Category Archives: n°6

Monday 14th July 2025 – I DON’T THINK …

… that Marion loves me any more.

The last time that she was on shift when I was at dialysis, she was nagging me to do my own preparation.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall exactly why I am simply unable to do it and so it doesn’t do any good at all to insist. It’s simply impossible.

And so this afternoon, she tried a new tactic. When my machine pinged to say that my session was over, she half-uncoupled me and then wandered off to do other things, leaving me hanging around like Piffy on a rock for twenty-five minutes.

If she thinks that that is going to galvanise me into action, she’s mistaken. I simply can’t bring myself to touch this pulsing, throbbing vein that they installed in my arm a year ago and that’s the end of it.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, last night, for a change, I actually finished early. After taking the stats and performing the back-up, I went and sorted myself out and ended up in bed by 22:40 which made a very welcome change, and how I enjoyed it too.

However, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it’s really pointless going to bed early because all that it means is that I awaken correspondingly early the following morning. So quickly to sleep once I was in bed, but wide awake this morning at 05:20.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … being awake is one thing, being up and about is something else completely and you have to wait until 05:40 when I finally crawled out of bed.

The ice pack had slipped from my knee during the night and was flapping about in the breeze this morning, so that hadn’t been of very much use, but nevertheless, I was moving about a little easier, which was a surprise.

First thing that I did was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was dreaming that I was going into hospital so I was checking everything that I had and that I needed to take with me. I took my ‘phone. When I was finally in bed, I strapped an ice pack onto my knee and just lay there. At a certain point a little later I heard my ‘phone making noises as if there was an alarm or something going on. After several minutes I realised that it was one of the chat programs on my telephone that had received a whole series of messages with the usual message tone but I hadn’t realised it prior to that.

Packing ready for hospital is something to which I look forward very much (I don’t think), knowing that in the immediate future I have to go back to Paris for the next session of chemotherapy, when I shall be insisting upon knowing why they are giving me the same chemotherapy that my body rejected violently nine years ago.

As for the ‘phone “making noises”, this morning, when I looked at my ‘phone, I found that I had indeed received a whole series of messages and photos from the kitchen fitter who had clearly been burning the midnight oil.

Later on, I was with my cleaner and my former friend from Stoke-on-Trent. There was a big group of people and we were connected in some way to a chevreuil which of course is a small deer. There was some issue about this deer and it had escaped, so everyone was out looking for it. We had other things to do but we couldn’t stop to look. Instead, we were going somewhere in a Mini. We were driving through a field and we had to perform a “U-turn” somewhere at the side of the road. There was this little turn-round place into a small field there but the only way out was on a blind corner so I went across the field in the Mini. It turned out that there was a really steep drop in this field so I told everyone to hang on and I went down in this Mini. We came across some traces of where these people had looking for the deer. There was some old pet’s bed there that had probably belonged to it. We continued to drive until we came to a huge set of gates where a lot of people from this search party were congregated. One woman was incensed about seeing the three of us together. She was complaining about how there were only two of her – she and someone else – in their group, how there ought to be more of them and how we ought to help. We explained how we had much more complicated and difficult things to do but she carried on and on and on. At these gates, she was struggling to open them with a key, this complaining woman, so I took a key and managed to open it straight away. It was a car scrapyard like McGuinness’s in Stoke-on-Trent. Inside was a “K” registered Škoda parked round by the door which I recognised as belonging to this woman. Once I’d opened the door, my friend from Stoke-on-Trent with his car and caravan drove inside. I went for a walk inside but it was totally empty. There was hardly anything at all in there. That disappointed me intensely because I was expecting it to be full of old vehicles as it usually was. Instead, I had a little walk, just looking at the wasteland while my friend drove around in his car and caravan. He came back, parked it up next to the Škoda and stepped out, looking as if he was walking away and leaving it. He asked me if I had my camera so that I could take a photo and asked me if I knew what kind of year the car was. I said “It’s ‘R’ registration so that puts it at about 1976”. However he thought that it was something different but he didn’t say exactly what. I went to fetch my camera to take a photograph of his car, the caravan and the Škoda, which were about the only three things in this entire scrapyard.

Now, there are loads of mileage in this dream. For a start, is this the first dream in which my cleaner has appeared?

As for my former friend, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … he was the kind of person who would do absolutely anything for you, but after his accident 25 or so years ago, he became a totally different person and I couldn’t handle the stress. I had enough trouble dealing with my own problems at that time without having to deal with someone else’s, and when he left his car to go, on his crutches, to thump the person in the car behind who had just beeped at us, the writing went on the wall. There were several other incidents too that convinced me that things had run their course by that time.

Where this “U-turn” place was situated was at the corner of Warmingham Lane and Groby Road in Crewe, across the road from the depot of the coach company where I worked in winter when there was no tour work at Shearings.

The “Škoda” was actually a gold FSO “Polonez”, but much more slimline than the car would have been in real life. They were strange cars, a nice design but the quality was appalling. When they finally sorted out the quality issues in the early 1990s, they were wonderful cars but by then the damage had been done. They were powered by a clone of a FIAT engine, and when importation into the UK stopped because of emissions issues, the aforementioned friend and I were thinking of buying one and fitting a FIAT diesel engine in it.

The highlight of the dream would have been wandering around McGuinness’s scrapyard. I’ve had many a happy weekend in there and the stuff that I’ve had from there was unbelievable – even an old Jaguar 420 that I wanted for spares for my Daimler. I once saw a Rolls-Royce in there, only the second that I have ever seen in a scrapyard after the one that I saw IN A SCRAPYARD IN BRIDGEWATER, MAINE, IN 1973

But mountaineering over mountains of scrap cars in scrapyards looking for exciting bits and pieces. Those were the days. You can’t even go into them now, thanks to “Health and Safety”.

After a wash and my morning medication, I came back in here and dealt with the last of the outstanding correspondence and paid the bills that I didn’t pay yesterday. And then I had to sort out some money for the kitchen fitter who had bought some wood and so on for the kitchen that he’s installing.

The nurse was early again? He applied some more heat treatment to my knee and then after having dealt with my legs, he cleared off quite rapidly.

He was closely followed by the kitchen fitter who came to do another day’s work. I gave him the money for the purchases he had made and he and his son went downstairs to carry on.

After they had left, I could carry on with making breakfast and to read MY BOOK.

Our author start off today by talking about the Bedlam (or Bethlem, as he calls it) Hospital for "distracted people" as he quaintly puts it, and tells us that "in this place, people who are distraight in wits are, by the suit of their friends, received and keep as afore."

All that I can say is that if that kind of situation were to persist today, I would have nothing to fear because quite simply, I don’t have any friends.

He goes on to talk about some works being undertaken at Spitalfields, and we have a gorgeous eyewitness account of the discovery and unearthing of a Roman cemetery and an account of the contents of the graves. It’s one of the most fascinating accounts that I have read.

Something else that he mentions is a land dispute between the parish clerks and a local nobleman who had been gifted some monastic property after the Reformation that had been gifted previously to the parish, and "the parish clerks having commenced suit … and being like to have prevailed, the said Sir Robert Chester pulled down the hall, sold the timber, stone and lead, and so the suit was ended.".

After that, I came back in here to attend my Welsh Summer School but it wasn’t a real success because I couldn’t stay here for long, having to go after ninety minutes to prepare for dialysis.

When my cleaner had fitted my patches, I didn’t have long to wait for the taxi, and we whizzed down to Avranches.

It took them forty minutes to couple me up today, leaving me sitting around for quite a while as they dealt with other people. I really felt quite out of it today.

However, the good news is that my friend from Ulm and her daughter will be on their travels and they plan to pass by later in the week to say “hello”. As well as that, my friend from Macon with whom I was on a student exchange in 1970 will be in the area at the beginning of September. He and his wife are planning to come to see me, and that will be nice too. I seem to be in great demand these days.

It was the je m’en foutiste doctor on duty today and he passed by to see if I needed anything, but when I spoke to him, he didn’t seem to be interested.

At one point, I dozed off for five minutes but Marion awoke me. I really think that she has it in for me at the moment, what with waiting around at the start and at the end. She also “forgot” the cold spray when she coupled me up, so all of this cannot be coincidence.

However, as I said just now, it’s not going to change a thing.

The poor taxi driver had to wait around for an age while we had the shenanigans at the end of my session, and I didn’t return home until 19:00. I stuck my head in downstairs to look at the kitchen and it really is impressive. I shall enjoy working with that when it’s ready.

Tea tonight was something cobbled up out of a handful of mushrooms and a small tin of kidney beans with pasta and tomato sauce. But now I’m off to bed, ready for my Summer School tomorrow. I have a feeling that tackling this course is not my wisest move, but we shall see.

But before I go to bed, seeing as we have been talking about Bedlam Hospital … "well, one of us has" – ed … it’s a little-known fact that I once served on the committee of the hospital.
One day we had to interview a patient who wasted to be liberated, so we had to go to see him to find out why.
"God told me that I was no longer crazy and that I could go home" he explained.
The man in the next bed shouted up "I said nothing of the kind!"

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Thursday 10th July 2025 – I AM FED UP …

… of the dialysis centre and the je m’en foutiste of the doctor who always seems to be at the centre of any dispute that I may have.

Once more, we’ve “had words” and it wasn’t a very ideal situation. I’ve made my point but it will have made absolutely no difference at all.

In fact, it’s been a bad day all round. It started off badly by me being asleep yet again when the alarm went off. How many days is this? A far cry from the heady days when I was up and working at 04:30, things like that.

It wasn’t as if it had been an early night though. It was quite close to midnight when I finally crawled into bed, but once in bed, there I stayed without moving.

It was actually difficult to move because my right knee was covered in this heat treatment and I had an ice pack strapped to it too. “Kill or cure” is my motto for right now.

When the alarm went off, it took a while for me to gather my wits, which is a surprise seeing how few I have these days, and then I had an undignified stagger into the bathroom for a wash and scrub up in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon.

It was a very slow early morning in the kitchen sorting out my medication too. It seemed to take an age before I was back in here.

First task was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was with a football club that was preparing for a series of pre-season friendlies. The match that was coming up was against Manchester United and so everyone was quite nervous about how the score would unfold. However, when we took to the field we found that it was against another club and that the Manchester United game had already taken place. However, no-one could remember the result of that game. Then the whistle sounded for the kick-off but it wasn’t the whistle, it was the alarm sounding at 06:30.

There are so many pre-season friendlies going on right now that this could refer to just about anything, although it was interesting to see me having yet another bout of confusion.

The nurse turned up early again. I asked him if he could have a look at my knee so he gave it a cursory examination and reckons that it’s simply bruised rather than broken or chipped or anything. This heat treatment and ice pack is the way to go, he reckons.

After he left I made my breakfast and had to deal with a volcano in the microwave, because the surveillance of my porridge was interrupted by my faithful cleaner arriving to check on me, to see how I was.

