conversation drifted round to all sorts of things. Several of the people were being extremely difficult in my opinion. One woman was really taking her time filling out a form. Everyone was explaining the difficulties that she was having but I didn’t think that they were anything at all. A few of us were talking about insurance and how it was sometimes quite catastrophic. I told them about how I worked in an insurance company (… and I did too …) and someone a few years later had T-boned my car. They actually worked for that insurance company and had their insurance there and how it was an endless tale of delays. We were discussing this. Suddenly I remembered the girl’s name who I worked with who this girl who was talking knew. I said her name and of course it cut the conversation. I felt extremely guilty about this. We were all sitting there trying to organise this and that one woman was taking so much time filling out a simple form. I was of the opinion that we weren’t ever going to get away at this rate
This meeting where there were people on about this insurance company and everything like that was where that guy stood up to make that announcement that his girlfriend was pregnant or they were getting married or something. That was really raining on everyone else’s parade at that particular moment. They were all disappointed that their thunder had been stolen.

There was some kind of tropical storm hitting the Carolinas and everyone had taken shelter. I’d gone with a news party to have a look at the situation inside one of these bunkers because the roof was damaged and water is getting in. I found several women, one of whom I knew very well, busy rolling up tissue and cloth in order to make some kind of something or other that would pass the time. This particular girl was working so quickly that she was way ahead of everyone else. While I was talking to her I looked up. A young girl who had come with her into the shelter was walking past on her way to the corner to lay down. I drew this woman’s attention to it. She invited the other one over to come along and join her to fold up tissue. Of course they started chatting like a couple of people in this situation would.

It was Friday night. I’d finished work and gone home. There was a story on the radio about how business was suffering from big bankruptcies and P-registered Cavaliers were being sold for as little as £3,000. I was wondering whether to go round to see a friend of mine and his wife, and of course Zero but thinking that I’d been round there every night this week I imagine that they must be becoming pretty fed up. The last thing that I wanted them to do was to stop me going round at all. So much as it hurt me, I decided that I’d stay at home tonight and start to sort through my toolbox. While I was doing that the TV was on. There was something happening about relief supplies involving DiY equipment. A whole pile of Opposition amendments were taking place to ensure that the Queen paid VAT on everything. They were all being passed so obviously there was some kind of mini-revolt going on in the House of Commons. Ordinarily that would have been just the kind of thing that I would have talked about with my friend but with having made a vow not to go round tonight I decided to keep to it and stay at home. I started to go through my toolbox making up kits of things that I might need in the future like electric sockets and so on

But imagine that? How many times is this that during the night I’ve turned down an opportunity to go and see Zero. I must be ill or something.

Tea was falafel with pasta and veg. I was hoping to have some potatoes so that I could have sausage, beans and chips tonight but that was something of a failure due to the issues that I had at LIDL. I hope that some good comes of my sign because I can’t go on living on my stocks of food. Rosemary and I talked about that on the ‘phone earlier and this was one of the things that galvanised me into making my sign.

And so we’ll see. It’ll be nice if it works and I can get some stock back in. The cupboard will be bare before I know it if I’m not careful.

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Monday 12th December 2022 – YOU MAY NOT …

… believe this, but Caliburn actually started up this morning on the battery that was on the van. And that’s astonishing, especially as he hasn’t run for over 11 weeks. There’s a small leak in the electrical circuit somewhere that slowly drains the battery so I was expecting it to be dead by now.

What wasn’t nice though was that I’d left open the window in the driver’s door. It had rained in somewhat but one of my neighbours had stuffed a black plastic bag in the door and taped it up to keep the worst out.

Nevertheless, fancy Caliburn starting. I gave him a couple of laps around the block to warm him up and charge up the battery but I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that driving him in my condition is a nightmare.

And so as you can imagine, I’ve been outside this morning, and in the freezing fog too. I had to take some rubbish to the bins across the road and even though it is just “across the road” it took me an agonising 25 minutes to do it, going in baby steps. I thought that having had a good relax and a gentle easing off of the stiffness would have made things better, but far from it.

This trip to Leuven for 2nd January is therefore looking less and less likely.

In other news, Strawberry Moose is back home. On eof the reasons why I put a battery on charge last night and then went to start him today was that a couple of guys from the radio had told me that they would be around today at lunchtime.

