… a lovely afternoon this afternoon in the company of friends, and it’s not very often that I can say that. Or, at least, not often enough.
Back in 1970 when I was 16 I went on a student exchange and ended up in a small village in the Burgundy Hills at the back of Macon, and the poor boy went to stay with my family in the UK.
What with me living a very nomadic existence after that, we lost touch but A CASUAL ENCOUNTER WITH ONE OF HIS RELATIVES rekindled things and we’ve kept in touch ever since.
Anyway, the last few days, they’ve been camping in the area and today, in between all of my medical appointments, we managed to meet up and see each other for the first time for a couple of years.
While I was at dialysis yesterday, he and his wife sent me a photo of themselves outside the building here so they had found where I lived, and they arranged to call here today.
That gave me something to anticipate eagerly last night, because these days there’s not all that much in the way of eager anticipation. I could certainly do with more of it because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.
Especially when I was feeling as ill as I was last night. Apart from the pain in my shoulder, I was feeling quite awful everywhere else and flat-out tired to boot.
Despite finishing my notes early last night, somehow the time evaporated afterwards and it was after 23:00 when I finally crawled into bed, tired out, in agony and totally fed up.
When I awoke, it was 03:30 and once more, I couldn’t go back to sleep no matter how hard I tried. I was all for leaving the bed after an hour or so of trying, but I thought that I’d give it five more minutes.
The next thing that I remember, it was 06:18, eleven minutes before the alarm. I had apparently gone back to sleep at some point. But seeing the time, I thought that I’d better leave the bed quite quickly and claim an “early start”.
After sorting myself out in the bathroom I went for my medication, and then afterwards I spent a very pleasant twenty minutes … "I don’t think" – ed … tidying some more of the kitchen.
Back in here, I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was with some friends again. We went to some kind of luxury hotel for breakfast one morning. The place was crowded and we had a struggle to find a seat. I ended up having to perch between the two seats of my two friends. I went to find some soya milk for my cereal. One of the waitresses said that they had some soya milk and it should be on the table at the back. I looked, but it wasn’t there so she replied that someone must have borrowed it. I walked around the table looking for the soya milk and saw a bottle on someone’s table, but as soon as I started to look at it to see if it was soya milk, the guy grabbed hold of it and put it on the floor between his legs. In the end, I went back to see one of the waitresses. She said that she would try to find me some more. There was no vegan butter either so I had to have my toast with jam on it. But by the time I finally returned to my seat, still without the soya milk, everyone else had been finished but I’d had no coffee, no cereal, no toast or anything. I was perched in between these two seats. I thought to myself that for a five-star hotel, this is absolutely awful. But while we were sitting there, some kind of Reverend or Vicar came up to talk to one of the girls with us. It turned out to be her brother. They were doing something with a car. The Priest or Vicar handed her the keys, saying that their mother had said to just leave it around somewhere and it will all be sorted out but it’ll need the keys for it.
In the past, I’ve stayed in five-star hotels where vegan alternatives don’t exist, and where I’ve met some of the most arrogant people on the planet. I’m much more comfortable and at my ease in steerage than I am up on the First-Class promenade.
Later on, I was talking to a former friend of mine from Stoke-upon-Trent. He was talking about my van, saying that someone had seen me and I was driving too fast, recklessly, all of this kind of thing. He gave some kind of fanciful description of a route that I was supposed to have driven around the town that this other guy had seen. I said that I don’t recognise that at all, and didn’t believe that it was me. He had a really good moan about the state of my van, about how when I first had it, I used to really look after it. I was by this time pretty much fed up because I didn’t recognise the journey that he was talking about, I didn’t recognise the state of the van etc. This kind of thing is really getting on my nerves now.
There’s a long story behind this former friend of mine. One of the nicest, most helpful people on the planet, his character totally changed with the medication that he was obliged to take after a serious motorcycle accident. There were several occasions when I ended up in some quite uncomfortable situations and in the end I had to stop going round there. I had enough of my own problems with which to deal without having to deal with the consequences of someone else’s.
Isabelle the Nurse breezed in, early for once. She was in chat mode once more and we spent a lively five minutes discussing this and that while she saw to my legs, and then she wandered off again, leaving me to make breakfast and to read some more of MIDDLESEX IN BRITISH, ROMAN AND SAXON TIMES.
In the past, I’ve often talked about the Local Government Act of 1888 that eliminated the hundreds, if not thousands of enclaves, counter-enclaves and even counter-counter enclaves of different Counties embedded within the borders of other Counties, speculating that the previous County boundaries an enclaves corresponded in many cases with ancient Bishoprics and Church lands.
Our author tells us that certainly in the case of Middlesex, the County boundary corresponded with the boundary of the Middle Saxons after the defeat of the West Saxons at the Battle of Fethanleah in AD584 but before the subsequent peace treaties in the Seventh Century. He goes on to quote from another author that the origins of these enclaves etc was during the reconversion of Britain to Christianity where "a lord had a parcel of land detached from the main of his estate, but not sufficient for a parish of itself, it was natural for him to endow his newly erected church with the tithe of those disjointed lands.".
This morning, I spent some time tidying up my office, rethreading cables etc, tidying boxes, putting things away and so on. But I’m really disappointed in how long it takes me to do even the simplest thing these days. It’s really depressing. Even picking up a box from the floor these days is almost beyond my capabilities.
After a disgusting drink break, my faithful cleaner appeared and set about today’s task of tidying up everything that I had not been able to do, but she was interrupted by the arrival of my friends.
They are Honda Goldwing owners and members of the Goldwing Owners’ Club. There’s a big annual reunion of the Goldwing Club up at Ouistreham near Caen, so they came from near Macon on the Goldwing to camp around here for a few days to see the area and to visit me before moving on to Ouistreham.
We had a good chat about all kinds of things, which was really nice. I don’t meet people anything like as often as I would like and I hardly talk to anyone these days. We ended up being here for hours drinking coffee and idly chatting.
After they left, I made tea – vegan nuggets, salad and air-fried chips.
Now it’s quite late, as usual, and I’m off to bed. Dialysis tomorrow afternoon, but I have washing to do in the morning which will be exciting. I’ve not had the washing machine going down here yet and I still don’t know where I’m going to put the clothes to dry. But as “It’s A Beautiful Day” once said, IT’LL ALL WORK OUT IN BOOMLAND
It better had, anyway.
But seeing as we have been talking about my student exchange visit, one of my sisters asked me afterwards "does their family say a prayer before they eat their meal like we do over here?"
"Ohh no" I replied. "His mother is a good cook."
For lunch I found a beautiful spot on a butte overlooking a village called Suin.
