Category Archives: Nerina Hall

Monday 11th April 2016 – IF I’M TOTALLY OUT OF IT TODAY …

… then there is a very good reason for this, because I was well away with the fairies during the night.

“Away” was not the word. I must have crashed out listening to the radio because I awoke at about 01:30, in the middle of the night, to the sound of the Clitheroe Kid.

And I wasn’t alone last night either. I had companions during all of it and I started off with none other than Nerina and my brother. He had a Ford Fiasco which had a luton body on it (don’t ask me how – or why) and he was out and about on his travels when he bumped into me, somewhere on the corner of Edwards Avenue and Edwards Close in Shavington. As we were talking, a police car loomed over the horizon and he beat something of a hasty retreat away from his Fiesta. I asked him why but he didn’t give a convincing reason and in the end I cornered him over the fact that it wasn’t insured. “Don’t you remember that as soon as I got my licence I was planning to go off on that drive across Europe but in the end I had to cancel it. That was because the insurance hadn’t come through”.
So from there we made our way into the company of Nerina who wanted some stuff moving. She didn’t care about how ill I was, and I couldn’t make her understand. We ended up bringing a quad motorcycle down some narrow stairs from an attic, getting it stuck at every turn, and once it was down, off we set. We carried on arguing all the way to where we were going, to Hankelow Hall, to my house in France, and even arguing in some roadside petrol station near Audlem (which was nowhere near Audlem of course) and I’d lost patience long ago.
After a trip down the corridor I was at the seaside. Only a teenager, I was with a group of others and there was a huge storm raging sending spray everywhere and one girl of our party was out running around in it. I went out to bring her inside but I ended up being overwhelmed by the magnificence of it all too and staying out with her. As the storm subsided we went for a walk and ended up taking a short cut through someone else’s garden . I asked her if she knew the people to which she replied that she did. I had no intention of meeting them so I persuaded her to retrace our steps and we were met at the gate by a crowd of people including the fire brigade. Apparently the place had caught fire and so we were asked what we had been doing. I replied with the first thing that came into my head – that we were collecting the pools money – but that was clearly the wrong thing to say because there was some scam going around about the Football Pools and I’d put my foot right in it. Nevertheless, an elderly couple whom I knew saw me with this girl and gave me a “knowing wink”.
And later still, I’d been out with a friend and her husband to a local bar. The husband was quite the worse for wear so she asked me to escort him home. I agreed, provided that she would bring a few bottles back for me to take to my friends. However, outside the bar, husband jumped on a bicycle and despite his wife’s most earnest entreaties, he wouldn’t get off and wobbled off down the street. I grabbed hold of the nearest bike, a kind of Moulton mini-bike with a flat rear tyre and weird handlebars, and shot off after him. But I was so impressed by this bike. Even with a flat rear tyre, the gearing was such that the momentum of going down Vine Tree Avenue took me all the way back up the bank in Chestnut Avenue, and I remember thinking that I shall have to look much more closely at modern bicycles

No wonder that I’m exhausted – but I’m curious to know what Shavington doing featuring in all of this these days.

I slept almost right through to the alarm this morning but it was a slow crawl to the breakfast room. And back here, I crashed out again for an hour straight afterwards. It took me ages to come round sufficiently but the cleaner threw me out of my room at about 11:00. This gave me an opportunity to go to the office to pay for my accommodation. I’ve paid up until Thursday morning because I’ve no idea where I’ll be after then. Will I be detained in hospital or will I be released?

As an aside, the receptionist complimented me on my Flemish. I suppose it must be returning by now but I don’t feel anything like as confident – or as competent – as I think that I ought to be.

I crawled to the supermarket to buy food for lunch and then crawled back here afterwards to eat it and then have another crash-out for a couple of hours. But at 20:00 I staggered out to the fritkot – not feeling very much like it at all but I have to eat and frits are full of fat which, apparently, I must have.

I was in luck at the fritkot – it was the anniversary of the opening of the place and so a medium portion was free. How often does this kind of thing happen to me? I had a struggle to eat them but they all went down and they must have done some good because now it’s 22:00 and I’m still awake.

But not for much longer. I’m off to bed and I’ll see where I end up tomorrow.

0

Wednesday 6th April 2016 – THE BEST-LAID SCHEMES …

… of mice and men gang aft agley, as Rabbie Burns once wrote. And how right he was. I reckoned that I lasted maybe for 5 minutes of my film before crashing out.

I was only awoken three times during the night – once by the usual need to take a stroll down the corridor, the second which was by one of the nurses who wanted to take my temperature, and the third time my a nurse asking me if I was okay. And had my reactions been any quicker, she would have had a pillow in the face as well. GRRRR!

But during the night I’d been looking at old cars for sale. I’d come across a garage that sold classic cars and my eye was caught by a maroon Wolseley 1300 (the same as Nerina used to have, except that hers was Black Tulip) that was for sale at €1,883. But I ended up playing in a rock band once more with Hans and also with a female on drums. We were playing at a concert up on the Chester road, slightly north of the Bluestones traffic lights near Acton (and we’ve been here before) and warming up, we played an impromptu blues number that I made up on the spot, called “I’m the accused”. Of course, the word “accused” is one of the easiest words in the English language to rhyme – there are so many other words that go with it, but it was still impressive that I could write a whole song “off the cuff” while actually performing it. And if I could write music, I’d write it down because I can still remember it even now.

And so the morning came round quick enough and I was soon tucking into breakfast. And with a sweet smile, I was even able to negotiate a second pot of coffee. I then had a shower (which made me feel so much better after yesterday) and a blood sample.

The blood sample wasn’t so easy though. They tried to take it out of the drain in my arm but for some reason that had become blocked. In the end, they had to take out the drain, fit another one in the other arm and take the sample from there.

An hour or so later they were back. “Your blood count is only 7.3, so we need to give you a transfusion today”
“So what was if before I had the transfusion on Monday?”
“6.5”
No wonder I was feeling like death in Givet last weekend.

We then had some amusement with the cleaner too. Doing her best to speak English to me (and I will never ever mock anyone’s attempts to speak a foreign language), she said “you must stay on your bed when I’m cleaning. It’s dangerous when I’m around”
“I know the feeling” I replied. “People often say that it’s dangerous when I’m around too”.

I found some time (although not very much) to start to write up the notes of my Canada 2014 voyage – I really need to get cracking with this – but it ground to a halt at about 15:00 when they came to give me more chemotherapy. This time, they took their time and it was soooooooo slowwwwwwwwwww. The blood came next and that needed to be heated to 41°C so they had a bizarre kind of coil heater machine to do it.

Foolish me should have gone to the bathroom at that moment because the blood transfusion was even slower. It crawled along and wasn’t finally over until 23:00, by which time I was bursting.

It meant that there was no chance whatever of me leaving the hospital today so I’m in for another night. And my neighbour is snoring like a pneumatic road-drill. It looks as if it’s going to be on of THOSE nights.