It was my intention to ask them to help me carry the battery downstairs and to couple it up in order to start him but that wasn’t unnecessary. But they brought back my suitcase completr with His Nibs.

It was interesting too because they work for the local council and they were able to give me some useful hints about dependent living. Having had some kind of impromptu interview, they told me that someone would be in touch.

And I’ll need it too after last night, which was another awful, horrendous night. I kept on waking up, went for one or two walks down the corridor and so on. I was also on my travels quite considerably during the night in another sphere as well. I was with my friend from the Scottish Borders last night. To my surprise she was heavily involved in Black Magic and Spiritualism. She had one of the original books from that period and she had lent it to me. Every time I tried to make a start on reading it someone came past and I wasn’t comfortable about reading this book in full view of whoever it was so I kept it hidden below the desk or down the bed or something until that person had gone. After a while my friend became frustrated and quoted some phrase in the book about “whoever has taken me from my possessor” or something like that. I explained that I hadn’t actually done that. I’d explained what I was doing but she thought that I had to be a lot more forthright about reading the book even though I was uncomfortable. In the end there was always a piece of music that I played that stopped us arguing. She handed me my guitar and asked me to play this piece even though I hadn’t played for quite a while. My performance was bound to be suspect but I thought that I’d give it a go, although I felt that this was just a sticking plaster over a wound and wasn’t actually solving the problem of me getting down to actually reading this book. Whether or not I has an interest in Spiritualism I had an enormous amount of curiosity and I was intrigued just as much as anyone else to see what was in this book and how everything would unfold. However just glancing through a couple of pages made me seem to think that she had at one time or another said something about almost everything that was in there

There was something in there as well about working in the suburbs of Brussels, how some people were complaining that it was expensive. The question was then asked “why don’t they move even further out? That way they could find somewhere more affordable”. The reply came back about the cost and time of commuting which would put them back to Square One even if they were to do that.

Percy Penguin sent me a text to ask me if I could run her to a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon. I replied “yes I would” but then I had a realisation that there was no MoT or tax on the car. I had to send her another e-mail straight back. She said that she had cancelled her transport at work so now I was pretty-much obliged to take her unless I could find someone else or someone else would volunteer. Then I was with friends walking around Middlewich. I was pushing something like a pram or a push-chair or whatever. We came off the street around some kind of semi-circle parking place to try to get through to where Walgrens and Marks and Spencers was. We’d been talking about the traffic problems being caused by people turning into their car park. I said that they should get all the nouveau-riche pretentious people, put them in Marks and Spencers and Walgrens and then drop a bomb on the place. That didn’t go down too well with my friends. We were trudging round this semi-circle car space with a cinder base thing. I suddenly wondered if we could get through to Walgrens from here. They replied “no, we should have gone through somewhere else”. On the skyline 100 yards ahead of us were these most peculiar buildings, tall and really narrow. They looked most unsafe. It turned out that these were single-bedroom flats for single occupancy. We were thinking that maybe Percy penguin could find a place there. Then we thought that they looked so delapidated that they would be bound to be closing down these places and demolishing them soon. Nevertheles we went in. There was only a small ladder on the ground floor on the inside. I thought that we had to climb up this ladder, look out of the top by poking our heads through the roof to look out over the top to see how we could get to where we wanted to go. If this ladder wasn’t tall enough for us to be able to do that then we would have a great amount of difficulty. I didn’t fancy leaning too much against the wall of one of these buildings in case we pushed it over because it was really unsafe.

I was also having a dream involving Rosemary. A Government had arbitrarily cut some kind of rate on bankruptcies. She couldn’t see a problem except that someone else had noticed and pointed out to me that it had wiped out the whole market for Insolvency Practicioners. This led to a big discussion about the acounts already agreed with Brussels. The only difference was that the dissident who was supposed to have been held in Moscow at some time but turned up eventually in China. She had a talk that they had a benefit concert for this guy in China but the two people who contributed most in bringing his name to the forefront never actually turned up for it. That name rang a bell with me.

When the alarm went off at 06:00 I felt absolutely awful and I was all ready to stay in bed but I forced myself out. I’d already written half of the notes for my radio programme so I finished the rest, recorded and edited them and then assembled everything.