After she left, I cleaned up the mess and sat down to eat breakfast while reading MY BOOK.

Today, we have been talking about the wealthy people whose donations to various charities enabled the poor of London to have a less mean existence. And when you see the amount of money donated by some people, you can see immediately, with the Margaret Thatcher "Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.", that modern-day society has collapsed, with the rich squirrelling away as much as they can in their offshore accounts.

Our author gives us a lovely example of how things were in the Sixteenth Century. There "were some small cottages … for some bed-ridden people … devout people … were accustomed oftentimes, especially on Fridays, weekly to walk that way purposely to bestow their alms."

What price that now?

Back in here, I read through my notes for the “Saturday Woodstock” programme, making a few corrections and additions ready to dictate the next time that I’m up early, whenever that might be. But the way things are going, it will be a while yet.

My cleaner turned up and fitted my anaesthetic patches, and after she left I came back in here to work. However, unbelievable as it may be, I dozed off.

The taxi awoke me and I staggered out into the lovely warm afternoon to drive down to Avranches. It was the chatty young female driver who took me so we had an interesting chat along the way.

At the centre, I was met with the bad news. Having insisted that I was losing weight and they denying it and insisting that these 200 grammes here, 300 grams there was correct, they performed another scan on me to determine my dry weight.

As I suspected, I have lost about three kilos just recently and I’m now officially below my preferred “inactive weight”. This also means that I had about four kilos of water to lose that they hadn’t extracted over the period that my weight was decreasing, and that means a stay of four hours.

All of the messing around meant that the procedure didn’t start until late either.

My blood pressure was horribly low so every fifteen minutes when the machine checked it, it sounded the alarm and the girls came running.

The je m’en foutiste doctor was there on duty so I complained to him. As usual, he didn’t seem to care so I expressed myself in somewhat … errr … forthright tones, but it made no difference.

While he was there, I also told him about my dizzy spells and the fall, but he didn’t seem to be too bothered either. He didn’t even examine me. He’s definitely in the wrong job.

The dietician came to see me too. They are all concerned about my loss of weight and in particular, the loss of protein. She was trying to persuade me to adopt a carnivorous diet, even though my body can’t digest animal fats and that I had a recurrence of my pancreas issues back in April.

These people really have no idea.

In the end, she told me to take as many as four disgusting drinks per day, and gave me several recipes to make it more palatable, including a recipe for a banana and orange milk shake, which totally threw me, seeing as about six months ago, she banned me from eating bananas and oranges because of the potassium.

The nurses came back and gave me some kind of electrogram test, although I don’t know why and neither did they.

During all of this, I was fighting off wave after wave of sleep but in the end I succumbed and poor Alexi had to awaken me to disconnect me.

Horribly late again, there was another passenger in the taxi and we had to drive miles through the Normandy countryside to drop him off, meaning that it was long after 19:30 when I returned home.

On the way in, I stuck my head inside the new apartment to see the work that the kitchen fitter had done, and it was so impressive. I can’t wait for him to come back and crack on.

My faithful cleaner has been busy too. She had been through my apartment here, tidying up and cleaning and it looks wonderful. Tomorrow, she’s going to blitz my bedroom so it all looks good for this photography session.

Tea was bangers and mash with vegetables. I don’t know why, but I had had a craving for them all-day. However, as is usual, they tasted much better in my imagination than they did in real life.

So now it’s bedtime, ready for a good day’s work tomorrow. There’s a lot to do and I can’t hang around. It won’t be done on its own.

But seeing as we have been talking about the je m’en foutiste doctor … "well, one of us has" – ed … during our chat, he told me "if you are really becoming fed up with being here for four hours, you can ask to be unplugged and then go home".

"If I could go home whenever I became fed up with dialysis" I retorted "I would never arrive at all"

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Wednesday 9th July 2025 – CAN YOU IMAGINE …

… anything as embarrassing as being in the middle of a conversation with someone and suddenly dropping unconscious at their feet?

The kitchen-fitter and his son who came this morning to start work don’t need to imagine it because they saw it for themselves as a conversation that I was having with them came to a rather dramatic pause.

That’s now the fourth of these little wobbles that I’ve had. There were the two that I mentioned last night, a third as I was going to bed, and the fourth which was the daddy of them all this morning.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that yesterday, I was becoming concerned about all of this. The one that I had when I was almost ready for bed made me even more worried, and then collapsing unconscious for a couple of minutes at the feet of a couple of visitors is extremely perturbing.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … one of these days I’m going to have one of these attacks and I won’t awaken from it. And the way that things are going, it won’t be long a-coming.

It was a late night too last night – I didn’t go to bed until about 00:15, what with one thing and another … "and until you’ve started, you have no idea how many other things there are" – ed … but I was soon asleep. And there I stayed until about 06:00.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … being awake is one thing. Leaving the bed is something else completely. It was about 06:15 when I finally saw the light of day and fell out of the bed.

In the bathroom I had a good wash and scrub up and then went into the kitchen for my morning fruit juice and medication. It was yet another slow start to the day while I slowly unwound.

Back in here I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. We shared a holiday home with some people, a home in France. Eventually we decided that we were going to settle down there and stay forever. The other people who were sharing the house were not particularly happy about the situation of Brexit and all of that. In the end, one night after a rather heated discussion, they simply packed their bags and left, leaving us in charge of the house. Nothing much happened about that after a while except that one evening, just as we were moving some furniture around, someone knocked at the door. We had to rearrange the furniture quickly and let them in. It was some people who had come to see the house. Obviously the house had been put up for sale, no-one had said anything to us, and now there were people arriving to have a look around it. They took a big liking to our collie who was six years old but the cats took absolutely no notice of them. We ended up having something of a chat about the situation. One of the things that came out in the discussion somewhere was the question of the rateable value of the land. Someone had a big plot of land in a forest but they were only paying a small amount of tax on it. After they had had this campaign to try to equalise the tax payments, someone explained to them that if the land is not capable of being exploited, for example, it’s too steep, it doesn’t attract council tax. Here in this forest in the middle of the mountains, a lot of the land was far too steep to do anything with it so it had no rateable value.

This sounds rather like what will be happening here over the next few weeks. The estate agents are coming to photograph the place on Friday and from then on, there will be streams of people coming to look at (and to sight-see) the apartment while I’ll be in the throes of trying to tidy up and move house.

If anyone has a free weekend some time, I shall be needing all the help that I can find.

The nurse turned up, much earlier than usual, and sorted out my legs. And while I was making my breakfast, the kitchen-fitter and his son turned up to start work.

They needed to know where my new apartment was and what needed to be done so I went downstairs with them. And it was while we were in the bathroom discussing the shower unit that I hit the floor quite dramatically.

Eventually, I recovered and it was a very sad, weary me who struggled in vain up the stairs. In the end I had to take the lift from the first half-landing up to the next and then struggle downwards to my door.

Breakfast was next, and I read MY BOOK but I was so out of everything that I couldn’t begin to tell you what I read.

Back in here, it took me a while to recover and then I started on my “Friday Woodstock” programme. And that is now, at long last, finished and is just how I want it to be. It took an age and several retries to bring it down to exactly one hour but there it is, all done and dusted, and the only artists excluded are Ravi Shankar and Swami Satchidananda, but there again their performances aren’t really the style that will fit into our rock music programmes.

Tomorrow, I’ll start on the “Saturday Woodstock” programme and see how I go. That is going to be much more complicated because there is so much that needs to be omitted if I want to keep it down to one hour.

There were the usual interruptions, such as a couple of disgusting drink breaks and the arrival of my faithful cleaner, who, as usual, helped me into and out of the bath while I had a shower.

And bless her, she spent much more than one hour going through the kitchen and bathroom making everything look respectable ready for the photograph sessions on Friday.

While all of this was going on, my right knee began to swell dramatically and it hurts like Hades. I can hardly move without being in some kind of agony and it looks as if there is a balloon on my knee. I must have fallen with quite a thump.

The kitchen fitter came to say goodbye and to show me some photos of what he had done. It certainly looks impressive and I can’t wait to see the finished product. That’s likely to be in a couple of weeks, he reckons.

The shower room isn’t going to be so easy, he thinks, and he’s probably right. I’m already beginning to redesign it in my head and I’ll probably do that three or four more times yet.

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta. I wasn’t feeling up to much. And my faithful cleaner came by to pick up some things for downstairs and to take a few more photos of the work

But that’s everything now. I’m going to rub some heat treatment into my leg and then strap an ice-pack on, and then go to sleep. I want to see if this swelling and the pain will go down overnight. If not, I’m going to have an enormous amount of difficulty going to dialysis.

But seeing as we have been talking about my bad leg … "well, one of us has" – ed … I’ll have to be careful about hos this works out.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I had a bad fall a few years ago while I was out and about and hurt my knee quite badly.
Some guy walking by stopped to help me and offered his advice.
"Are you a doctor?" I asked
"Not exactly" he replied, "but I do have some kind of medical experience"
"So what do you think?" I asked him
He examined me and replied "I’d better go to fetch my gun"
"Your gun?" I exclaimed. "Why a gun?"
"I’ve seen that injury before" he replied "and I had to use it on the horse."

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Monday 7th July 2025 – MISERABLE FAILURE …

… that I am yet again, I was once more asleep when the alarm went off this morning. How many times is this now?

It’s not as if I had a late night either. It wasn’t 23:00, that’s for sure, but it wasn’t as late as 23:30 either. That means that for once, during the night, I had seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, and it’s been a long time since that has happened.

And “uninterrupted” it certainly was. I remember nothing whatsoever about anything at all during the night.

When the alarm went off, I struggled to sit on the edge of the bed, and that’s where I stayed for a good few minutes while I waited for the bedroom to stop spinning around.

In the bathroom, I had a good wash and a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then went off in search of my medication for the morning.

Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was at the local technical college last night and there had been some kind of meeting in the great hall. Everyone had waded through there to fetch their meal, this meeting had taken place and slowly, everyone had left. We were some of the last to go. We were having a look around the place, looking to see where would be the best place to put some kind of permanent stage for holding meetings, but we noticed on the wall some small button-like things and realised that these were micro-camera lenses. The wall had been covered in micro-cameras to film what had happened at this meeting. As we walked out of the hall we walked down the front of some kind of supermarket where there were some military people investigating things with machines. We wondered whether they were using these unidirectional receiver things to pick up what people were saying on their mobile ‘phones from a distance. As we walked out, there was a commotion at one of the cash desks. It seemed that some soldier and some civilian were having an argument, the soldier had pulled his gun but the civilian was not backing down and was haranguing this soldier. Quite a crowd had gathered around to watch.

With no recollection whatever of this dream, I have no idea about what must have been going on in my mind … "neither have we" – ed … during the night and it certainly doesn’t seem to relate to anything that is currently or has recently been ongoing.