0

Sunday 27th March 2016 – MY POSTILION HAS BEEN STRUCK BY LIGHTNING

Well, not quite, but round about 16:30 this afternoon, in the middle of a thunderstorm and hailstone fusillade, there was a dull thud, the building shook a little and all of the power went off.

heavy storm clouds north sea zouteland netherlandsI went for a walk a little later and this was what I saw in the distance. Huge massing storm clouds over there, hanging over the North Sea.

In fact, we had heavy storm clouds all over the place and in the distance to the south (remember that Zoutelande is on the north-west coast of the Schelde estuary were some very clear thunder flashes. It is therefore very tempting to suggest that the hotel had been struck by lightning.

ship sailing up schelde estuary zoutelande netherlandsThat wasn’t all that was going on either. I’d been for a walk earlier while the housemaid made up my room, and was lucky enough to see a ship sailing up towards Antwerp, just offshore.

And excuse the lack of focus on the image – the wind was terrific and blowing me around like nobody’s business. This was the best of the images that I took, and that doesn’t say much for the others.

But talking of the housemaid, we had a little chat this morning. And the only language that we had in common was Italian. Imagine that in the Netherlands!

But those storm clouds that we saw gathering off the coast yesterday early evening finally arrived during the night. They hit my little room with such a force that I was immediately woken up, and when I went back to sleep, then half an hour later I was awoken once more.

This accounts for the dreadful night’s sleep that I had last night, and also for the number and variety of my nocturnal rambles. And believe me, there were dozens, quite a few of which didn’t make it to the dictaphone because either I fell straight back to sleep or else by the time that I found the dictaphone, I’d forgotten where I’d been.

Anyway, from what I do remember, I was in XCL, my red Cortina, and back at school (or, rather, a school in France, not my old one). I was an adult by this time and I only went back to school very occasionally, because I was studying Geography and History in my own time, but I would call in to the lessons if ever I was going past the school because I wanted to take the school exams and I needed to make sure that I was in touch with the course. As a result, I didn’t really know any of the children there. One afternoon, I’d bought something – some new seat covers or something for XCL so they needed wrapping. I had my yellow rucksack with me, which had now transformed itself into a school satchel. I’d turned up at the school and I can’t remember now how I had arrived but as I arrived, I remembered that there was something that I wanted. I had to walk all the way back to the car in order to get what it was that I wanted. As I walked out of the class there were all of these kids hanging around the door like you find at a school. It was the afternoon so there was a triple-period, but it was only the final two lessons, a double-period, that were history lessons but I had plans to do something in the period immediately after lunch. As I walked out of the school towards my car, I was singing “Daydream Believer” or, at least, trying to because I couldn’t hit the notes. I was devastated because I was hoping to sing it really well and show these kids a thing or two, but I just couldn’t get the notes.
A little later, I was back playing cricket and our team had unfortunately been skittled out. I was the last batsman remaining and I had to survive the last over so that our team would win. But it was now pitch-black and you couldn’t see a thing, and the bowler was bowling from around the corner behind the wall. All that I could do was to put my bat in the way and hope that that would block the wicket. For the final over, we started to have some friendly banter and the bowler said that he was going to bowl underarm at me. He took up a position about a foot from my wicket ready to bowl. I had to explain to him that he couldn’t do that – it was a no-ball. He could bowl underarm at me as much as he likes and no-one will say a thing, least of all me, but you have to bowl from back at the other crease, 22 yards away, just as you would do for bowling any other kind of ball in a cricket match. But it took me ages to get this to sink into this flaming bowler’s head.
A little later, I was back at work driving my car about and I’d been summoned into the office – it was a Sunday morning – but there had been some war that had gone on and it had been won by we westerners. However, there had been a few bits and pieces of unpleasantness that had come out of it. I needed to go to use the bathroom but for some unknown reason I had forgotten all of the vocabulary so I said what I could remember. This didn’t, for some reason, go down very well so I thought “sod them! I’m doing the best that I can and no-one can do more than that and it’s their look-out if it doesn’t suit”. But it was a bright sunny day and so I went on my motor-bike from the north-west of the city and there had been a heavy rainstorm earlier that day and now everything was flooded out. Now I couldn’t come my usual way into work because of this and at one stage I was riding through a park and on a pavement and then down the wrong way in a one-way street with water up to the axles on the motorbike, following some kind of lorry that was tearing up the roadway in this park. I’d finally arrived at work, and found that my boss had been searching through my drawers for something. He found some of Roxanne’s clothing that I was keeping there and he was proudly displaying it all around. I asked him “is this all yours?” to which he replied with a ribald joke. I said to him that it was Roxanne’s and I would like to have it back so he eventually gave it back to me and I stuck it back in my drawer.
After the next bout of thunderstorms I was back at another place of former employment with someone who was formerly a very good friend of mine. We were visiting the richest farm in the UK, run by the richest UK farmer and his wife. There were some tunnels that had been discovered on this farm and having inspected them, we noticed that they had been lined and that there was electricity going right down there. I immediately thought of a tourist attraction and so I button-holed the woman when I saw her and asked her about them. She replied that the intention was indeed to make them into a tourist attraction and so I wanted to know more? Was it World War II? Was it the Vietnam War? She replied that from what she had been able to find out, they went back to the 5th Century, which immediately suggested the collapse of Roman Britain to me. I was immediately aroused by this and so I intended to be the first person to go down there. I asked her if she knew to where these tunnels led, but she didn’t. However, it was her intention to explore them one of these days, so I immediately pencilled myself in to go and explore these tunnels with her. We would travel miles and I would invite someone from the University – I’m not sure now if I mentioned the OU – to accompany us. To me, it was absolutely marvellous and exciting.
After a very brief return to the arms of Morpheus, I was awake again thanks to the storm. And I can recount that I had been to see the Queen. I’d taken this puppy, which was really the star of it all, although I’m not sure quite why and so we were going to do a stage show with it when the puppy would be presented to the Queen. We were hoping that this puppy would be house-trained and behave itself in view of all of the excitement and not let itself down. This led on to a debate about cleaning. Tourism was still in its infancy and no-one really seemed to know how to clean up a place properly (as if I’m any expert) except for a dustpan and brush. Everyone was hoping that everyone else would prove to be the expert on cleaning up the building.
But the final part of my night-time voyage was easily the most exciting and astonishing. You remember yesterday that I mentioned the navigator whose body is in the Commonwealth War Graves part of the local cemetery? Well, last night, whilst deep in the arms of Morpheus, I set out to find his pilot. The voyage, which started out to be simple enough, took me, and two Ministerial cars and assorted Government officials to a small urban cemetery in the East End of London (where, incidentally, the pilot was not buried and I knew this, yet my journey still took me there) despite the obstruction of a well-known London solicitor who had instructed the two members of his staff who were assisting me not to give me too much help in my enquiries because, as I was later to discover, he was interested in the case from a personal point of view. In fact, being early for a 13:00 appointment, I suddenly made a decision to divert to this small cemetery one more time as I had suddenly made a dramatic realisation. I ended up inspecting the paperwork of an old woman who had just been laid to rest there, and was just about to make an Executive decision (and executive decision is one where if it’s the wrong decision, the person making it is executed) when the alarm went off. And how frustrated was I?

