Category Archives: cleaner

Wednesday 1st February 2023 – I’VE JUST BEEN …

… crashed out on the chair in the bedroom. Not actually asleep but in some kind of cataleptic trance. I could hear the radio playing in the background but for a good 20 minutes or so I was totally unable to move.

It’s probably something to do with tiredness and that’s no surprise at all. I ended up last night – or rather, this morning – not going to bed until about 02:30. I started something before I went to bed and was somehow swept up in the excitement, such as it was.

And no-one was more surprised than me – not even you, I bet – that I was able to haul myself out of bed when the alarm went off at 07:30. And I kept on going al day as well.

After the medication and so on, I had a few things to do. Like bake my fruit buns. And I do have to say that they are the best that I have made – I had one with my coffee. I think that I’ve got the hang of them right now, although I wish that the dough would rise more than it does.

Most of the rest of the day has been spent sorting out the music for the next batch of radio programmes. It’s not like me to go around getting ahead of myself but one lot of music is done and paired off, and I’m halfway through pairing off the music for the second one.

However, I had to grind to a halt as I had other fish to fry. In fact, while I was listening to the one that I’d intended to send off, I heard myself going on about a musician who had died since I recorded it. Consequently I had to rewrite that bit, record and edit it, and then filter it in. And as I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … it takes longer to edit a programme like that than it does to record it in the first place.

The cleaner came round too and had a good go at the place. She cleaned all of the air vents today which probably means that it’ll be a little cooler but smell nicer.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone from last night too. I was with someone. We were living with someone on the edge of Paris. She’d been arrested in some kind of demonstration in Lyon so she was going to demonstrate against her arrest. She asked me if I’d drive her so we got into the car, a C15 van, and set out. We hadn’t been driving very long before I asked “are we actually going to Lyon?”. She replied “yes”. I then asked had she thought about what would happen if she were arrested again. She said “yes” and was quite prepared for everything. She intended to be true to herself and would feel pretty bad if she weren’t. We carried on driving. We stopped at a place for lunch, a pub. She decided that she wanted turkey, and they served me with turkey as well. There was someone else there whom we knew so the 3 of us were there eating turkey. She was talking about spells – how she’d like to go inside one of these spells and disappear off into the realms of darkness. She went up to the counter for something. When she came back she told us that she’d told the people at the counter what they had said and she told them what she wanted to do with this magic spell and this turkey. They had said that some Tory would probably come along and make sure that you stay there. We were eating this turkey and I suddenly realised that I was vegan and it was making me really ill. I had to stop and she was disappointed. I said that I wasn’t going to eat any more otherwise I’d be really ill. At that point a family came in, mother, father and a young girl. They looked around for a table and found one but there were no chairs. There were 3 of us and 4 chairs so the guy with us took our other chair and took it over to them to sit down so that they would at least have one seat.

Tonight’s leftover curry was delicious. It seems that my cooking is improving these days. I’ve no idea what I’m doing that is different or whether it’s my taste buds but the stuff looks much better and is much more tasty. But I’m hoping that when I eventually move into this new apartment with its nice kitchen and new appliances, it’ll be even better. A good oven will be a huge step up and I can’t wait for that.

But right now that’s for worrying about tomorrow because even though I’m not tired and it’s later than usual, I’m going off to bed. The physiotherapist will be here tomorrow afternoon so I suppose that I ought to make a start on trying some of these exercises otherwise I won’t ever improve.

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Wednesday 25th January 2023 – AFTER ALL OF …

… the excitement and effort yesterday, I’ve been taking it easy today.

With not going to bed before midnight last night, I decided to ignore the alarms this morning and I stayed in bed until 09:45 this morning. That’s all very well for an odd day here and there but it’s not too good in the long term, that’s for sure, and I really do have to put in more of an effort to crawl out of bed at a more respectable time.

It must have been a really good night for sleeping too because I didn’t go far during on my travels. We were working in a garage during the night. There was a Hillman Imp van there that someone had partially dismantled the rear light unit on the left-hand side. I went to reassemble it. Just then A former friend of mine from school appeared in the distance and was wandering into the garage. He pointed out that he’d had some problems with the vehicle on that corner and had taken the rear light apart to look at the suspension. He found that the hi-fi speaker was missing out of the place where it goes which was accessible through the back of the rear light. I had a look and you could see that there was no speaker there. All the lugs had corroded so it looked as if it had been missing for quite some considerable time.

After a leisurely start to the day I started to edit the radio programme that will (hopefully) be broadcast on Friday. We’ve had another musician go off and play in that great big gig in the sky and that involved some editing of the programme. And surprisingly, it takes longer to edit something that I’ve already done than it does to actually make the programme.

Particularly when I miscalulate yet again (I shall have to take up this idea of more compulsory maths) and end up with 10 seconds short so I have to turn round and do it again.

The cleaner came round this afternoon too for an hour and made the place look much more like home, for which I am grateful. Mind you, it’s the last Wednesday of the month so I have to think about paying her.