For a change, I was working backwards so I fell about a minute short so I had to expand my notes and re-dictate some of them. Therefore I didn’t really save as much time as I might otherwise have done.

Then I had Caliburn who required attention, and then my visitors.

Once everyone had gone I had a play around on the computer but fell asleep on my chair. That prompted me to go to bed, something that I have been trying not to do but there was no alternative as I have never in my life felt so tired, as all of … errr … 7% of my daily target will testify.

When I finally crawled out of bed (due mainly to a need to go and take a ride on the Porcelain Horse otherwise I’d probably still be there now) I ended up doing … shock! Horror! … some tidying up. Not much but just enough to take me up to tea time.

So now I’m off to bed. I have a Welsh lesson tomorrow so I need to be on form and then I’ll (hopefully) take Caliburn for another spin. See how I feel and maybe in a few days I’ll pluck up the courage to go to the shops.

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Sunday 11th December 2022 – I’M EXHAUSTED …

… and it’s not as if I’ve done anything either today. I’m on 3% of my daily target, having staggered a mere 200 metres all day.

And as I said yesterday, I haven’t put my sooty foot outside the door either.

Being up and about at 09:45 is already something on a Sunday but it’s even more astonishing considerind that I didn’t go to bed until 02:00 or thereabouts. Actually I was in bed before midnight, having crashed out in my chair, but once I’d lain down, all thoughts of sleep had disappeared.

The computer was doing something so I had left it, but with all thoughts of sleep gone, I raised myself from the dead and finished it off properly.

There were several trips down the corridor too, and Brain of Britain had left the alarm switched on at 06:00 as well, so all in all last night was a mess.

Plenty of stuff on the dictaphone too, and much of it was the same. This time I can tell you all about it. I dreamed that I was married and that my wife and I had been away for a while. When we came back we found that my mother had actually divorced my father and married the father of my bride.

And as it happened I didn’t just dream this once but I dreamt this two other times as well during different stages of the night

There was something in there too at one point during the night about the buses on which I’d been travelling just recently. Someone was marshalling the buses. It involved them going round a roundabout somwhere and disappearing off up one of the exits. On the one occasion when I was doing it on my own it meant that one of the buses had to come back from that exit so there was a kind-of marshall there who was standing there in the middle of the road stopping it coming back on the roundabout. I couldn’t work out what that was all about either

When I finally aroused myself from the dead I had a few things to do here and there, such as tidying up in here, sorting out some papers and sending off a few e-mails. There’s a mountain of correspondence that has built up that needs my attention and I’m a long way from dealing with it all so my apologies in advance.

There was also a bill that need paying and I couldn’t leave that any longer.

After lunch I had to sort out the music for the radio programme that I’ll be preparing on Monday. Things need to get back to normal. It’s going to be a “special” so I had to choose the music and remix it, as well as pairing it all off.

There was even time to write out half of the notes too. I’m getting ahead of myself again, and I should think so too. Things have been running to seed a little as a result of all of my exertions over this last … errr … 11 weeks.

We also had a break for the football – Y Drenewydd v Hwlffordd in the Welsh Premier League. Considering the glacial weather conditions it was quite an exciting match played with a considerable amounnt of skill and was another one of these games that was a good advert for the league.

Henry Jones, who has featured in these pages quite often, was pulling the strings in the midfield for Hwlffordd but his team-mates couldn’t match his skill of endeavour. They did however have plenty of the ball, hit the post once and had several good chances to score on other occasions.

Y Drenewydd scored two which was rather flattering I suppose really, and their opening goal WAS SUBLIME.

All in all, it was nice to see a couple of mid-table teams let the ball do most of the work, a style of which I happen to appreciate. If I were to manage a football team, the emphasis would be on the quick passing game.

One or two of my friends have been in the habit of mocking me due to the amount of tinned food that I have here. However I did a quick inventory and found that at a puch I can keep going with tinned ‘basics” for at least a fortnight. There’s a lot to be said for a good supply of tinned food, as I knew that there would be.

Tonight though, it was pasta in spicy tomato sauce with frozen veg and a couple of small, breadcrumbed soya burgers. That will keep me out of mischief for a while. And while we’re on the subject of frozen food, this is an opportunity for me to thin out the stocks in there a bit too.