But none of it was wasted because this morning while waiting for the weather to brighten up, I did manage to track down some further information. Flying Officer Angus Peter MacLeod (for it is he), service number 63376, was flying as navigator in Mosquito Night-Fighter II serial HJ935 for pilot, Flight Lieutenant Basil John Brachi when they were lost over the North Sea on 29th January 1944.

And now that I have found out the serial number of the aeroplane, I can tell you even more. The plane took off at 01:15, one of seven from West Raynham in Norfolk on a “Serrate” mission, which was to pick up the radar emissions of the German night-fighters’ “Lichtenstein” equipment, and then follow the emissions to the source (ie the night-fighter) and shoot it down. However, the starboard engine of the Mosquito failed and so Brachi turned for home. A short while later, the port engine failed and so Brachi and MacLeod bailed out. No trace was ever found of Brachi or of the aeroplane, but the body of MacLeod was washed ashore near here on 5th May 1944. And here he lies.

I’ve not done too much today – not even been for my mid-morning (or mid-afternoon) coffee. I didn’t have the courage to go outside very much. Mind you, this weather didn’t encourage me too much.

but I did go out this evening and one of the little restaurants here directed me to the fritkot which is now open. And I had fritjes for tea, just for a change. And tomorrow, the ice-cream parlour in the town opens up. Of course, I shall have to go to give it an official visit.

apart from that, I’ve had a shower today and washed my clothes. And depressingly, I find that I’ve only bought two polo shirts with me, not three. So I’m going to have to stay in this one while the other one dries. Let’s hope that that will be tomorrow.

And I know know why next-door neighbour’s 06:30 alarm didn’t wake me up this morning. The hour has changed, hasn’t it. I didn’t realise until this evening when I thought that it was quite light for 20:00 when i went out for my fritjes. My telephone is automatic, and so is my laptop, so they got on with the job of changing the hour without me knowing anything about it. No wonder I was rather tired this morning.

But now I’m off for an early night because I can’t keep up the pace. Only a few more days now before my second hospital appointment so I hope that they will have some news for me.

0

Tuesday 8th March 2016 – FIRST EXCITING THING …

… to happen today was that my web-host’s server went down. And was down for about three hours in total and so you were all denied the pleasure of reading about my ramblings in the early part of the afternoon.

But that wasn’t what upset me the most about it. What did annoy me was that I had been actually using part of the blog from October, and when it all went down, my work came to a shuddering halt. As I mentioned the other day, the next part of the magnum opus which is the collating of the photos that I took in Canada last year with the relevant notes that I made on the dictaphone – that’s also coupled with the entries that I made on my blog so I needed to cut and paste the relevant sections out of there to correspond with whatever I dictated on the dictaphone. And of course, with the blog being down, that I could not do, and so that was that.

Second exciting thing was that the nurse remembered to come this morning. And as a result, I had my blood test. I’ve had the results too, which show that my blood count has now gone back up to 9.0. “Good news” you might be thinking, but it should be tempered with the fact that I’ve had a blood transfusion with two pochettes of blood in between this one and the last one. It’s going to be much more interesting to see what happens at the blood test next week and see where we have got to.

Third exciting thing was that Nerina came along to visit me again during the night, which certainly makes a change from members of my family. Regardless of anything that might (or might not) have happened in the early 90s, I would prefer her company any day to three or four of the others whom I’ve met recently while I’ve been out and about in the middle of the night.

But it was not she who made her appearance during the early part of the evening, but some others with whom I can well live without. I can’t remember what was happening here now with this first bit but I had nine somethings – was it nine stitches? Nine rows of stitches? But they had to be taken out and while this was going on I was surrounded by a load of people whom I knew – some of whom worked in the OUSA offices. But I do remember in my dream passing out long before we reached the end of what was going on there.
But after the trip down the corridor, the next part was a lot more coherent even if I couldn’t remember the beginning of it. I’d been out for a drive with Nerina, each of us in our own car. Both of them were markIII Cortinas – mine being a lovely pale-green late-model one but Nerina’s was an old 2.0 bronze-coloured one. But I was ill and having difficulty driving mine, having been told not to go too far in it, but that wasn’t likely to stop me. After a while, we came to a petrol station and I was feeling really uncomfortable by this time. Nerina suggested that we swap cars as hers was fitted with power-steering and so it would be easier for me to drive. And so we swapped. The fuel gauge in Nerina’s car wasn’t working so I reckoned that I had better fill it up to make sure that I had enough fuel to make it back home again. I told the girl in charge of the petrol pumps to “fill ‘er up”. But after a few seconds, the counter on the petrol pumps stopped working so she tried with the next one, and the same thing happened. And so on, and on. But anyway, it seemed that Nerina’s car was almost empty so I was filling it right to the top – as much as would go in it. Not that that annoyed me – what was annoying me was that the fuel read-outs on the pumps weren’t working. As you probably know, ever since I started with my taxis in 1979 I’ve always kept fuel records for the vehicles that I’ve used, and I still do so even today with Caliburn. I was telling the girl at the fuel pumps about this and she replied “don’t worry, sir, it’ll all be okay. We’ll work it out somehow”. I was wondering just how she was going to do this with all of this confusion about changing from pump to pump, how much fuel had gone into Nerina’s car and how much it was going to cost me. And then how was she going to prepare a receipt for me with all of the details that I needed to keep up with my records as I usually do. The delay was now starting to get on Nerina’s nerves, and she mentioned that I had only invited her out for half an hour and now I had her doing all of this (and it wouldn’t have been the first time that I had heard this complaint either). And I hadn’t even checked the water in the car yet.

But then downstairs, wait for the nurse, work on the web pages as much as I could, coffee and vegan banana muffins for break, baked beans on toast for lunch and home-made vegan lasagne for tea. I’ve told you before, … "and you’ll tell us again" – ed … if I ever recover from this illness that I have and am fit enough to go back home, I shall immediately find something else that might be wrong with me.

Much as I love my little house and miss it very much, I shall miss Liz’s home cooking even more.

0

Monday 29th February 2016 – LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS AND HIDE THE SILVER!

Especially if you live in Leuven, in Belgium. Because I’ll be off on my travels in early course and Leuven is the destination.