Once she’d gone I decided to go and make a start on bringing the shopping in from Caliburn. I decided that that would be the exercise for the next week – a dozen or so trips up and down the stairs carrying a small amount of stuff every time.

However it didn’t work out like that. I bumped into a couple of neighbours and they took it upon themselves to run a shuttle service up to my door, and everything was done before I even had time to lock Caliburn back up again.

It’s like I said, not only is the building and the area so nice, the neighbours are so wonderful too. I can’t understand why anyone would want to leave here.

With a mug of hot chocolate I transcribed the dictaphone notes and yesterday’s details are now on line for your perusal.

Tea tonight was a left-over curry and it was one of the best yet. I definitely have the hang of this now and my own mixture of spices seems to be working.

So now I have a few things to finish off and then i’m off to bed. I have a few important things to do tomorrow too and I have to set the ball rolling about gathering in what I need to pay for this apartment. I’ve already made a few enquiries about getting a workman in to help me with the shower but there’s plenty more to do too.

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Wednesday 11th January 2023 – I’M NOT GOING …

… to tell you what time I left my bed this morning.

One thing that I will tell you is that it wasn’t 07:30, that’s for sure. And another thing that I’ll say is that at least it was still morning.

And it was a better night’s sleep too, without an awful lot of disturbances. One or two nevertheless. I was on the Millfields estate in Nantwich walking around and there was one of the tiny Ford Transit vans parked there. When I went past again the back was open and it was fitted out as a guy probably my age was sleeping in it. We started to have a chat. Someone else came along and joined us. We were talking mainly about politics . The conversation drifted around to John Henry and the Liverpool poets and the “Conservative Government Unemployment Figures” joke which I told incorrectly. They agreed with me that society was in a right mess these days as far as everyone like us was concerned.

And later on I was in Canada in my father’s garage, which was actually the garage of my niece’s husband as well. I was there with this ancient Bedford QL … “actually he means an RL” – ed … They were doing something or other and asked if I had my tools with me. They were in the back of BILL BADGER, my old A60 van. They wandered off and when I went outside to look they had all my tools out everywhere looking for something. I went over, and it turned out that a socket had gone missing. They couldn’t find it. I said that it was a complete tool kit when I assembled it. We started looking over everywhere. I was climbing over this Bedford trying to find it. Someone mentioned something about it. I replied “yes, this was £80, or $120 when I bought it in 1978. It’s still running”. Someone said “I thought you were in that yellow car” meaning the Cortina estate. I replied “yes, that was a bit more expensive, $350 but I thought that I’d give the Bedford a run out in Canada this time”

Once I’d had my medication I had a few things to do in here, such as scanning all of the prescriptions that i’ve received just recently from the doctor and then spent an hour or so tidying up the worst of the apartment so that the cleaner wouldn’t die of fright when she arrived.

While she was here I worked on the radio, trying to choose the music for the next few radio programmes. Not that I organised too many because you’ve no idea just how quickly an hour passes when you are busy.

She was heading into town this afternoon after she’d been here so I gave her one of my prescriptions – the one for the pair of crutches that the doctor wants me to have – and she fetched them back for me. They need adjusting before I can use them so I’ll organise the physiotherapist when he comes tomorrow.

But there is an improvement in the way that I’m moving about which isn’t actually difficult because it surely couldn’t have been much worse. I think that come Friday, if it’s not raining, I’ll try for the shop in the town centre again for my mushrooms and peppers. I’ll have to work out how to use the crutches and pull my shopping trolley along at the same time.

Tea tonight was a curry made of all of the leftovers in the fridge, lengthened by a potato. And it was actually quite nice. Tomorrow I might have a slice of pie with potatoes and veg. I have plenty of potatoes following the delivery of my food order last weekend and they will go off if I don’t use them.

And that reminds me – I have the lettuce to use as well. I mustn’t forget that. But it’s a Batavia and they do keep longer than an Iceberg. And how I wish that I had bought a bigger fridge. We’ll have to see what we can do about that in the future.

Anyway, now I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I’m going to be doing another radio programme in order to keep up with this two per week for the next while until I end up about 6 months ahead. That way, there will be plenty of room for manoeuvre if something happens that I’m not able to prepare any, such as happened when I was in hospital.

There won’t be an 06:00 start though. And there won’t be an 07:30 start either, if recent events are anything to go by.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thursday 31st October 2013 – THE CLEANER …

… came round this morning right on time and was here for about 4 hours. I did what I could to help, but that wasn’t all that much and it was clear that I was in the way and so I skulked off to my little room and stayed there, just occasionally giving advice and assisitance.

I can’t say that I’m too impressed with what she did, to be honest. I was expecting a much more thorough job that this, but she did more in four hours than I would have been able to do in four years and so I can’t complain too much.

The purchaser turned up with a workman later. He wants to have the parquet floor sanded and polished, and needed an estimate. I didn’t have any good reason not to let them in and so in they came. It rather disrupted my plans a little, but that’s what plans are for, of course. And after they went, I cleaned a few of the more obvious places that the cleaner had missed.

There wasn’t much time left after that and so I had tea and called it a night. An early night with a good book is always a good idea every so often.

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