My only forays into the Technical College at Crewe were at nights where I learned paint spraying and welding, and where I did my first computer courses back in 1974 and 1975.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in and returned my “War and Peace”, making a few comments as she did so. After she fixed my legs she disappeared off into the sunset for her week’s rest, but not before we’d talked about Alvin Tofler and SOME OF HIS MOST ASTONISHINGLY ACCURATE PREDICTIONS.

Once she’d left I could make breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK.

Today, we covered an extraordinary amount of ground, discussing many different subjects such as medieval games, including primitive ice-skating where "some tie bones to their feet and under their heels". I could write pages and pages about the sports that he mentioned and their descriptions, and so could he, apparently, for he mentions how the maidens would "dance for garlands hung athwart the streets, which open pastimes in my youth being suppressed, worse practices within doors are to be feared."

He talks about alms for the poor and gives several examples, including "Ethelwald, Bishop of Winchester, … about the Year of Christ 963, he in great famine sold away all the sacred vessels of his Church for to relieve the almost-starved people, saying that there was no reason that the senseless temples of God should abound in riches.". Contrast that with the Church today with their works of art, silver candlesticks and the like.

Another thing that he mentions is the rise in traffic in London at the end of the Sixteenth Century, commenting that "the World runs on wheels with many whose parents were glad to go on foot.", a quote that I have added to my little library because I have rarely heard a truer word spoken.

We’ve also had the accounts of several large households, sums that would be extravagant even by today’s standards.

In fact, I can say without fear of contradiction that this has been the most interesting day’s reading that I have had for quite some considerable time.

After breakfast, I began the arduous task of sorting out the kitchen. I’ve gone through the boxes with the plastic containers in and binned about 90% of the contents. Well, not actually “binned”, but earmarked for disposal. My faithful cleaner can then distribute them amongst the needy. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m doing my best to go over to glass and have amassed quite a collection of the big olive jars which I am now pressing into service.

Back in here, I made a start on editing the radio notes and by the time my faithful cleaner arrived, I’d edited about a quarter of them. This is going to be a very long job, I reckon.

After she had fitted my anaesthetic patches, we went through the medication and anything that is not actually in use went into an old box ready to go downstairs. We need to crack on with this emptying and tidying up ready for the estate agents to photograph the place on Friday ready for re-letting

The taxi was late arriving, we had to go to pick up another passenger (making three as there was already a passenger in there when it arrived) and what with one thing and another … "and until you’ve started, you have no idea how many other things there are" – ed … we were really late arriving.

There were also three ambulances there in front of us, one of which was a new patient. And they all were destined for my ward. Consequently it was 14:40 when I was finally connected.

Once I was finally off and running, I dozed off, to find myself being shaken awake by a panic-stricken doctor. Not, unfortunately, Emilie the Cute Consultant. Anyway, we had a good chat about chemotherapy and Paris. His idea as to why they are starting to give me the medication that my body rejected in 2016 is that they have now run out of other solutions. That makes for some grim reading.

He agrees though, and so does everyone else, that I ought to persuade them to send me to Rennes, closer to home and more relaxed

When I was finished, the taxi home was already waiting, but it was still 19:30 when I returned. And I wasn’t sure if I’d come to the correct apartment. My faithful cleaner had shifted a couple more loads downstairs.

It took me a while to recover and then I made a stuffed pepper, even though I didn’t feel like it. I have to eat.

So now, much later that I would have liked, I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I’ll crack on with the radio notes and see if I can’t complete the first run of the programme, to give me an idea of what I’ll need to edit to cut it all down to an hour.

But seeing as we have been talking about medieval games … "well, one of us has" – ed … one of the most popular medieval games was “hide and seek”.
John Stow asked me if we played “hide and seek” in modern times, so I assured him that we did.
"Is it still an enjoyable game?" he asked.
"Maybe so" I replied "but I never really enjoyed it."
"Why was that?" he asked.
"Because I would always be the one who would have to hide" I replied "but no-one ever bothered to come to look for me!"

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Saturday 5th July 2025 – MISERABLE FAILURE …

… that I am, I was asleep again this morning when the alarm went off at 06:30.

However, I had been awake earlier just as it was becoming light and I was lying there thinking about struggling to my feet but I must have gone to sleep at some point because the sound of the alarm in broad daylight was the next thing that I remember.

It wasn’t as if I’d had too much of a late night either. I was in bed for about 23:45, which is quite early these days, and I must have gone to sleep quite quickly too. I’ve no idea at what time I awoke but it wasn’t too early either, even though it was only just becoming light, and I wish that I’d summoned up the energy to look at the time.

Once I was up, I had a very leisurely start to the morning and it took me over an hour to be back in here after having had a wash and taken my medication.

First thing that I did back in here was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I’d signed up for a new team of something or other. The reason why I’d come there was because I knew some of the people there and they were really quite friendly. I soon had a change of opinion when I went in to start there. There was one particular incident where we were changing and someone came along and took the chair that I was using to put my clothes on so I simply went to fetch another one. The boss came roaring in, accusing me of pushing in front of other people to fetch a chair. I told him that that was nonsense. I told him what had happened and he pointed to someone else, saying that he says differently. I said that he was wrong so the boss asked if I was calling him a liar. I replied that I was saying what I did and not what anyone else says that I did. He replied “right, then we’ll ask him what this other person did” but the other person turned his head away. The boss wasn’t going to let this drop. He asked “where are your clothes anyway at the moment?”. I replied that they were on my body, so he asked “what do you need a chair for?”. I replied that they won’t be on my body for very long. He pointed to me and said “in any case, you have a broken back. What are you here for anyway?”. “I don’t have a broken back”. “Yes, you have” he retorted. I was about to say that I’d just had a medical and no medical had ever picked up anything about a broken back but he just went on and on and on. Then he turned to a girl who was there too and asked “what about your medication?”. She replied “I don’t take it while I’m at work”. He replied “you should take it while you are at work and it should be noted down”. She replied “if I were to do that, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be on sick leave”. He replied “it doesn’t matter. You note down all the medication that you take when you go on work”. I said to this girl “I can see exactly how this is going to turn out. Neither of us will be here by the end of the week”. She replied “yes, just after I’ve ordered a barrel of 400 litres of something to last me all through the year too”.

This is a combination of a couple of events. The first one was an interview with a new player at Stranraer, who said that what encouraged him to sign for the club rather than any other was the fact that he already knew several players who were already there and so it would be like being on familiar territory.

The second part is clearly a reference to that most disagreeable male nurse at Paris whom I bawled out in front of the doctor because of his arrogant, aggressive tone. And if he starts his nonsense next time I’m there, never mind the end of the week, I won’t be there at the end of the session. I am rapidly reaching the end of my tether with all of this nonsense.

There was also something about being at a hospital, but I have only the vaguest recollection and nothing was recorded about it.

Isabelle the Nurse breezed in on the end of a hurricane. She couldn’t stop, and hadn’t read my “War and Peace” from Paris, but one thing for which she did ask was a copy of my photo from Paris, the one with the mouse on it. I’ve no idea what she intends to do with it, but it all sounds quite mysterious.

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

Today, we’ve been discussing the Barons’ War of 1215, its effect on Baynard’s Castle and the grievances of the Fitzwalter family but there was nothing particular of any interest.

The allegations seemed to be that King John had set his eye on Matilda, the daughter of Robert Fitzwalter, but both father and daughter refused John’s advances and when some kind of undercurrent against the Kings reign swelled up, Fitzwalter attached himself to it vigour in revenge.

After breakfast, I had some housekeeping to do in here on the computer, only to be surprised by my cleaner who caught me unawares.

The taxi came early too and despite ending up with three passengers, we were early arriving at Avranches.

For a change, I was coupled up early. There wasn’t much at all to extract so I persuaded them to go for 1 kg and bring down my dry weight. And then left in peace to carry on with my work. Not even the doctor came to see me, which was unusual considering the events of Thursday.

One interruption though was from the house agents of my landlord here. They have had my notice of leaving and want to come round to photograph the place in order to advertise it. We arranged for them to come on Friday afternoon

Connected up early, I was disconnected early too and for another change, the taxi was already waiting. The drive home, behind all of the arriving tourists, stopping every half-mile to admire the seagulls, took longer than it should and we had a drama when the driver drove right past the turning where we need to go to drop off my fellow passenger. We had to do a quick lap round the block to go back.

Back here, my faithful cleaner was waiting. We went into the apartment to rescue the lettuce and had a discussion about how we would try to make my place look presentable for the photographer.

Back here, I collapsed into a chair for half an hour, and then made some tea. Chips, falafel and salad. Not very much of it at all, but I still struggled to eat it all. And, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, if I’m off my food, then I really am ill.

It’s still quite early but nevertheless, I’m going to bed. I’ve had enough for today. I’m still not feeling very well, even after all of this time, and I now have one of those heavy summer colds that I have occasionally.

Tomorrow I have a Welsh class all day, so I need to be on the best form that I possibly can. God help me.

But seeing as we have been talking about doctors and other people telling me how ill I am … "well, one of us has" – ed … it reminds me of the time when I went to see the school nurse after an accident on the football field.
"You’ve broken your arm in two places" she told me
"So tell me which two places they are" I replied "and I shan’t go there again."

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Thursday 3rd July 2025 – REGULAR READERS OF …

… this rubbish will recall that when they pass by during the night, those from the far-flung corners of the Globe (and a few from closer to home too), they usually find that the latest instalment has managed to crawl on-line at some point, and they can sit and peruse it at their leisure while those readers closer to home are still in the Land of Nod.

And so last night, or this morning, they are probably wondering what has happened that there was nothing on-line for them to read.

The truth was that I was in bed, and had been since 19:30 in fact, for at dialysis yesterday afternoon I had another malaise and went into a coma again.

Not that any of that is a surprise. It was well after midnight when I finally went to bed last night, and I was awake again at about 02:40. This time though, I didn’t manage to go back to sleep and lay there tossing and turning until about 05:30 when I finally gave up the struggle and arose from the Dead.

It’s dialysis day of course, so I went to have a good scrub up and shave just in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then I went into the kitchen to take my medication so that I would be ready to Fight the Good Fight.

Back here, I had a listen to the dictaphone, but as I was expecting, there was nothing on it. That’s no surprise, seeing that I only had two and a half hours’ sleep. Instead, I found a few other things to do while I awaited the arrival of Isabelle the Nurse.

When she arrived, she gave me the next of this series of injections. If it is indeed to stimulate the red blood cells in their fight against the carcinogenic protein in my blood, it’s a mystery as to why they are only giving it to me for five days, without any other kind of control. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when this cancer was first diagnosed back in the winter of 2015-2016 when I was also taking this Retuximab, they were injecting me twice per day

After she left, the plumber turned up and we had a lengthy discussion about my plans. He seemed to be much more amenable to my ideas so I gave him the keys and let him loose downstairs to do his thing.