I was on the phone for quite some time this morning, firstly to the hospital at Montlucon clarifying all of the appointments that are organised for the next couple of weeks. And once we had done that, I spent the rest of the morning on the phone to the UZ Leuven in Belgium. I told them a brief story of my medical history, how I was satisfied with neither my treatment nor my progress and, quite surprisingly, the doctor with whom I spoke totally agreed with me. I ought to be doing better than this.

The upshot of this is that he’s agreed to see me in Leuven on 22 March at 14:00. And so I’m going.

What’s even nicer is that my friend Alison who lives a short drive away from Leuven has very kindly offered to put me up for a couple of days while I’m there and let me borrow one of her three cats. I think that that’s a really nice and generous gesture on her part and makes me feel so much better. Terry however clearly reckons that she doesn’t know me all that well.

And not before time too because I had the blood test this morning and the results were ready by teatime.

And it’s grim reading. What started out at 10.4 when I was in hospital and went down to 9.8 and then to 9.0 has now dropped dramatically through the floor to a dismal figure of just 8.0 – that’s a loss of over 12% in a week. And that’s after everything that I’ve been through and all that I’ve suffered over these last couple of months. Nothing has improved, I’ve picked up a pulmonary embolism and I’ve suffered pain like I never knew existed.

And all, apparently, for nothing.

And the thing that galls me the most is that my loss of blood is dramatic to say the least, and there’s not been a peep out of the hospital. I would have thought that this is all becoming urgent, not to mention crucial, and the people at the hospital haven’t shown even the slightest hint of interest at all.

In other news, I’ve had a reply back to my e-mail the other day. They’ve asked for my phone number so they can call me for a chat. Right after I made “other arrangements” for a second opinion. But of course this phone call is probably to tell me that I’ve been sacked or some such. I wouldn’t be surprised.

So having got all of that off my chest, what else has been happening?

We had another night of being careful how we left the bed due to bits of me being all over the floor. Twice in two nights, this.
But back in the arms of Morpheus and I was back off to a lock-up garage somewhere that I didn’t know and in there was some kind of small two-door estate car, dark blue, resembling a late 1960s Toyota or a FIAT 128. I was looking at this along with another person who had some kind of mechanical aspirations. The vehicle had been bought by my brother at an auction for £400, which was a lot of money to pay for such a vehicle, never mind its poor condition, and the person I was with expressed his surprise that my brother hadn’t tried to beat down the vendor to a more realistic price. Anyway, I couldn’t hang about. I was off up to Stoke on Trent, somewhere round about the Waterloo Road (which it wasn’t, but never mind) in a big van that I had at the time. I ended up down a side street in a maze of terraced houses being shown a room that was to let in a terraced house that was being used as a lodging-house. A girl that I knew – someone from my old days in Stoke on Trent – was running the place and so I asked her about it. She said that it was formerly a vet’s office but when it came onto the market it was too good to miss and so she converted it into rooms, with she and her family living in a tiny room right at the top. We went outside, there was a lovely (if that’s the word) view of the street lights and the urban area in the dark of the North-Western Potteries, all of the lights twinkling in what was a very late and clear evening. They say that the best time to see the Potteries is during the hours of darkness during a power cut and the local newspaper once famously described the old railway line that passed through here as “10 miles of the world’s worst scenery”.
But scenery notwithstanding, I’ve now moved on to Brussels (so there really isn’t all that much difference) living in an apartment that was part of a house conversion – what they call a trois pièces en enfilade. It’s not a very pretty apartment but anyway we start off with me not being there. I’m with Nerina up on the huge concrete windswept plateau on the high-rise council estate not too far from the Heysel Stadium and we’re looking over the parapet to some mid-rise (about 10-storey, I dunno) concrete-and-glass tower blocks. There are about dour of them, with a square footprint and they have some kind of reputation of being quite comfortable and pleasant places to live. Nerina was saying that we should have gone to live in a place like that and while I didn’t disagree for a minute, I did say (and quite rightly so) that a place such as that is way outside our budget. But we ended up back at our apartment (or maybe it was mine and she was only visiting) and we started to tidy up the place. There had been a new television delivered and I was idly flicking through the channels when I suddenly found a Morecambe and Wise film – and one which wasn’t part of the Morecambe and Wise trilogy either. And so I sat down to watch it while Nerina sat down at the other end of the apartment to do some painting. At a certain moment she asked me to pass her a bottle of paint of a red colour and so I walked over there to hand it to her, but it was the wrong bottle that I gave her.
Before she had time to say anything about this, the alarm went off and that was that. And despite a reasonable night’s sleep I was thoroughly exhausted. It was all that I could do to stagger downstairs.

At least I didn’t have to wait too long for the nurse to come to take my blood test.

Once everything had been sorted out and we’d had lunch (I had the very last of the curry with some bread) I cracked on with the dictaphone notes and now, there remain just 26 soundfiles to transcribe and we’ll be done. And I can’t wait to finish them off because there’s a lot of other work that has now built up and I need to deal with that too.

For tea we had pasta and sauce and garlic bread, and I’m really going to miss all of this when I go to Leuven – if I ever get there because I went out for a walk just now with Liz and I couldn’t even make 50 metres up the hill outside.

I have therefore cancelled my little trip out on Wednesday to collect Caliburn as I’ll be in no state at all to drive him.

All of this is starting to look very ominous indeed and I am dismayed.

0

Sunday 21st February 2016 – OHH WHAT A BEAUTIFUL MORNING!

As indeed it was too. I crawled downstairs at about 08:00 this morning and opened the door into the kitchen where I met a whole host of shafts of bright sunlight streaming into the room.

You’ve no idea how much that cheered me up today seeing that. It’s just like the first day of Spring and it did remind me very much of that early morning in Labrador in late September – that freezing cold night when I had been sleeping out in the Wilderness in Strider and the sun bursting out over the horizon. That made me feel so much better too!

And I needed cheering up too because I’d had a rather difficult night. Not as far as sleep went – that was just as normal – but the voyage that I was on was one that was very uncomfortable, almost to the point of being distressing. I was working with a group of other people in a laboratory doing some tests on radio-active material. We broke off work to have the office party and I ended up dancing with a young girl, the daughter of one of my female colleagues. Afterwards, we went back to work, carrying on checking these samples for radio-activity. Suddenly, we found one that hadn’t been accounted for. It had been dropped in its watch-glass on the steps of the enclosed booth where we did the tests. This of course was a monumental error as the radio-activity could spread like wildfire, worse than the bubonic plague. As I had instituted this activity and was responsible for the tests, the woman actually carrying out the tasks asked me whether I intended to report the matter and accept the serious consequences. I immediately reported it and there was immediately a plant lock-down. Two women who were in one particular area of the factory were left behind and locked in and we could see, through the glass door, them dying an agonising death as the radio-activity spread across their bodies. The factory and its personnel dispersed but the personnel started to die off. The woman who had been carrying out the tasks went home and her mother who lived there, who was old and feeble, developed the radio-activity. She became seriously ill and her daughter, my colleague, was trying to reassure her and her own daughter (the one with whom I’d been dancing earlier) but kept fainting and collapsing, obviously gravely ill but doing her very best not to let anyone notice. The young girl was really frightened by all of this, hiding behind a door. She had two sons too and they didn’t know what was happening either. As everyone was dying out rapidly and my brother had put in an appearance by this time (what on earth was he doing here?) I asked him if he would go and check on this family to make sure that they were okay. He reckoned that they hadn’t been up to anything so they shouldn’t have any problems, not being aware of the woman’s involvement with the missing sample. I ended up back at home, in bed, and Nerina came round to visit. She had a bed at my house when she stayed the night and tonight, she needed a couple of extra pillows so I told her that she knew where they were. At this moment I noticed that I was starting to become ill. I had a touch of dysentery and thought that this isn’t like me and suddenly the revelation hit me that the radio-activity was now affecting me. I started to panic and wondered just who was going to be left over if even I was starting to succumb. We were all going to die and there would just be this young girl left. What a nightmare she would have, being surrounded by nothing but dead bodies of her family and friends.