There is always the possibility of having a home delivery, but it costs €10:00, there’s nothing like the choice of foods, and what there is is much more expensive than trying to buy it over the counter. But it’s an avenue to explore, I reckon, if things go badly and I can’t get out. But I draw the line at paying €2:49 for a kilo of fresh, dirty carrots when 2kgs of washed fresh carrots costs €1:29. They don’t ‘arf stoke it up.

But for the moment I’ve put the spare battery for Caliburn on charge overnight. If I can enlist some aid to take the battery downstairs, I can swap it over. And then I’ll just have to worry about climbing into the cab.

However, that’s for another day. I need to concentrate on things that are of more immediate concern, like the radio programme. I need to be up at 06:00 so I suppose that I’d better go to bed.

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Saturday 10th December 2022 – IF I WERE …

… to say that I stayed in bed until 11:00 this morning, you would probably think that I had had a good night’s sleep for a change.

However, when I tell you that I didn’t go to bed until at least 04:00 you might change your mind.

And when I tell you that I had a pretty dreadful night in between, then you might be even more convinced. I had a mad fit of the itching that means that I was having withdrawal symptoms to something that they were giving me at hospital and I had to smother my legs in this type of cold cream that they give me.

There was this extremely depressing and dismal dream as well and what was even more depressing and dismal was that after I’d settled down again I had exactly the same dream again word for word. But don’t worry – it’s one of those where if you are having your tea right at this moment you wouldn’t thank me for typing it out.

When I left the bed at 11:00 it really was more of a case of not having anything better to do. I’d been awake for quite some time without being able to go back to sleep.

It should be no surprise to anyone that making a start this morning was rather difficult. I had to slowly bring myself back into the swing of things. And having spilled a pile of lemonade all over the floor part of the morning involved giving the kitchen floor a good seeing-to.

Steam-cleaning (and I DO mean “steam-cleaning” the microwave oven as well, that was next.

And then the fridge. When I first opened the fridge door, something inside switched off the light and closed it again. So I had to put on a brave face and attack the cartons of overinflated and fermented drink in there. I’ll look at the rest another time.

Add to that the tidying up and putting the washing away from before I went off on my travels, and I was exhausted even before I’d started, and I wasn’t feling very well either.

With a clean microwave and a fresh carton of milk I could make myself some porridge. And together with a strong coffee and a glass of orange it was something like a decent breakfast. And didn’t that make a change from jam butties?

Next step was a shower, and that was hard work in itself. Somehow managing to climb over the edge of the bath into the shower was only half of my problems. The other half of my problems was climbing out afterwards. You’ve no idea how much of an exertion that was altogether and I’ll have to do this for as long as I’m still breathing

The rest of the day has been spent backing up the computer and even as we speak, that’s a task that’s still going on. It seems to be never-ending and is an indication of maybe how much time I had on my hands in the hospital.

But just when I was feeling really down and looking for a lift, there in the bottom of the freezer was a portion of pepper-and-lentil vindaloo and that went down extraordinarily well. I needed that very much.

And if you’ll notice, I haven’t been out of the building at all today. The steps are going to defeat me if I take things too quickly. I’m going to have to spend some time just walking around the apartment, I reckon, building up my muscles on a daily basis.

Yesterday, on my way home I did 21% of my daily target and while that may not sound like much, it’s 10 times the daily rate of what had been happening while I’d been in hospital. Consequently 6% today is slowly stepping up the rate from how things have been in hospital, and clambering in the bath will stretch a few muscles more.

That’s not to say that things were easy today but by the time that tonight came round I was feeling a little more optimistic. I wonder how long this new wave of optimism will last.

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Friday 9th December 2022 – “THERE’S ONE THING …

… that I got to tell you man, and that it’s Good To Be Back Home”.

So said Barry Hay on the beach at Scheveningen in the Netherlands back in 1993 when I was there on my old CX500 and I can’t disagree.

But I owe a great big thanks to two of my neighbours who drove to the railway station here at Granville at 19:00 to meet me off the train because, believe me, I was finished, totally finished when it pulled into the station

And I was right about my affairs at the hotel. I really was given the run-around and at 07:00 when I was on the point of leaving and wanted to pick them up, I was told that they weren’t there as far as they could see and I could stand there all day and wait for them if I liked and it would change nothing at all.

So that’s the NIKON D500, the 70-300mm LENS and all of my photos from Canada along with all of my portable electronic equipment gone the Way of the West.