Now that he was downstairs, I went to make breakfast, but I found myself confronting a major problem. The fridge door was part-open, an enormous mound of ice had grown inside and the door wouldn’t close. Add to that the fact that the soya milk inside had “turned”.

Fearing all other kinds of problems, I turned off the fridge for the moment and made breakfast, and then sat down to eat it and read MY BOOK.

Our author tells us that "Henry I built his manor at Woodstock, with a park … He placed therein … divers strange beasts to be kept and nourished such as were brought to him from far countries, as lions, leopards, linces, porpentines and such other" – presumably, the UK’s first safari park.

He goes on to say that "King Edward II … commanded the sheriffs of London to pay to the keepers of the king’s leopard in the Tower of London sixpence the day for the sustenance of the leopard and three halfpence a day for the diet of the said keeper … More, in the 16th of Edward III, one lion, one lioness, one leopard and two cat lions in the said Tower were committed to the custody of Robert, son of John Bowre."

So London Zoo has a very long history indeed.

After breakfast, I had to empty the fridge and attack the ice mountain with an old hair-dryer, but I couldn’t do it for long because, with my head upside down, I was losing blood pressure and my head was spinning round.

There were several interruptions while I was trying to work. First, the plumber came up to give me a progress report, and then Rosemary ‘phoned about a problem that she was having with a tyre on her car.

After half an hour I had to give up the cleaning of the fridge until my head cleared, so I came back in here to do some work on the radio while I calmed down, but I could feel a wave of ill-health slowly sweep over me.

When my cleaner came to fit my anaesthetic patches, she noticed the mess in the kitchen so after having sorted me out, she waded into the kitchen, took all of the food off the worktop, and said that she’d be back later.

The taxi came early for me, and I was soon at Avranches with a very chatty driver entertaining us (we were two passengers) with conversation almost all of the way down to Avranches.

For a change, I was early at the dialysis centre, and for another change, I was connected up quite quickly. However, I didn’t even have time to switch on my laptop before I’d gone into a coma – blood pressure down at 8.8, apparently.

When Fleurette noticed, it brought her running and she quickly flattened my bed and raised my feet, and that was how I found myself ten minutes later, totally unaware of what had happened.

Everyone was, as usual, quite concerned about me and did their best to do something to help the situation, but I just wanted to go to sleep, which I did for about ninety minutes. But one of these days, I’m going to go into one of these comas and not wake up out of it.

The doctor came to see me and changed my prescription, telling me to cut out the blood pressure medication on the grounds that it’s working too well, and to see what happens over the next few days. I don’t know why they even gave it to me in the first place.

When it was time to unplug me, they were all worried once again and tried to make me use a wheelchair but I refused yet again. And for once that I was ready quite early, the taxi was quite late. I had to wait over half an hour before it turned up and that was just about the end.

It was the young, chatty guy who brought me home to where my faithful cleaner was waiting, and we went to have a look at the bathroom in the new place.

And what a shambles it is. Behind the bath, the plasterboard hasn’t even been skimmed – it’s just bare hydrofuge. The floor under the bath hasn’t been made good either, never mind tiled, and the pipework is all non-standard size, as if someone has wanted to use up a batch of ancient out-of-date pipe.

On the wall behind the bathroom cabinet, the plasterboard hasn’t even been skimmed and in places, not even painted.

All in all, I don’t think that my Barratt House of 1979 was as poorly-prepared as this.

Not that I’m complaining, of course. When I work out how much I paid for the place, I still have a bargain, and the work to put everything right is work that I would have had done anyway when the shower unit is built.

By now, I was feeling so ill that I could only struggle up the first flight of stairs, and I failed dismally on the second. I ended up having to go up from the half-landing in the lift and come back down the stairs from the half-landing above.

Once back in here, I had a brief look at the nice clean fridge that my faithful cleaner had cleaned while I’d been in dialysis, and then I went straight to bed. That was about that for the day.

Seeing as we have been talking about my bathroom … "well, one of us has" – ed … I shall have to bite the bullet and have it painted, I suppose.
And when I see the cabinet-maker who is going to paint everywhere, I shall have to tell him to put on two coats.
"Why two coats?" he asked.
"Well, it needs to be ready for winter."

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Friday 27th June 2025 – I AM ACHING …

… and breaking and I don’t kno … errr … in just about everywhere that it is possible to ache, and i’m feeling dreadful.

In LORD OF THE RINGS Frodo Baggins said that he felt "all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread."

And the way that I feel today, I know exactly what he meant and how he must have been feeling.

He went on to say "That can’t be right. I need a change, or something". And he was right – it can’t be right. I need a change, but how on earth do you manage to do that when you can’t walk or drive and every two or three days you need to go for a painful three-and-a-half hour session of dialysis.

There have been three things that have triggered off this current depression .

  1. The fact that I am aching all over, absolutely everywhere and it’s becoming a nightmare to move
  2. That the creatinine amount on my bloodstream has only reduced to 406 after nine months of dialysis (the critical limit is about 80).
  3. Speaking to the nice receptionist at the taxi company this afternoon, the doctor dealing with my chemotherapy has asked for authorisation for no fewer than FIFTEEN trips to Paris and back

One of these trips and one of these sessions is more than enough. I am simply not going to survive another fourteen of them. And if next time I have the same kind of interaction with certain members of staff that I had this time, it will be the last time for sure. As has been attributed without positive proof to many theatrical personalities, "I’m too old, I’m too tired and I’m too talented to care" any more.

There is at least a positive side to all of this in that with another fourteen trips to Paris in the pipeline, the taxi company will be doing its best to keep on my good side.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, I was in bed long before 20:00 last night, curled up under the covers and dead to the World.

At one point I do have some vague memory of the Hound of the Baskervilles yowling and barking some little yelps during the night, obviously having some sweet dreams himself, but that’s about it. I eventually awoke at 4:42, drenched in sweat yet again which was rather unfortunate as I still had on my day clothes, as I discovered.

By 4:52 I was already at the desk writing out the notes from yesterday and it took me quite a while to do so, firstly because there was so much to write and secondly because it was so hard to motivate myself, as usual.

Once the notes were finished, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. Later on … "later on from when?" – ed … I was being ill and so I decided that I was going to go home. My cleaner decided to come with me. There were quite a few of us in the car. We arrived at Davenport Avenvue and we all piled out. I went straight upstairs and my cleaner followed. Where these other people were staying was in one of the bedrooms and I pointed it out to them. I noticed that someone had painted the bathroom door and it looked really nice. I went into my bedroom, which was right down at the end of some kind of kinked corridor as at the hospital in Paris just now where I prepared myself ready to go to bed. As I climbed into bed, my cleaner came in. She was in her night attire too. She handed my ‘phone to me, saying that she didn’t know how these people had found my number – or her number … fell asleep here … So anyway, as I was about to climb into bed she handed me the telephone and said “I don’t know how these people have my ‘phone number”. I took it and answered, and it was the dialysis centre saying that they needed to have a talk with me about this afternoon. I waited and waited and waited but they didn’t answer at all so in the end I hung up. My cleaner told me that it wasn’t a very intelligent thing to do, to hang up on the dialysis centre but I said that I didn’t want to hang around in my nightclothes for very long at all. I wanted to be in bed.

And that is exactly how I’m feeling right now. I couldn’t care less about the dialysis centre, I couldn’t care less about the chemotherapy, I couldn’t care less about anything any more. I just want to go to bed and sleep.

Did I dictate the dream about my brother coming up to stay with me … "no you didn’t" – ed … We were talking about doing something or going somewhere so I asked him if I needed a car. He said that he needed one for the Sunday and to drop off a few other things on the Saturday. I thought that I’d arrange to hire a sports car for the weekend and we’d have some fun with it. We began to make our plans about where we were going and what we were doing but we had to wait around for a while for some reason or other. The next thing that I knew was that I found myself in bed. My brother was asleep in a bed in the same room, and when he awoke, he told me that he’d been vomiting through the night so I had to go to fetch some kitchen towels or something to clean things up. I asked him how he was and he replied that he was feeling much better but nevertheless, our plans were going to be changing. Because of this, I had a feeling that if I didn’t begin to exercise myself and have things done today we’d end up without a car at the weekend and that would be complicated

This isn’t like our family at all. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we are well-known for not being willing to share so much as a bus shelter in the middle of a monsoon with each other.

There was another dream too about being in Montréal. I was there with Nerina and we were talking to someone who was telling us certain things but I can’t remember now, but I remember saying that this is the fault with non-urban people, that they have a different outlook and a different approach to life. They can’t see things in the same way as everyone else, to which they agreed. I told Nerina about the woman whom I’d met in Labrador back in 2010 and with whom I’d kept in contact for a while until she moved to Toronto and I can’t remember any more about this particular dream.

One place to which I never took Nerina was to Montreal. I talked to her once about going to North America but she wasn’t impressed so I never mentioned it again. Canada was actually my preferred destination as a bolt-hole when my past began to catch up with me but Diplomatic Immunity in Belgium was a pretty good choice when that job came up. I still preen myself with pride … "show-off!" – ed … when I think that there were seventy-eight of us who sat that first exam in London for just one vacancy.

A friend of mine had a job as a house painter, to paint someone’s house. The house was in Ightfield, near Whitchurch. He asked me if I’d run him for his second day of work. I’d had a really bad night of sleep but nevertheless, when he came round at something like 08:00 on a Sunday, I took him out there. We found the house, so we pulled up outside it. It was a very narrow road. he took about five minutes to try to exit the van, saying that it was all muddy where we had stopped so in the end I had to move into the middle of the road and let him out there to fetch all of his things. Of course, with the road being narrow and me being in the middle of the road, a big lorry appeared so I had to move off quite quickly and swing into a side street to look for a parking place. There was a pub, so I drove into the pub. There were loads of people in there. I backed up against the pub wall on the inside, and climbed out of the van on my crutches and went to fetch the key to lock the doors. I suddenly realised that i’d left the keys in the back door. I’d backed the van right up against the wall so I couldn’t reach the key and I couldn’t start the van to move it because of course the key was in the back door. I was scratching my head thinking “how am I going to find my way out of this one? I seem to have made a huge mess of parking this van up. What was I going to do now?”.

Astute readers will be asking themselves the same question that I did when I transcribed the notes for this particular dream. Namely “if you drove the van into the pub and backed it up against the wall, you must have used an ignition key that is not stuck in the back door of the van, so why don’t you use that?”.

By about 7:30 everyone else had arisen from the Dead so we all gathered in the kitchen and had coffee and a chat. And my friend showed me a lovely ‘photo of an invalid scooter with a Kawasaki 900cc 4-cylinder transverse engine. I was sorely tempted until I noticed in the comments that someone was trying to work on fitting a V8 engine in one. I’ll wait and see how that pans out.