No wonder I had an uneasy night with all of this going on. I really was happy to see the sun this morning.

i’ve spent most of the day watching the English cricket team totally humiliated by the South Africans (“just a blip” says the England captain but he’s clearly been watching – and playing in – a different series of matches than everyone else has been watching) and Manchester City bring the FA Cup and the game into disrepute by fielding a weakened team in a 5th Round competition. How I hate foreign footballers and foreign football managers who have no sense of pride and achievement and want to change the game to suit their own requirements.

Apart from that, I’ve finally finished the dictaphone notes for the 2015 trip to Canada. I’ve made a start on the notes of a voyage I made to Central France just before I left and I’m hoping to finish those tomorrow. Then, there will be the Germany trip and before that, the 2014 voyage to Canada.

But it won’t be done tonight as I’m going to have another early night in a bit. And I hope tomorrow will be just as lovely as today was. 16°C outside this afternoon, apparently.

0

Wednesday 10th February 2016 – IT SNOWED TODAY

Great big flakes, the size of dinner plates too! That’s what we had for about half an hour here round about 15:00 or so. It didn’t stick, unfortunately, otherwise it would have been something really impressive, but at least winter is back. That’s bad news for all of the plants that are growing, because one thing that I noticed on my way back from Montlucon the other day is that we have the blossom on the trees. This weather will have put paid to all of that.

We had another visitor too. Liz and Terry have a friend who lives out the other side of Les Ancizes and she passed by this afternoon to say hello. It’s nice to have company every now and again.

Apart from that, I’ve not done too much. I still have pains in my chest and in my side and it’s uncomfortable to sit for too long. Typing is difficult too as the constant movement of my arms and fingers is putting a strain on the muscles that have been injured.

And I’ve also been having to recover from my night-time voyages too. I’m still racking up the miles here and there as I travel about the world, and last night was no different. We started off with some kind of disturbance involving a group of kids going on a rampage in an underground car park, and I was eager to get away from all of this. I hopped into my car, a late-model Series III Hillman Minx, and headed off out of the exit. As I arrived at the end of the exit ramp I noticed that all of these kids were there, blockading the way out, so I did a smart u-turn and went back down again. These kids immediately drew the attention of a passing police car to me and so they all decided to set up an ambush for me. My car was actually quite conspicuous, because it had one of these exaggerated spoilers fitted to the boot – the type of aerodynamic spoiler that was fitted to the very first of the aerodynamic Formula One racing cars. I came out again at a different exit across the road, but was spotted so I had to go back down again. The third time that I tried to leave, it was at a different exit right across at the opposite end of the car park. It was at the top of a bank, at the far end of a surface-level car park which was totally empty so that you had a really good view of the surrounding area. And there was snow and slush just about everywhere. The entrance and exit to this surface car park were controlled by traffic lights which stopped the traffic on the main road. These worked sequentially so it was quite easy to work out the rhythm. This was important as I would only have one opportunity to make good my escape without being blocked in by the police and everyone else. I timed my run down the bank very, very carefully just so that I arrived there just as the lights turned to green which stopped all of the traffic on the main road, and I could squeeze my way out and nip off. By now, my car had transformed itself into an old PB Cresta … "it was actually a PA Cresta" – ed … and I was driving through this snow and slush and black ice and ended up in Tunstall (nothing like Tunstall of course). At the top end of the town was a roundabout with three roads feeding in, and it didn’t matter which road I took, it always brought me back to this roundabout again. On one occasion approaching this roundabout, a cyclist was following me and as driving a car in this kind of weather in Tunstall only meant for slow progress, I was exchanging conversation with this cyclist every time we caught up with each other. At one particular moment we came to a part, just before this roundabout, where the road narrowed. There was a church encroaching into the carriageway. Someone in a BMC 1300 was coming the other way and ended up on my side of the road, blocking the highway. I had a race to see if I could reach this part of the road before he completely blocked it off but we both arrived at the same time. In the end I had to swerve around him on the wrong side of the road and on the wrong side of these bollards to pass him and return to my side of the road. And then, of course, I ended up yet again back at this roundabout.
From here I went off on a sprawling, amazing ramble. I was involved in an incident with a girl but I can’t remember now who she was and what was going on. I liked this girl quite a lot and I’d spent some time trying to establish some kind of rapport with her. It ended up that she had to leave, and this meant going across this bailey bridge or pontoon bridge that was full of Chinese refugees fleeing some kind of attack. All of these people were struggling across this bridge that had been hastily thrown together and she was in a small car of some description, stuck in the middle of this bridge. Someone had given her a crystal ball and so while she was waiting for the crowd to advance, she was admiring this crystal ball. As the crowd began to advance, she slipped this crystal ball into the back pocket of her dress and started her car. At that moment, the crystal ball exploded, for it was really a booby-trapped bomb. From where I was standing, on the bank of the river I could see this pillar of dark brown smoke going up into the air from about where her car was situated. I went home to change my clothes. I’d been scratching myself and I’d scratched the heads off a couple of scabs on my legs and there were a few trails of blood running down my legs. I was intending to write a letter to this girl and I was writing her address on my knees for some reason or other. At this moment, Nerina put in an appearance. She’d been out since yesterday and was only just coming back. I commented upon her arrival, saying that it was quite a coincidence as I’d only been back long enough to write this address on my knees. Nerina replied that lunch would be ready soon, so I explained to her that I had to go out and deliver this letter, so hold up lunch until I came back. I wouldn’t be long. But as I was writing this letter I noticed that they started to lay the table downstairs. And then the food appeared, and of course that wasn’t in my plans at all. But then I noticed that all of my breakfast things were still on a tray in the corner of my room so I needed to take all of them downstairs. I still hadn’t finished this letter and I was becoming more and more annoyed by all of this. Having asked for lunch to be delayed, I was expecting someone to take notice of what I was saying.