Ahh well!

It’s not surprising that i was in a bad mood about this because I’d had a bad night, as I always do when I’m having to go somewhere early. Not that it stopped me going off on my travels and although I don’t remember much about my travels, I do recall that had I not awoken suddenly, I would have had a visit from one of my favourite young ladies.

So maybe that’s why I awoke suddenly. My whole outlook on life has changed just recently.

Having finished my rather acrimonious but otherwise pointless discission with the hotel staff (I seem to be arguing with everyone right now) I set off in the ice and freezing cold that made my already unsteady gait even more so.

But not for the railway station at Bruxelles-Midi. Instead, I clambered gingerly down the stairs into the metro station at the Boulevard Lemonnier. Crossing the road to get there was fraught, and no mistake.

Even more fraught was crossing the tram rails to the opposite platform and I was convinced that at one point rather than travel by tram I would be out on my ass but in an incredible feat of gymnastics I just about managed to keep my feet.

The platforms at the Gare du Nord were a mess and I must have staggered for miles trying to find my way up to ground level, having to be helped up a few steps by a few people. But when I did I had to go round and round in ever-decreasing circles in order to find my way out of the station.

Yes, “out of the station” because I’m not going by train.

Eventually I found my way outside in the freezing fog and having completely lost my bearings, I wandered around (such as I can) until I stumbled quite by accident on that for which I was looking.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that back several years ago when there was a rail strike I ended up HAVING TO GO BY BUS. I remembered that it called at Caen and then went on via several stops to Bruxelles-Nord – without going via Paris.

It was going via Paris that was frightening me. Can you imagine the fight in the Metro and the long walk down to the station at Montparnasse? Not on your nellie!

But trains now go from Caen to Granville and there were, to my surprise, two that corresponded with the arrival of this bus. So sitting comfortably (not that it’s comfortable on these buses but you get the point) all the way to Caen without moving has to be a good deal.

It’s not surprise to anyone that I had to be lifted onto the bus, and then I was sat in a seat by the door. And to make sure that I didn’t move, I didn’t eat or drink anything all the way to Caen. What doesn’t go in can’t come out.

It was a long, boring drive all the way to Caen but every time I started to become fed up, I began to think of the fight through the metro in Paris and that restored me to my senses.

We were late arriving at Caen which means that I missed the 16:11 but there was plenty of time for the 17:16. And that wasjust as well because it’s a long walk from the bus stop to the station. Once I’d bought a ticket from the machine I bought myself a coffee (first drink of the day) and made a tomato butty while I waited for the train.

And what a stagger it was to the lift, through the subterranean tunnel and back up the lift on another platform. I was really gone by this time and I just fell into the nearest seat on the train. My journey had been well-documented on social media and you have no idea the size of the sigh of relief that I breathed when Marie and Anna asked if I would like to be picked up.

The station at Granville was iced up and I was even more unsteady that I had been in the morning and I took hours to leave the station. Marie and Anna were heartbroken to see me because, believe me, I am not the same person who left here in September. That trip to Canada was one trip too many and one trip too far.

When we arrived back here there was a little ad-hoc reception committee that met me but I was really in no mood to see anyone. Marie helped me into my room here at Ice Station Zebra and that was that.

When I’m finally tired enough to sleep, whenever that might be, I’ll go to bed. And there will be no alarm until Monday. Not that I care either. It’s been weeks, if not months, since I’ve slept with no alarm and I deserve some time off

And when I’m ready, I’ll rebuild my life with what’s left of my health and what’s left of my possessions and start again until the end. I just can’t fo it any more.

A big thank you to everyone who has been so kind to me on my travels around and who has helped me in my difficulties. So many of you that have helped restore my faith in humanity. I love you all, more than I can say.

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Friday 9th December 2022 – BEFORE I START …

… going on about my woes and miseries, I want to make it clear that there are people who are far more worse off than I am. And some whose woes and miseries have regrettably come to an end.

And when it’s people whom we all know, after a fashion, it’s even more regrettable.

One of the trawlers that has featured quite often on these pages in the past has been the Jersey trawler L’Ecume II

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having seen her ON NUMEROUS OCCASIONS coming into port, in the harbour here, having a coat of paint in the chantier naval, moored in the harbour in Jersey etc etc.