The nurse came round as usual, and if ever proof were needed that he doesn’t listen to a word that anyone says, we had
"How are you today? Was it OK at dialysis?"
"Not at all. My fever reached 38°C, coagulated the blood in the needles and they had to stop the session."
"And did you sleep well?"

After he left, we had breakfast and then set to work. We emptied the big glass-fronted wardrobe by the door that blocks the draughts. We turned it round to face the room and took several photos.

There is no place for it in the new apartment so it’s being sold. My friend, who has known me and my habits for sixty years told me to “put it online right now or else it will never be sold” so I advertised that and the kitchen units that I never used after buying them a few years ago. You can see the adverts HERE.

After all of that, we sat and chatted for quite a while and then my faithful cleaner came along and chased us out of the apartment while she did her stuff. We went downstairs and changed over the doors on the new fridge-freezer.

And that was an engineering job too, not at all simple. The two of us figured it out in the end because in some places the destructions were not at all clear. It took an age to do it and, as usual, we ended up with a screw left over.

After that, we went for a walk outside but by now the Black Dog was beginning to make its appearance. I was tired, I was aching and I was beginning to feel dreadful again.

Climbing back up these stairs was a Herculean effort and once I’d sat down, I had a really hard time standing up again. Tea was baked potatoes with a mixture of leftovers from out of the fridge with a sachet of vegan mince thrown in. And you can tell that I’m not feeling well at all because I’m still off my food. I didn’t feel like very much at all.

Now it’s bedtime and I just want to go to sleep. I don’t care about anything else any more, but I do know that I won’t be able to manage another fourteen of these chemotherapy sessions at this rate. I was looking back at my blog entries from when the Mapthera began, and it didn’t look very positive. I was hospitalised on several occasions after a dosage. And I was younger and fitter then, too.

But seeing as we have been talking about painters … "well, one of us has" – ed … my painter friend was asked to go and put two coats of light green all-weather matt paint on the porch at some rich person’s house.
When the guy cane back, he asked my friend "have you finished that paint job?"
"Yes I have" He replied. "But it’s not a porch, it’s a Ferrari".

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Wednesday 25th June 2025 – I WAS NOT …

… alone!

And when they send me the bill for the €20:00 for the subsistence, I shall only pay half and the mouse that I saw at 05:25 eating the crumbs on the floor when I awoke can pay the rest.

What surprised me particularly was not so much the mouse but the nonchalant attitude of the staff when I told them, as if “we’ve heard it all and seen it all before”. One member of staff (the male nurse with whom I’d had that huge argument last night) even tried to chase it away into someone else’s room rather than try to eradicate it.

So now my mind is made up. When I move downstairs I am definitely going to have a cat – a female cat – and the problem with what to do with it when I’m in hospital is resolved because I shall bring it with me. It can have free board and lodging.

And if anyone tells me that animals aren’t allowed into hospitals …

So, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here, the intravenous drip went on until about 03:00, with me trying to sleep and every half an hour or so a nurse coming to check and awakening me

When they finally disconnected me, I could at last have some proper sleep, which I did until all of 05:20, which was when I saw the mouse.

As I said earlier, it was the nonchalant attitude of the staff that surprised me the most. They seemed to think that it was quite a normal thing to have a mouse in their hospital. I wasn’t impressed, though.

After they left, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. While I was having a brief doze I saw a couple of heavy lorries go past with huge, heavy trailers on the back. From one of them, the trailer broke away and 100 yards further on the heavy metal container body on the lorry full of scrap metal or something also fell off. The trailer careered off down a side street and I remember thinking to myself “so that was the end of Mike’s Music Shop in Edleston Road”.

There used to be a music shop in Edleston Road – it moved there from Nantwich Road several years ago. I bought a lot of stuff, including my famous Gibson EB3 bass, from there. However, one of the owners died a couple of years ago so I don’t know if the shop is still there.

Later on; I ended up having a row with a nurse during a dream last night. He wanted to couple me up to a drip-feed thing in a very complicated way that I was sure wasn’t right. When he came to work on it, he found that he had to make the cables longer so he pulled on the cables and that nearly pulled the catheter out of my arm. When I shouted at him to stop he made something of a face and we had something of an argument … fell asleep here …

And fell asleep for two hours and eight minutes, so the dictaphone’s timestamp told me. And I’ve seen enough of these couplings-up to a Portable Patient these last ten or so years to know how it’s done and to know if it’s not done correctly. But clearly, that row last night must have been on my mind.

They had coupled the machine incorrectly, and ended up with pipes looking like a plate of spaghetti, all tangled up in each other rather than a nice flowing series of pipes; And the fact that they were all tangled together was the root of this argument, when he pulled on one and it pulled all the others

Breakfast (for me, anyway) came at 09:10 this morning and when I finished, and I wasn’t in the mood to eat all of it they coupled up the chemotherapy stuff.

And round about 10:00 the side effects began. I began to shiver and shake, I went deathly cold and a huge wave of fatigue swept over me. There’s only one cure for this – I went to bed, under the bedclothes to keep warm.

The nurses and the doctor were frantic with worry but I know about this kind of thing and I know the best cure is to sleep it off. They were having none of it though, and insisted on taking tests and measurements

There was also, as you might be expecting, the "would you like a doliprane?"

Round about 11:30 they finally got the message and cleared off, except for the cleaner and the nursing assistant who brought me my lunch, which I refused.

With the taxi coming at 14:30, I left the bed at 14:00, still feeling shaky, and packed my bags. And then went back to sleep.

The taxi arrived at 15:30 and as I was feeling a little better, I walked to the car, refusing the wheelchair, and settled myself down in a comfortable position.

The driver has taken me before, and he’s a nice, friendly guy so we had a little chat as we drove out of Paris. For once, the traffic circulation was fairly fluid so we would make good time

Once we were on the motorway I fell asleep and slept all the way to Caen, except for dealing with messages from my friend ond my faithful cleaner about my kitchen, which has arrived at last. I mentioned to the kitchen fitter that it had arrived, so he’s going to start work on his next free day, which might be some time at the end of next week.

He’s also been to another store and found what he needs from there and has negotiated a good price so he’ll be bringing all of that after I’ve paid for it.

When I awoke we were going round the north side of Caen. My driver reckons that it’s quicker at this time of afternoon and he was probably right too because we arrived back at home after just four hours of travel And we were greeted by a rainstorm of tropical proportions.

The boxes of kitchen stuff look impressive in the new apartment. I can’t wait for them to be opened and assembled. And then I climbed up here, feeling a little better than just recently, despite the pain in my foot that has now gone off to the back of the base of my little toe and in my heel since the Retuximab.

My friend had made some food to eat which was nice of him, and now I’ve come to write my notes before I go to bed.

But seeing as we have been talking about this pain in my foot… "well, one of us has" – ed … one of the nurses asked me "have you ever thought about acupuncture to solve the pain?"
"Yes I have as it happens" I replied "but I just didn’t get the point of it."

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Monday 23rd June 2025 – I HAD A …

… special visitor during the night last night – someone who hasn’t been to see me for quite some considerable time.

But more of that anon. This time tomorrow I shall be … well … not sitting in a rainbow, but sitting in a hospital bed in Paris where they will be starting this Rituximab cancer treatment.

Or, rather, restarting it, because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that was the product (or Mabthera, a generic thereof) that they gave me right at the beginning back in February 2016 after the chemotherapy failed.

And it worked at that moment too. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I was unable to walk and so ill that I had to live with friends because I was unable to cope by myself, yet six months later I was in Canada. I’m not expecting the same miracles this time, but any little help and relief that it might give me will be most welcome.

And in other news, it looks as if this apartment move will be taking place during the week of 18th-25th of August. That seems to be when the usual suspects are collecting themselves together, and I’m recruiting further volunteers if anyone else would like to join in. All are welcome and I do not practise any kind of discrimination at all. I hate everyone equally, regardless of race, creed, colour or sexual orientation.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, had I exerted myself last night I could have been in bed well before 23:00 but as usual, dillying and dallying about, it was about 23:30 when I finally crawled in underneath the covers.

When I awoke at 05:20 I was somewhere about in the dialysis centre but whatever it was that I was doing evaporated from my mind immediately … "not that there’s much in there to hold it in" – ed … which is just as well because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I don’t like to dwell on that place when I’m not there. It’s bad enough that I do when I am.

The first task that I undertook when I finally settled down at the desk (at … errr … 05:50) was to listen to the dictaphone notes to find out where I’d been during the night. And, as I said earlier, I had a special visitor come to see me. There was a group of us in a house somewhere and who should come in but our old friend (or mine, anyway), Zero. And what a long time it’s been since she last put in an appearance. I wanted to say “hello” to her but she walked right through the front of the house all the way to the stairs. I pretended to chase after, and she saw me, let out a squeal and ran upstairs. Her mother said something about going to frighten her away and that I had to look after her at that end of the room. My brother was upstairs in his room at the time and I could hear him and Zero talking to each other. I thought “how am I going to look after Zero at this end of the room if she has already gone upstairs?”. I thought in any case that he was supposed to be busy doing some things that he needed to do rather than sit around talking, but apparently not.

So here we go again. Zero having far more sense than to hang around chatting to me, and a member of my family turning up in my nocturnal rambles to spoil all my fun. I thought that we’d put all of that behind us, but apparently not. Presumably, some psychiatrist somewhere would come out with a few interesting remarks about this kind of situation, but it would all be news to me. There’s no other logical explanation for it, although whatever logic would have to do with what went on in my head during the night would also be news to me.

Round about 07:00 everyone else began to surface so I went for a good wash and scrub up ready for dialysis and Emilie the Cute Consultant, although I forgot to shave. And then we sat around waiting for Isabelle the Nurse to come to see me.

Almost as soon as she left, the taxi came round to take me to the Medical Centre to see the doctor about my heart.

At first, I saw his assistant who coupled me up to an echograph machine with a rapidity that took me quite by surprise.
"That’s not the first time that you’ve done this, is it?"
"Oh no" she replied. "Only a few thousand times.".

When she’d finished, she took me into the doctor’s room where he gave me a thorough examination.
"It’s not your heart that’s causing your problems" he said. "That’s working fine."

And that’s just as well because it’s only my heart that is keeping me going. With my low blood count and low blood pressure, my heart is having to beat about twice as fast as anyone else’s. Anyone’s heart can do that for a while, but mine’s been doing it for almost ten years. When it gives out, I’ll be gone in an instant.

But at least he found my heart and I still have one. I’ve not turned into a Conservative yet.

"Where’s all your paperwork?" he asked.
"No-one told me to bring any" I replied. "The dialysis centre arranged this appointment. I imagined that they would have sent you whatever you needed"
"You should always bring all of your medical paperwork with you when you come" he said
"I’ll remember that" I replied. "Do you know where I can hire a fork-lift truck?"