Anyway, life is going to be like this for a good few weeks, I reckon. I’m just going to take it easy, not do too much and slowly recover. I have the nurse starting back tomorrow for my blood tests (and how I hope that the situation will at least have stabilised and that I don’t have to have any more transfusions) and so I’m going for an early night. The days of lying in look as if they are well and truly over for the foreseeable future.

0

Friday 22nd January 2016 – MY LITTLE 3D EMPIRE MADE THE NEWS …

… during the night. Someone was using my 3D Characters and settings to make some kind of party-political broadcasts in the real world. He said that he could name ten or so names of people who were up to no good in society. We of course said “such as?”, but when he replied, he named just three names which just goes to show how much rubbish is being spoken today. We can all think of three people without being prompted and he was trying to impress us with his knowledge and … err … exaggeration.
After this, we had Nerina putting in yet another appearance on our nightly voyages. We were still married, still together and we had a small child of about 18 months. We were both in the offices of the European Union doing something there. We had parked the car in the underground car park and we were on level 25, which was well-underground. We had had a good wander around the building and Nerina had gone off for a coffee in the small coffee bar there. I’d had to do something else and ended up being considerably delayed so I had to run like the wind down the stairs into this cafe but couldn’t see Nerina at all. But who was there was one of a family from Shavington (who on earth were they?), one of three boys, who gave me an estimate for the supply of some champagne and I was taken aback by this because it was one of the other brothers who was dealing with this. He was talking to me as if I knew what was going on, which I didn’t really, and anyway I was more interested in where Nerina might be. Suddenly, he clicked. “Ohh yes, it’s my other brother who should have brought you this, isn’t it? But he’s having to drive the tractor because the third brother is ill, so he’s given all of the paperwork to me”. At this moment, Nerina put in her appearance. She’d been in the ladies’, and on coming out she didn’t see me and so went straight off upstairs. I had to separate myself from these boys who were being quite friendly (and I was enjoying them being friendly too) to go off after Nerina. She had come out on the wrong level on the car park, 2 levels further down, and had to walk back up to the car again. When I caught up with her, we got into the car adnd I asked her what the plan was for the evening. She replied that she intended to go out and get drunk. I could see that she was totally fed up about something.Trying to cheer her up, I asked her to tell me exactly what she wanted really to do. “The weekend is yours!”. By now, Nerina had transformed herself into Liz’s daughter Kit. she was really, realy depressed and I felt like saying “why don’t we wait until Friday and you come up north from London and then we’ll go on to your family home in the North-East. I’ll run you back on Sunday evening”. Somehow, though, I couldn’t make the words come out. Anyway, we ended up going to see some friends of mine who ran a junk shop. There were all kinds of things there in the shop, including a set of ancient scales for weighing a baby. Tomake it work, you put the baby on the scales and thenjumped up and down on the floor to make it vibrate. It was something like an amusement ride for the baby so that was what we were doing with ours. Whilst all of this was going on, I was stroking their young black cat – a really friendly black cat. But then I noticed a really large and fresh flea bite on the cat, just above its eye. didn’t want to stay there after seeing that, especially with the baby there. The child wasn’t to happy about having to leave its game, and Ket was unhappy because I wouldn’t tell her why we need to go. And these people were unhappy too because we were having a good time and I especially enjoyed their company.
I was off to Finland later, with a guy from Stoke on Trent who once was a very good friend of mine. We’d been out in the wilderness and come back down the dusty road to rejoin the main road (something like the road junction at the back of Baie Comeau in Quebec where Highway 389 joins Highway 138). We turned left there and a couple of hundred metres further on, we needed to turn right at another major road junction by a fuel station. There was an enormous – and I do mean enormous – traffic queue here turning right as if there was some kind of road accident or other obstruction blocking the way. We were waiting for hours to move and in the end, we became thoroughly fed up and did a U-turn to go the other way. We found some fuel, because we needed it, and then returned to the road junction. Even though we had been away for ages, we found ourselves right behind exactly the same vehicles – a big silver tanker and a caravan come to mind. They hadn’t moved an inch. However, just as we pulled up behind them, the vehicles all started to move off. We turned round the corner and almost immediately had to stop at some traffic lights. We were in the third lane, with the vehicles that were going to be turning left 100 metres further on (it’s drive-on-the-rght in Finland of course). THis was however the wrong lane – we needed to be right over on the right-hand side of the road. I wound down the window on my side (apaprently I was passenger) and put out my right hand to indicate that we intended to pull out and muscle into the traffic on the inside. When the lights changed and everyone started to move off, there was no-one on the inside of us and no car within 50 yards of us. Plenty of room for us, I thought, so I told him to put his foot down and we can go. He was much more timid than that however, saying that there were too many cars. I would have gone, and so would many others, but the result of all of this hesitation was that we lost our place. There wasn’t room for ages and so we ended up sitting there. He wouldn’t carry on to the left either, do a U-turn up the side road and come back to the main road either so we just sat there, our right-hand indicator on, waiting for a space. And of course, the inevitable happened. A car coming up behind us, seeing the green traffic light, put his foot down, not realising what we were doing, and ploughed straight into the back of us.

So that’s enough travelling for one day, in my opinion. And I don’t know where it all came from either because I had a bad night’s sleep too – not going to sleep until very late and being disturbed by all kinds of things. In fact, when I went downstairs, I crashed out, slumped over the kitchen table until the nurse arrived.

Liz and Terry went off to do the shopping after breakfast, and I carried on building my 3D set for my practical work. You may remember that this course requires me to build a 3D bedroom and fit it out as far as is practical to go so that the occupant of the room can be clearly defined by the objects on view. I’ve worked out a stunner, which I’ll show you in due course. I’ve taken 160 snapshots from different camera angles, with the camera in the ceiling and slowly spiralling down to ground level, and what I need now to find is a free mvoie-maker program to turn them all into a short 10-second film. And my ending is a killer, even though I say it myself.

I’d run out of muesli too, so Liz bought me the stuff that I need, for I make my own. Porridge oats,, corn flakes, all bran, sunflower seeds, almonds, dessicated coconut, trail mix and whatever else happens to be around the house. The best way to start the day (if the blood-man comes on time).

After lunch I sat and vegetated for a while. I really don’t remember too much of what happened. I’m clearly not feeling myself these days which is just as well because it’s a disgusting habit anyway. But to bring me round, not only did Liz make a coffee but we had some more vegan Christmas cake too, and I’m all in favour of that.

I was in bed early too – by 20:30 too. Not one of my better days, this one. I’ve so much to do before Wednesday so I beed to get myself into gear. I’m not going to make any progress at all like this.