As well as that, regular readers of this rubbish will recall a story that has been circulating around the naval world that another vessel that has featured on these pages, albeit from a distance, COMMODORE GOODWILL has been accused of running down and sinking with all hands a trawler off the coast of Guernsey in the early hours of Thursday morning.

A press release this afternoon has made it clear that following the collision on Thursday, it’s L’Ecume II that has failed to answer its calls and an underwater survey has identified her wreck on the sea bed in roughly the position where the collision took place.

It’s devastating news and I am totally devastated. There isn’t very much that I can add to what has already been said.

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Wednesday 26th October 2022 – STRAWBERRY MOOSE …

…. is missing!

He and the rest of my luggage failed to meet up with me in the baggage claim area of the airport this morning.

The fact is that he’s probably aware of the fact that this was our last great adventure together and seeing that Canada has always been a happy hunting ground for him, he’s stolen all of my equipment, made good his escape and gone off adventuring on his own account.

Anyway, even as we speak, enquiries are being made.

Mind you, strange as it might seem, in the peculiar circumstances of the moment my luggage not arriving at the airport is something positive. It means that I don’t have to maul that huge suitcase around with me for the final stages of my journey.

To be honest, I’m totally done in. This was one journey too many and one journey too far in my state of health right now.

It was another night when I had had no sleep whatsoever. How many is this now over the last week? I coughed and spluttered through every minute of the long flight, and it was long too because despite leaving only a handful of minutes late, we were 1:20 late landing in Paris.

And shame on Air Canada who wouldn’t pay for a proper terminal but wanted to decant us in the middle of the runway. And on a greasy, slippery set of metal stairs too.

There was no chance whatever of my making that with my backpack full of heavy electrical equipment. I sat inside with the other disabled people (this is how I’m seeing myself now) waiting for the wheelchair lift.

That promptly broke down so in the end I was helped down by one assistant while another carried my bag.

My helper passed me through the express route into France, where presenting my carte de séjour at the same time as presenting my passport means that I don’t need my passport to be stamped. And then the eternal waiting in vain for STRAWBERRY MOOSE

Eventually I filed a lost luggage complaint and then crawled wearily the entire length of the airport (and you’ve no idea how long the airport is) to the railway station.

TGV Réseau 38000 tri-volt 4520 pba gare tgv paris charles de gaulle france Eric Hall photo 26th October 2022Here was just about my only bit of luck for today. The TGV from Rennes to Brussels was running over an hour late which meant that it would be here in 7 minutes. Just time enough for me to buy a ticket and get to the platform.

Sure enough, just as I made it down to the platform, it pulled in. One of the Tri-volt PBA (Paris – Brussels – Amsterdam) trainsets that leaves Rennes at the crack of dawn to to go to Brussels direct without passing by Paris.

Once or twice I’d thought about catching this train from Rennes. It would certainly be more convenient for me except that it departs too early for a connection with trains from Granville. But I never thought that I’d be catching it from here.

Once on board the train, I had a beautiful, blissful sleep of all of about 5 minutes.

hotel de france boulevard jamar brussels belgium Eric Hall photo 26th October 2022At Brussels-Midi I bought some banana-fjavoured soya milk, a couple of bricks, and then walked to my hotel. It’s 400 metres from the railway station yet it took me 20 minutes and I almost fell over twice.

It’s a different hotel than usual. Slightly more expensive but much more luxurious and better finished. I stayed here one a good few years ago. And I’m not disappointed either. Luckily even though I was early, my room was ready for me, and it’s a nice room.

First thing was to have a shower and wash my clothes. The only clothes that I have with me are the ones in which I’ve been travelling and I’m very mindful of something Rosemary once said to me. After I’d been on the road for a couple of days once she told me that I looked like a tramp. And to be honest, today I knew that I did. With my hospital visits tomorrow I have at least to make a pretence of civilisation.

Having done that I came in here, crashed out on the bed and went away with the fairies for three hours.

When I awoke, I had a packet of crisps and then got into bed ready to wait until tomorrow morning.

Talking of eating, do you want to know what I’ve eaten since Thursday lunchtime last week? well, 2 bananas, half a baguette, 2 slices of pizza, one airline meal and a packet of crisps

My appetite has gone completely, and so will I if this carries on much longer.

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