But as Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock once said, "it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners."

Back here (in the rain) I was halfway through eating breakfast when the ‘phone rang.
"What are you doing tomorrow?" a voice asked
"Not a lot" I replied.
"Good. Come to Paris and we’ll start the Rituximab"

So there we are. Now a frantic ringing-round to book taxis and obtain permission from the Securité Sociale.

My cleaner turned up as usual to fit my anaesthetic patches and then we waited around for a while. As the weather was now back to sunshine, we went downstairs to wait outside.

The taxi was bang on time with our other passenger already in, and we shot off to Avranches at the Speed of Light, me with my eyes closed. It’s not very often I feel nervous as a passenger these days.

And as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … there’s no point being ten minutes early anywhere if you have to spend that ten minutes washing your underwear.

When we arrived there were three ambulances ahead of us unloading the horizontal patients so I knew how this would pan out. And when one of those ahead in the queue had a crisis and everyone had to rush to help, I knew that that was that.

Having a trainee didn’t improve my morale much, and my 13:30 arrival turned into a 14:30 coupling up.

The doctor came round to see me to ask me how I was.
"OK at the moment but it won’t be for much longer if you keep on prescribing me these" and I showed him one of the boxes of tablets that I’d been prescribed on Saturday, a product that contained lactose.
"And your doctor moaned at me a few weeks ago when I had that attack of pancreatitis"

He didn’t stay very long after that.

The dietician came to see me too, to ask how I was getting on with the disgusting drink that she prescribed for me.

When I told her that I was taking it as instructed, she replied "Good" and renewed the prescription for another three months. I should have said nothing.

Julie the Cook was back from her holidays and she had ten minutes to come to sit on my bed for a chat, which was nice. She’s a really nice, bubbly, cheerful girl and always has a smile on her face. She can also perch on my bed any time she likes.

When I was uncoupled, I went out to the taxi but we had to wait (and wait, and wait) for another passenger who needs a lot of assistance. And who is dropped off first so it was at 19:37 when we finally arrived home.

My adjustable stool had arrived this afternoon and so things are looking much more positive downstairs. The stool will certainly ease my cooking issues, as I can now sit down while I’m at the worktop cooking, and take the weight off my knees.

Tea tonight was baked potato, salad in balsamic vinegar and a mix of falafel and veggie balls. It was delicious as usual.

Tomorrow I have bags to pack, sandwiches to make and food to rustle up, seeing as I don’t know how long I’ll be staying. They say that I’ll be back on Wednesday, but we shall see. I’m really grateful that my friend is here to deal with the kitchen that will (hopefully) arrive.

But first, I’m off to bed in the hope that Zero will come back.

Seeing as we have been talking about the doctor’s surgery just now … "well, one of us has" – ed … the patient before me was complaining about having a very sore throat
"Right" said the doctor. "Go over to the window, stick your thumbs in your ears and stick out your tongue as far as you can."
"Will that make me feel better?" asked the patient
"Oh no" replied the doctor. "My wife’s standing on the pavement outside."

0

Thursday 19th June 2025 – WE NOW HAVE …

… a fridge-freezer downstairs to go with the oven that came on Wednesday. A large van must have done half a dozen laps around here before deciding that this building is where he wants to be.

And we need a large fridge-freezer too because the temperature is ridiculous today. My faithful cleaner is convinced that she saw 38°C indicated on a temperature reader in the town. If that’s the case, it’s the hottest that I’ve been since I was IN HUNGARY IN 2020.

It didn’t look like that last night. It was fairly cool when I came in here to write up my notes, and I was so comfortable that I wasn’t in any rush to finish. It ended up a slow, leisurely evening and after midnight I was still letting it all hang out.

Eventually I made it into bed and was asleep quite quickly. But once again, not for long because at 05:35 I was wide awake.

With the extra-early start, I dictated the radio notes that i’d written earlier in the week – and then had to dictate them a second time as the first attempt didn’t record. And the volume is still weak and feeble, just like me at the moment

By now, everyone else was awake so I went for a wash and shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon. Then we assembled in the kitchen and sat around drinking coffee.

The Hound of the Baskervilles dragged its master off for walkies and I came in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was doing something with the radio last night, having to play around with various tracks to work out how long they were and work out whereabouts in the programme they would actually fit. I wasn’t doing it for very long because I don’t know what awoke me but I happened to wake up round about 05:35 so I’ve no idea.

One of the songs that was going round and round in my head when I awoke was Steve Earle’s THE DEVIL’S RIGHT HAND, sung by the Phil Beer Band. It was probably stuck in my brain due to the fact that I was listening to a concert by the group just before I went to bed.

After that, I made a start on editing the radio notes but everyone came back from walkies so we had more coffee.

Interestingly, the hackles on the Hound of the Baskervilles stood up and he began to have a deep, menacing growl. 30 seconds later, Isabelle the Nurse came in. He barked at her but she soon won him over and left me thinking “I wish that she’d stroke me like that!”

Once she’d left I could have breakfast, and then we plotted what we intended to do this afternoon and sorted everything out. We also watched a strange van circle around here a couple of times

My cleaner came bang on time to fit my anaesthetic patches, having noticed a strange van circling around. She’d asked then if it was for me but then denied it all, and carried on circling.

The taxi was early, and when I descended, I noticed that the van had made up its mind and had stopped. They had the tail-lift down and were manoeuvring … "PERSONoeuvring" – ed …. an enormous package – my fridge-freezer. My friend helped them move it into the apartment downstairs while I rode off into the sunset.

There were two other people to pick up on the way, but even so, we were early. However, it was to no avail, being early, because they weren’t ready for me. I had to loiter around for twenty minutes.

The coupling-up was painful as usual, and then I was so exhausted that I crashed out for fifteen minutes or so. The staff, though, left me mostly alone, except for the odd check of my blood pressure when the alarm sounded.

In the middle of it all, there were several ‘phone calls. There was another delivery but the driver was lost. Consequently I had to liaise with him, my friend and my faithful cleaner in order that the parcel arrived as it should. All of this effort for a new spice rack.

Océane uncoupled me this evening, and not for the first time, she held my hand while she compressed my arm, which I thought was sweet. When I was let go, she came with me to hand my bag over to the taxi driver, and as she turned to go back in, I expressed my surprise that she wasn’t going to come home with me.

But honestly, any one of a dozen or so of those nurses could come hime with me any time they liked.

Back here, I inspected the new purchases, and also the insides of the wardrobes that my friend had painted for me. They look so much better now, and will look even nicer when they are dry.

As a treat, I took him out to the Italian restaurant that we like. I had my usual penne al arrabbiata and he had ham in a gorgonzola sauce. I hope that it tasted better than it smelt.

So right now, thoroughly exhausted and the fan on to try to cool everything down, I’m off to bed where I intend to sleep for a week.

But seeing as we have been talking about the delivery driver … "well, one of us has" – ed … when I came home my friend told me that the Hound of the Baskervilles had been chasing the delivery driver down the street in his van.
"That’ll teach him a valuable lesson" I said. "Next time he comes here, he’ll take the keys out of the ignition and close the door"
Nevertheless, I was quite impressed. I didn’t even realise that the Hound of the Baskervilles could drive

0

Wednesday 18th June 2025 – THE FIRST OF THE …

… deliveries arrived today. We now have a built-in electric oven sitting on a pallet in the apartment downstairs.

We actually have the units in which to fit it too, but they are in the back of the van where they have been since June 2022 when I bought them in Munich. However, I’ve never been able to take them out. And that made me wonder – is it really that long since I lost the ability to walk?

Although I’d had several bad falls up until that date, it was on the boat COMING BACK FROM JERSEY ON 31st AUGUST 2022 where my legs finally gave way and I wouldn’t pick myself up off the floor.

Nevertheless, I went to Canada to finalise everything but that was a journey too far and not only did I not last out the journey, I caught that virus that almost killed me and led to a two-month stay in hospital as soon as I returned.

But anyway, I digress.

Last night it was late yet again by the time that I finished my notes – I do have to say that as usual, I was not in all that much of a rush.

Once in bed though, I had the longest sleep that I have had for quite some considerable time. It was 06:15 when I awoke this morning, and I had to rush to make sure that I was out of bed prior to the alarm going off.

It wasn’t long before everyone else was up and about too, so there wasn’t really any time to do very much. Instead, I sorted myself out in the bathroom and when the Hound of the Baskervilles, who had dragged his master outside for five minutes, came back, I went for a coffee.

It was a nice, slow start to the day as we sat around chatting about past times and the days of our youth etc., and we were still there when Isabelle the Nurse blew in. She fell in love with the Hound of the Baskervilles and probably spent more time talking to him than she did to me.

After she left, so did the Hound of the Baskervilles, dragging his master behind him, and I made myself some breakfast for a good start to the day.

A little later, we set out for the shops. First port of call was the Disabled Persons’ shop on the edge of town. This is a place where they sell everything that you need if you need some kind of special equipment for some medical reason or other.

My purpose was to look for grab rails for the shower and for the w.c. I’m not going to keep this weird framework thing in the w.c. here – it takes up far too much space. I would prefer a couple of handles on the wall. And the same for the shower too. I need to be able to hold on to something and pull myself in, and to hold myself upright when I’m showering.

The good news is that they have them in stock. There’s no need to order them. So I can come and fetch them any time that I like – assuming that I have some transport to take me there.

While I was there, I asked about mobility scooters to see what they had. However, they don’t stock them at all. That’s a shame. I was going to have a little try-out around the car park.

Next stop was in Centrakor for another window pole for the gap between the living room and the other half of the apartment. And as well as a window pole, I came out with a combined w.c. brush and toilet roll holder and also several large storage jars for my flour. This new apartment is starting to become a serious proposition.

Third stop was the local park. The Hound of the Baskervilles was becoming restless and wanted a run-around so I directed my friend to the Parc du Val ès Fleurs, the site of the old Christian Dior factory now transformed into a lovely park. They went off for a ramble while I sat and enjoyed the sunshine.

This was when the delivery lady rang me so we had to pile back into the car and drive home to unlock everything so that she could bring the oven in. Yes, things are looking up.

When she’d gone, I did something that I hadn’t done for ages, and that was to sit on the wall at the top of the cliff by our building. The sun was beautiful and I really made the most of it for half an hour or so, watching the ships coming over from Jersey and the trawlers out in the bay. It was wonderful.

On the way back I met my cleaner and also the lady whose briefcase we recovered yesterday. We had quite a nice chat for a while and then I staggered back up the stairs.

When my cleaner came up to do her stuff, the others went out for a walk and I went to have a shower. So there’s a nice, clean me this afternoon ready to charm Emilie the Cute Consultant tomorrow.

Back in here, I rather regrettably crashed out for half an hour – the first time for ages. But then again, I’d done a lot today – much more than I usually would.