0

Thursday 21st January 2016 – SO IT WAS NERINA …

… who drew the short straw tonight, coming with me to take a coach party down to the south coast, Worthing or somewhere similar. We stopped the night at a town not too far away, somewhere near Lewes. While we were there, I rang up the hotel on the coast to make all of the arrangements for our arrival, and to find out the directions to the hotel. When I came out of the telephone booth into the bar, there were several giant-sized people in the bar, all professional wrestlers who were handing out promotional gifts. I was given a cigarette lighter (of course, I don’t smoke) but it leaked and I was getting all of the fluid all over me and smelling like a tart’s boudoir. In the end, Nerina sent me to wash my hands so I went into the toilet but all of the sinks were full of baby clothes – someone had filled up all of the sinks and left the clothes in there to soak. This had annoyed everyone in the hotel. I went to someone else’s coach because I knew that he had a kind of tap and hand-washing arrangement on an extendible pipe right by the driver’s seat (it was a left-hand drive coach but the entrance was on the left). I used this to wash off my hands. While I was doing this, other coach drivers came up to ask what I was doing, so I explained. I had difficulty closing off this tap no matter what I did, so the other drivers had a try and they couldn’t do it either, so they started to fill their bottles of drink with it. Coming off the coach I heard some woman talking to one of the coach hostesses talking about exit doors on coaches. She was going on about a particular kind of coach and describing a particular kind of door, to which I interjected that that was a B10M (which, incidentally, is a model of chassis, not a body) but no-one was listening and the hostess was saying that it’s not an E62 like we have. So I said “B10M” again, to just the same amount of notice. And back in the hotel still filthy, still covered in cigarette lighter fluid, and I eventually found a map of how to reach this hotel. It wasn’t where I thought at all but to the west of the town on a headland and fairly easy to reach. There was a big coach park right opposite just by the headland and also a small restaurant close by which was useful because I knew what hotel food was like and I could see me eating out every night if the hotel food was rubbish.
And Maria, having made her rather dramatic entrance onto our stage yesterday, is back for a follow-up appearance. This time however, she was quite seriously ill and had been discharged from her employment at the EU. I was running a business from my home with about three or four people sitting at desks doing things (I can’t remember what now) and so to help out Maria and make sure that her Social Security obligations were met, I offered her a small job at my place. And so she came to work, not doing very much. On one day needed to go to a medical appointment so I offered to take her. “You can’t go like that” she said, indicating my present attire, and nipped off upstairs (I’ve had exactly the same conversation with a friend of mine a couple of months ago, by the way). She came back down again with a pair of denim jeans. “Put these on”. “What size are they?” I enquired, to which she replied that they were 32-inch. Now up until I stopped running in the late 1990s I could fit into 32″ jeans, but even on a nocturnal ramble I knew full well that they would be too small, but I tried them on and found that I actually needed a belt to hold them up, which amazed me. But anyway, off we went to the hospital and on the way, I found that the two of us were holding hands, something that Maria would never ever do in real life (and which parallels, incidentally, something that was going through my mind with another person just before I dropped off to sleep).
Later on, the two of us found ourselves out on the ski slopes. We were fighting our way out through hordes of children up the steps to the three ski-lifts that were there and then I came to a sudden stop. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that on three or four occasions in the past my nocturnal rambles have taken me to a certain ski-run which involves a passage down a narrow valley, a difficult passage through and over some kind of watershed and then a glorious run down another valley which made all of the hard work quite worthwhile (and we even visited it in our red Cortina estate on one occasion during one night) – anyway, this was where I was heading. But I couldn’t remember how to get there now. Looking at the map board, I could see a black run indicated (ski runs are colour coded to give their degree of difficulty and black runs are the most difficult) which I reckoned would be the one that I wanted, but I couldn’t work out how to get there. Maria said that she knew the way but was surprisingly evasive when it came to actually telling me. I was looking for a map to take with me but there wasn’t one available and so I was feeling really disappointed about this as I had really been looking forward to revisiting this ski run.

On that note of disappointment the alarm went off and I came downstairs. And then had a long loooooooooong wait for the nurse to come. He’d forgotten that it was blood test day and was busy doing his rounds elsewhere while I was sitting here starving.

And talking of blood tests, here’s a shock. I have an id and password so I can go to the laboratory’s website any time after 16:30 and pick up my results. And this evening I found that my blood count has NOT gone down. Now there’s a surprise. I wondered why I had not been “summoned to appear at nine o’clock in the forenoon to answer to the aforesaid” at the hospital.

But this brings with it it’s own problem. I mean – this is good news, make no mistake – that if the blood count is down on Monday, I may well be called in on Tuesday, but I’m being admitted to hospital on Wednesday for my operation on Thursday. On Wednesday I’m definitely having a transfusion (I’ve been told that for definite) and it’s likely that on Thursday and Friday they will be carrying on (assuming that I’m still here on Friday). Too much strange blood all at once can provoke a strange reaction and I don’t want one of those while I’m under the knife. I would have been much happier to go in tomorrow regardless.

But apart from that, I’ve had a quiet day in the house doing not very much at all. I’ve not even set foot outside (although Terry took his van for the controle technique – it passed, by the way). There was a huge mega-sale of items on the 3D site that I use so I spent a little money today (and I would have spent a great deal more had I had it to hand) and I pressed on with my 3D Animation course.

The course set us an interesting challenge. We are doing computer-generated 3D animation now (the part of the course that is of most interest to me) and the aim was to produce a bedroom and fit it with items so that the occupant of the room could be clearly identified. I have therefore been scouring www.sharecg.com – the leading free resource community for the 3D program that I use -for items and happily building a bedroom for my K4 character. She now has a bed with teddy bear, a desk with homework scattered about, a chest of drawers with a boom box on it, a wardrobe with clothes hanging in it (it took me hours to do that), a skateboard with helmet and also a pile of clothes scattered about the floor. No prizes for guessing who is the occupant of THAT room.

Apart from that, I’ve had a shower (so that’s me sorted until September) and a change of clothes (ditto) and done badger all else. And ask me if I care.

But I suppose that really, I do care. I can’t go on like this. I’m not looking forward to the operation and I’m looking forward even less to the week or so that will follow. But I need to do something positive and put my life back on the rails. Much as I enjoy being here, I really want to go home and get on with everything.

0

Tuesday 19th January 2016 – TERRY’S HAD ME …

… hard at it today.

Sitting there finishing off our post-prandial coffee, when he announced “let’s go and cut some wood!”.

Terry’s wood is free. The commune of Sauret-Besserve has a huge communal forest and part of the privileges of the commune is that you can have a couple of trees. Each year, you lodge your demand with the mayor and he sends round a forester to inspect the forest. Trees that are condemned are then allocated amongst the villagers who have lodged demands, but they have to cut them down themselves.

Terry works with the neighbour across the road to cut down their wood together, and it’s all stacked in 2-metre lengths in a big pile. So we coupled up Terry’s big trailer to the Jeep and went to fetch a trailer-load.