Once I’d recovered, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. After only a couple of seconds after having gone to bed I must have fallen asleep because I saw Nerina come into the room. I was with someone else when she walked in. Of course, she was a lot older than she had been. She walked in and went out of a door in the wall. Another woman came in after her and stuck her head in the door and shouted “Neessa”. At that moment the Hound of the Baskervilles made a noise and I awoke. I would have loved to have known what was going to happen after all of that but the Hound of the Baskervilles broke the spell.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … much as I don’t appreciate my family coming along to disrupt my nighttime voyages, I don’t mind Nerina being there. After all, I did invite her to share my life so she has every right to be there, and in any case, you can’t choose to live with someone for nine years and not like them.

There was time to make a start on the next radio programme so I went through the notes, found that I’d written down incorrectly one of the dates and so had to start again from the beginning. In the pipeline already, there’s one set of notes to dictate but I want to see how far I can push on.

When everyone came back I set about making a curry – mainly because I fancied some more of that vegan soya mince that I’d used the other day. So the big mystery was “why, if the curry that I made tasted so nice, did I actually forget to put in the soya mince?”. I really am losing my mind these days.

So right now, it’s bedtime ready for dialysis tomorrow, I don’t think. Another seven hours of my life wasted and three and a half hours of painful purgatory.

But seeing as we have been talking about my shower … "well, one of us has" – ed … while I was drying myself afterwards, my cleaner and I were talking about school and punishment – the difference between our day and today.
It reminded me of one day when I was talking to one of my form teachers. I asked him "would you, as a matter of principle, ever punish a pupil for something that they hadn’t done?"
"Not at all" he said. "I would never ever do that."
"That’s good news" I replied
"Why did you ask?" he asked
"Because, I’m afraid, I haven’t done my homework this week."

0

Sunday 15th June 2025 – WHAT A LOVELY …

… day that I have had today. It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve had such an interesting day.

Well, actually, that’s not really fair. A friend of mine was over here for a couple of days several weeks ago and we had a very good and interesting time. And today (and these last few days in fact) were just as interesting and enjoyable.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I don’t have many friends, but those whom I have are the best in the World. No-one has better friends than I do.

So last night, I had another gentle meander around in cyberspace, sometimes looking for things on the internet and sometimes even writing my notes. But in any case it was long after midnight when I finally crawled into bed.

For a change, I was asleep quite quickly, and there I stayed until all of … errr … 05:10 when something awoke me. I’ve no idea what it was but anyway, I was awake and that was that.

“Being awake” is of course not the same thing as “leaving the bed”. That is something quite different. So there I was lying there vegetating when I thought “hang on – I have things to do” and left the bed. This was round about 05:30.

Everyone else was asleep so I sat down and began to transcribe the notes on the dictaphone. They were laying out some young girl last night, a 3D model of one. She had died. They were dressing her in whatever funeral clothes that they could find and making her ready for burial.

This was quite a morbid theme for the night when I’m supposed to be relaxing. And even now, I can still see the scene. Interestingly, they were dressing her in white. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that when I was going through the wardrobe in here the other day sorting out things that I’ll be taking downstairs, I came across Roxanne’s communion dress and a bridesmaid’s dress that she wore that her mother left behind when our relationship ended. I’ve never been able to bring myself to throw them out.

There are lots of things – clothes, toys, a bike and so on of Roxanne’s that I still have that were left behind down on the farm that I came across when I scrapped the caravan in which we lived when we went down there at first on our holidays. It’s rather too late now to worry about what’s going to become of it, but whoever draws the short straw and has to sort out my effects is going to have something of a time trying to untangle everything.

Once I’d finished the dictaphone notes (which, let’s face it, didn’t take long) I sorted out the rest of the music for my biodiversity radio programme. That’s all chosen, edited, remixed and segued now, and I even began to write the notes. However, round about 07:15 I detected signs of people stirring so I went to join them.

After I’d had a good wash and scrub up we all sat around talking and drinking coffee until the nurse arrived. And he was once more taken unawares by the Hound of the Baskervilles. Consequently, he didn’t stay long and we could push on and make breakfast.

While breakfast was a-making, I set my friend a task TO PROVE THAT HE IS WORTHY. I mentioned the other day that I needed someone to place an advert on a certain Social Media Group to try to find a plumber. I was going to ask my friend Liz to do it but I can’t keep on asking her to do things for me or she’ll soon become fed up, so I set my friend onto the task.

While I was eating my breakfast, I sent off my on-line order for the oven, microwave, fridge-freezer and a few other things. They will start to arrive in midweek and carry on into the beginning of next week. So now it looks as if we are off, up and running.

To cement our progress, we sorted out some things and took them downstairs to put in the new place. That’s right! WE ARE BEGINNING TO MOVE IN! Slowly, it has to be said, but nevertheless …

Once we’d sorted out what needed to go downstairs, we decided to make the most of the beautiful weather and go out.

The first place that we visited was the radio’s studio at St Nicolas so that my friend knew where it was for the future, and then we had a nice, steady drive in the sunshine all the way down to the Pointe de Carolles where he took the Hound of the Baskervilles for a run on the beach and I went for a coffee.

That wasn’t as easy as it sounded either because it was lunchtime and the place was full. They offered me a kind-of casual table outside but the seats were no good for me. Eventually, they found a spare seat with armrests where I could sit down and, more importantly, lift myself out again.

When they had finished their walkies they came to join me and we were there for about an hour in the sun having coffee. And the cute little serving wench who waited on us can hand it to me on a platter any time she likes.

Interestingly, there were several young children wandering around, dressed in white. I asked the aforementioned serving wench about it, and she replied that the local kids had had their communion today. After that dream about the girl being laid out for her funeral, dressed in white, and Roxanne’s communion dress, that was a real coincidence.

We climbed back into the car and drove on down the coast and into Avranches to fuel up, and then carried on along the coast in the beautiful weather, admiring the view until we reached St Malo.

It’s years since I’ve been to St Malo and I can’t remember it at all compared to how it is now. But I sat on the side of the harbour watching the shipping while the Hound of the Baskervilles dragged its master off for another walk. And why I didn’t take a ‘photo of the first “Ship of the Day” since I was in MONTREAL THE 30th SEPTEMBER 2022 I really don’t know.

Back in the car, we had a nice, steady drive home, coming through the town centre to see the chaos that they are creating with these “improvements”. And all that I can say is that it’s better than Crewe Town Centre right now, that’s for sure.

Another nice surprise is that someone had replied to the advert that my friend had placed this morning. So now I have a plumber/handyman coming to see me on Friday afternoon to have a look at the job that needs doing downstairs in the bathroom. That might even be taking off at this rate.

For tea tonight I made another pizza, a large square one this time and that went down really well. There’s even some left over so my friend has bagged that for lunch tomorrow while I’m at dialysis.

So now, I’m off to bed, exhausted following a really wonderful day. I don’t have enough of those so I’ll make the most of whatever I can have.

But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about watching the boats in St Malo harbour … "well, one of us has" – ed … I spent a lot of time looking at this strange type of elasticated sailing boat that was there, flying the flag of one of these Middle-Eastern Emirate countries.
It was so unusual that I asked a local yokel about it.
He was a very vocal local yokel too, and told me "it’s a very famous boat, that one. Didn’t you know?"
"No, I’m afraid that I didn’t." I said
"It’s so famous" he said "that a very famous poem has been written about it"
"Which one was that?" I asked, bitterly regretting ten seconds later having done so
"It’s ‘The Rubber Yacht of Omar Khayyam’"

0

Thursday 12th June 2025 – I AM NOT …

… alone.

And not only that, I have done something that I haven’t done for quite a while, and that is, to go to a restaurant for a meal.

Currently lying asleep on the sofa in the living room is my friend from Munich, and at his feet is lying the Hound of the Baskervilles. So we have something of a full house tonight.

Last night though, there was only me in the apartment, writing up my notes, wasting time, and generally having something of a late night yet again as I failed miserably to motivate myself once more.

Once in bed though, at whatever late hour it was, there I lay, fast asleep, until all of … errr … 04:40 when I had another dramatic awakening.

Being unable to go back to sleep, I was lying there vegetating when it occurred to me round about 05:20 that here is the moment for which I have been waiting. I arose from the Dead and dictated the radio notes that I’d written the previous day.

Next port of call was the bathroom, and then the kitchen for the medication.

Back in here, there were now two lots of radio notes on hand so seeing that once more there was nothing on the dictaphone, I sat down and began work.

By the time that the nurse arrived, I’d finished editing one of them – the notes for the extra track to join the two halves of one of the programmes I’d prepared a week or so ago. I had to break off at that point to sort him out.

He had the usual banal comments and questions, but didn’t hang around long. I could then crack on, make breakfast and read MY NEW BOOK.

We’re discussing the wharves on the River Thames and its tributaries today. One thing that I hadn’t realised was that most of the wharves and landing stages were private and a toll was charged to anyone who used them. Quite a few had been authorised by the City but quite a few more were unauthorised.

There were however a few free wharves where one could come ashore without payment, and I imagine that they were quite popular.

Breakfast was however interrupted. The electrician came, so I had to take him downstairs and show him what needed doing. Once he was settled in, I left him to it. So work has started downstairs at last.

Back in my little room, I finished off assembling the programme that I’d started earlier, and then attacked the one for which I’d dictated the notes this morning.

There was the usual interruption from my cleaner who came by to fit my anaesthetic patches, and with the taxi not now coming until 13:00 I came back in here to carry on working.

By the time that it arrived, I’d just about finished it, which is another good day’s work done already.

We had a pleasant drive down to Avranches, the driver, another passenger and me. And when we arrived there, most of the people had been already plugged up so in theory there wasn’t a very long wait.

However, our plans came to nought as one of the elderly patients, an old man with dementia who was there for the first time, was proving to be difficult and all the nurses were crowded around him.

Once I was connected though, I could review my shopping list for LeClerc, revise my Welsh and … errr … have a little relax.

Once more, at unplugging time; the elderly patient was having another crisis and so it was quite late when I was unplugged and compressed.

However the principle of these 13:00 taxis and 14:00 starts is something of a benefit, if it all works out as it’s supposed to.

There were two other passengers in the car with me on the way home so we went around the houses, but waiting for me at the apartment was not only my faithful cleaner, but the Hound of the Baskervilles and his owner.

We stuck our heads into the apartment while we were passing and noticed that the electrician seems to have done a good job. He’ll finish off when the kitchen fitter is there.

Later on, we went out for a meal at this new Italian restaurant where I had an excellent penne arrabbiata – the first time for a positive age and I enjoyed every mouthful of it.

Back here, we had a good chin-wag until tiredness overwhelmed us and it was time for bed.

But what a nice pleasant day it has been today, and for many reasons too. It’s been quite exciting.

It’s always very nice to meet old friends, and “old” is the word, for we have been friends for 60 years this coming September when we sat next to each other on our first day at Grammar School.
He was always a very devoted and loyal friend. One day he came up to me in school and said "the other boys in the class are saying that you aren’t fit to live with pigs"
"And what did you say?" I asked.
"Ohh, I stood up for you" he said. "I said that you are!"

0

Wednesday 11th June 2025 – I DON’T THINK …

… that I’m going to have my shower installed for when I move downstairs, unfortunately.

Having had a good chat this afternoon with the guy who is going to fit the kitchen, he’s not convinced that he’d be able to do the work that I want. He’s happy to do some of it but not the rest. He really thinks that we ought to have a professional plumber on hand, and he’s probably quite right too.

But you try to find one. I shall ask around and see who knows one, and maybe trouble my friend Liz to put another advert on that Social Media page. Maybe there might even be someone on one of these tradesmen’s sites who has a week or two free. There is bound to be a solution somewhere.

Anyway, last night I had another fairly late night, not being able to motivate myself sufficiently to have everything done in any kind of urgency. It was about 23:45 when I finally crawled into bed.

Once in bed though, I remember nothing at all. I must have gone to sleep quite quickly, and there I lay until about 06:15 without moving at all.

When the alarm went off at 06:30 I was in the bathroom sorting myself out. Then after the medication, I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I had been during the night.

There was a police investigation taking place last night and I was in charge of the enquiry. It had taken place in a large house where a lot of people were staying. We’d had a stroke of luck in that someone had identified a coat, a blue and white checked coat. This was not general knowledge so I kept that to myself but I arranged for the rooms of all of the people to be searched. We found someone with a blue and white checked coat, so we decided to keep an eye on her. There were one or two other things too that led us to believe that she was the one who committed the offence but we wanted to make sure that we had all the evidence that we needed. That involved taking her coat and examining it so we had to wait until she was ready to go into the bath. We arranged to send some young girl around who was to tell everyone that she was looking for a blue and white checked coat so that it would divert suspicion if the girl was found carrying one, or if someone else was found carrying one. Then this woman decided that she was going to have a shower. I waited until she went and then I collected my shower things ready to go into another bathroom but she stepped out of her bathroom and saw me. She asked me if I was going for a shower too. I told her not to worry because the two showers were on different circuits. In the meantime, the young girl was coming upstairs and was asking if anyone had seen a blue and white checked coat. I suddenly realised that I had a blue and white checked coat and this could be complicated if the two became mixed up so I had to think of how to say something, but the girl was wandering around the corridors asking everyone whom she met and I thought that she was going to be up to me fairly soon so I need to be able to have some kind of story ready for her

This is a road down which I’ve travelled during the night on many occasions – the one where I’m full of doubt and indecision, just as I am with the kitchen and the rest of the apartment right now. I’ll be really happy when it’s all done (if it ever is) and I don’t have to do anything else. However, being involved in a murder case during the night without Holmes and Watson being present is quite unusual. They’ve joined me on a few trips in the past.

Good Queen Bess (that is, Queen Elizabeth I) was having to choose a new personal confidante and admirer because her previous one, with whom she got along really well, was suspected of being in the pay of the French and all the British secrets were being passed over to the French before the English could do anything about it. Anyway so it was all possible to talk about having a new set of official suites during the interval between the terms but she is believed not to be very happy about that.

Whatever this is all about I have no idea. Apart from a brief reference in passing to a couple of the books that I’ve been reading, it doesn’t appear to have any relevance at all.

The nurse was even earlier this morning. Not that it’s a surprise because he probably doesn’t have much to do. He was soon gone too and I could make breakfast and carry on reading MY NEW BOOK.

Once more, we’re stumbling on little-known facts. John Stow has been describing the rivers, stream and wells that ran through the City of London in the past. Although the existence of one or two of them is disputed today, he’s quoting charters and deeds that refer to many of them, and even gives an inventory of people who contributed money towards their upkeep, and how much they donated.

We then moved on to bridges, and there was a lot of information about those too, doing back to the time of the Saxons.

Interestingly, he talks about a siege of London in 1471 by an army led by someone called, rather eloquently, “Thomas the Bastard Fawconbridge”. With a name like that, he sounded as if he was well-worth tracking down. It turns out that it’s a reference to Thomas Neville, son of William Neville, Lord Fauconberg and a leading supporter of the House of Lancaster during the Wars of the Roses.

For much of the day, I’ve been dealing with a radio programme. There’s the anniversary of a concert coming up soon and I found the recording that we made of it so I’ve been editing it, remixing it, cutting out bits that we don’t need and merging the joins together so that it all runs smoothly and seamlessly.

Then I needed an introduction so I sat down and wrote a couple of thousand words that will make a nice lead-in to the music. And that’s all ready for recording on Saturday night, or maybe even earlier if I have any more really early starts.

My cleaner turned up this afternoon to do her stuff. We went downstairs to the new apartment and took a few more measurements that the kitchen fitter needed. Back up in here, I had a nice shower to try to make myself pretty for dialysis tomorrow, in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant, even though she doesn’t love me any more.

The kitchen fitter rang me afterwards. We had a lengthy, Rosemaryesque chat and he now seems to have all of the information that he needs. He’s going to stick his head into IKEA to find out the answers to a few questions that I can’t answer, and then we’ll move on and order the product and have it delivered ready for installation

There was time to make a start on another radio programme. Another day that is coming up in due course is “International Biodiversity Day” and with musicians such as Robert Plant, Herbie Flowers and Kate Bush, and groups such as Porcupine Tree, there is the basis of a programme already suggesting itself

If I were to play Herbie Flowers’ song DANCE OF THE LITTLE FAIRIES, I wonder if the editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine would make any comment.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice and veg followed by ginger cake and soya dessert, and very nice too, s usual.

So now, having wasted enough time this evening, I’m off to bed. I have a visitor tomorrow morning, dialysis in the afternoon and another visitor tomorrow evening. I seem to be in great demand right now, which is nice, if it weren’t for the dialysis of course. But at least I’ll smell nice for Emilie the Cute Consultant.

But seeing as we’ve been talking about Thomas the Bastard Fawconbridge, it reminds me of when Nerina went for a job interview.
They asked about her family life, and she replied, mentioning "my husband" quite a few times
"But what’s his name?" asked the interviewer. "What do you call him?"
"I call him quite a few names" replied Nerina "but if I told you what they were, I wouldn’t get the job."

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Saturday 7th June 2025 – I HAD NOTHING ON …

… the dictaphone again last night. That is, of course, extremely depressing from my point of view, but ss I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … if you don’t go to bed until 01:00 and you’re wide-awake again at 04:40, you haven’t really had all that much time to go anywhere.

It’s still quite disappointing though, because I enjoyed my nocturnal rambles, even if I did keep on falling over members of my family, and I wish that they would start up (the dreams, not the family) soon.

Last night I dillied and dallied through my notes and a few other things and, as I wasn’t feeling in the least bit tired, I found a few other things to do to waste some time. In the end, though, I called it a night – or a morning – and staggered off to bed.

As usual, I fell asleep quite quickly but as I said just now, it wasn’t for long. I checked the ‘phone when I awoke and it was 04:40 – far too early to raise myself from the Dead so I loitered around, trying to go back to sleep but in the end, gave it up as a bad job

The first thing that I did was, as I promised, to take advantage of the peace and quiet of the early morning and dictate the radio notes that I’d written the other day. That will save me some time on Saturday night

The bathroom was next. I had a good wash and scrub up, and even a shave in case I meet Emilie the Cute Consultant this afternoon, and then went into the kitchen to sort out the medication.

Back here, I sat down and in a mad fit of enthusiasm (and God alone knows where that came from) I began to edit the radio notes that I’d dictated earlier.

The sound on my recorder is back to being all over the place and it took an age to adjust the controls so that I had something passable without sounding as if I had been dictating with my head stuck inside a bucket.

Isabelle the Nurse came along as usual, and she noticed that I had another weeping oedema, and how I am fed up with all of this too. I really did think that I’d seen the back of all of these problems, but apparently not.

After she left, I made some breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK. Today, we’ve arrived at York where our author has spent several pages extolling poetically the virtues of the city and the area without mentioning once anything to do with medieval Military Architecture.

But that’s the story of this book, really. As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … it seems to be a guide book for the benefit of the more-informed tourist rather than, as I was hoping, a serious treatise and discussion on the important aspects of Medieval Military Architecture

Back in here, I carried on with the editing of the radio notes and by the time that my cleaner put her sooty foot in the door to sort out my anaesthetic patches, I’d just about finished them. Tomorrow, I’ll assemble the programme.

After my cleaner left, I didn’t have long to wait for the taxi, and even though we had another passenger to pick up, we arrived at the dialysis centre early.

The problem was though that so did everyone else, and they weren’t ready for us. And when they let us in I found that I’d been moved to the bed the farthest away from the entrance. As I’m slow when it comes to moving about, I was the last in bed and so the last to be coupled up.

When they came to deal with me, I told them about the oedemas and although the doctor didn’t come to see me, he recommended that they reduce my dry weight and increase the fluid extraction. I’ll go along with that until they start talking about this “four hours” and “four sessions” again. I’ve had quite enough of that kind of talk.

Today I was in a little room all on my own and no-one came to bother me. I should have been revising my Welsh but instead I drifted in and out of sleep for most of the afternoon. I really was feeling quite exhausted after my very short night’s sleep.

At the end of the session I had to wait for a while for the taxi to show up so we were just as late arriving back home as we would have been had we set out late for the outward trip.

At the building I went into the new apartment to do some more measuring of distances that I needed. One thing that I really did notice was how much easier it is to go into there rather than to struggle up all of these stairs. That’s one thing to which I shall really be looking forward when I finally do make it downstairs permanently – none of these 39 Steps or whatever they are to struggle up here.

However, that’s not for right now. I still had to struggle back up here and sort myself out.

Tea tonight was a vegan salad with baked potato and falafel, followed by ginger cake and soya dessert. The vegan salad was laced with some home-made vegan garlic mayonnaise that I made yesterday but forgot to mention. And it really is excellent.

So right now, I’m off to bed. I was planning on finishing off the radio programme but I’m still quite tired so a good night’s sleep will do me good. But if I can’t sleep or if I awaken early, I can always deal with the radio programme too.

Something else that I have to do tomorrow is to sort out my apartment – plan what I need and talk to the people who are involved in all of this. I need to push on rapidly.

But seeing as we have been talking about home-made mayonnaise… "well, one of us has" – ed … I was talking to someone about making my own mayonnaise.
"That’s supposed to be a rather religious experience isn’t it?" she asked
"Not that I know about it" I replied
"Someone wrote a hymn about it though, didn’t they?"
"I’m sure that they didn’t" I answered
"Yes they did" she insisted. "It goes something like ♬ ‘mayonnaise have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’ ♬ "

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