We then had to unload it, cut it into 40cm lengths, then split it into manageable chunks and stack it in the barn. All in the pouring rain, because it really was wet. I managed an hour or an hour and a half and then I had to come in and sit down. I’m definitely not up to it yet, although it is an improvement from when I last tried to do some work. It really was heavy work lifting all of that wood into the trailer.

Apart from that though, I didn’t do a great deal. I didn’t even do anything on my animation course. I’d had a bad night, en early start and so I was pretty much out of it for quite a while in the morning.

Last night, I didn’t end up going to sleep until late – my guilty conscience must be catching me up. And when I finally did go to sleep, it was a fitful night of restlessness and awakening, punctuated by some more impressive nocturnal rambles.

We started off by featuring once more some of my 3D characters. There was some kind of sports tournament involving them and there are loads and loads of people and other 3D characters watching from the sidelines and most people are dressed in fancy dress. I remember a kind of medieval knight in chain mail and someone else wrapped in what looked like an Argentinian flag.
From here, we moved on to a pub somewhere. It was one of these 1950s type of housing estate pubs, the Greenall Whitley type that you used to see everywhere. At this pub, something had happened and the landlady had to be evicted from the premises. However she’d been to the court and obtained a stay of execution of the eviction. One day, though, she had to leave the pub for some reason or other, and on returning, she found that the brewery had taken possession and locked her out. We had all gathered outside the pub to show our support for the landlady and to try somehow to get her back into her property. This involved my brother, my youngest sister’s husband (them again?) a set of steps and a short ladder. We had to use the steps and the ladder to climb up over the verandah and up into a window on the first floor. It was all down to me of course because they certainly weren’t interested in climbing up, and they were making life extremely difficult for me because they didn’t have the ladder in the right place for me, not being able to find the steps, not putting the steps in the right place. They couldn’t do anything correctly. Anyway,to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … we couldn’t find a way in there and so had to try another route, up and over the porch over the front door and in through the window above. It wasn’t long before the owners of the pub, the brewery, the clients and the new temporary landlord realised what was going on and they all came surging out. This led to a pile of gratuitous insults being hurled and it all became quite offensive and unnecessary. One person in particular was particularly uncooperative and unpleasant and wanted to know who was in charge of our party. I replied that I supposed that I was. He mentioned something about music so I pointed him in the direction of the manager of the rock group in which I played. He asked the manager if our group could quickly learn 12 songs to play for his audience. In principle, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem but there was a big discussion, if not argument, about how safe would the young girl who sang with us be, walking up to these premises on her own by the main road at night with all of the traffic around, would she be able to cross over the street into the pub?
I ended up back on the taxis again after that. We were on a weekend, a Saturday night in fact. Things were starting to wind down a little and another taxi driver came to see me, rather annoyed, wanting to know what one of his regular passengers had been doing in one of my taxis. It was a really good fare to Wigan too. I had a look in our day book and it seemed that it was a fare from a pub called the Farmer’s Arms (there’s one of those at Ravensmoor, near Nantwich). he was annoyed, saying that none of his regular passengers would ever willingly get into a taxi driven by anyone else, however our records showed that it was a call from one of the employees of the pub that had summoned our taxi and we knew no more about it than that. The driver concerned happened to be on duty and we asked him about it, and he confirmed exactly what I had said, without being prompted. The fare had actually come to £37:00, and that was in early-1980s prices too, so I could understand him being quite upset about losing the fare. We smoothed this over anyway and eventually ended up talking about Air Products at Elton and British Salt at Cledford (two places where my father had worked in the past). It seemed that the landlord of this pub had had something to do with Air Products and that was the connection between me and the Farmer’s Arms. It seemed that this taxi driver had given my telephone operator a hard time over this affair and just at this moment she was there in the street (which bore a passing resemblance to Vine Tree Avenue) so he asked me to go over and present his compliments to her and explain that the matter had been resolved. Most unlike taxi-driving in Crewe, this was.
As an aside, I’d said to my taxi driver that I’d see him back here at work tomorrow morning, but he replied that I wouldn’t – he was going to have a day off. So I had had a look at the job sheets for next morning and saw that we had jobs booked in from 06:00 on that morning, meaning that I would be finishing here at 04:00 as we had jobs booked right up until then, and then back out at 06:00 (not that this kind of thing had ever bothered me too much when I really was doing it back then) but I said nothing, and put on a cheerful face about it.
But on the subject of taxis and British Salt, where’s our Leyland Princess? As a matter of fact, I did have one of those at one time. It was near Christmas 1988 and Nerina and I just happened to be at a car auction and a beautiful 1800 Princess, W reg, went through, with a long MoT and 5 months tax for just £270. But it had the wrong driveshaft in it and it kept stripping the hubs (as I was to find out later). In the end, I went down to the scrapyard and dismantled the entire front end of another one and spent a whole day swapping it over. And then it ran fine until the clutch went. But I digress. But last night, the car was in the hands of one of the mechanics at British Salt (and not George either) having some work done on it, and it was now Friday and we still hadn’t had the car back. I went over to the garage there to talk to the guy to see what had happened to it (strangely enough, the garage was almost a reverse image of how it really used to be). I met up with the guy who told me that it was having to have the servo changed and it will be ready some time next week. But it was now Friday and we were always really busy over the weekend and I couldn’t afford to have the car not on the road. I told him that we really needed it – we were rushed off our feet. I couldn’t afford to wait until Monday for it. So this ended up in some kind of dispute.
But from here, another person entered into the story. A Greek girl called Maria with whom I worked when I was in Brussels. Right now, I can’t remember how or why she fitted in to some part of these adventures last night, but she was certainly there.

3D models, taxis and taxi drivers, British Salt, Maria, my brother and brother in law? We’ll be having Godzilla putting in an appearance next.

0

Saturday 16th January 2016 – I’M TRYING TO THINK …

… "always a difficult task" – ed … if I went outside yesterday. And the answer is that I did, briefly, to buy a loaf of bread when the mobile baker came round. That was the sum total of my adventures outside in the snow today.

But there wasn’t much in the way of snow. The promised downpour during the night never came and instead we had maybe half an inch and that didn’t last too long. The gritter finally found its way down here too this morning so at least it’s possible to travel around, if you wanted to.

But no-one wanted to. We all had a day in watching England dispose of the South African Test team in what can only be described as an eventful day’s cricket, and then watching the football. And probably the most exciting Premier League match that I have seen in years – the second half of Aston Villa v Leicester. A game that was played in exactly the fashion of how a good old First Division match of the 1970s would have been played instead of the boring, monotonous garbage that’s served up today where teams will pass the ball all the way back to the goalkeeper from the opponent’s penalty area if it means keeping possession of the ball rather than going on an all-out attacking rampage.

I’ve caught up with the second week of my animation course too. Back right on schedule although I’m the first to admit that I’ve not done the practical work. I don’t have the facilities here to do any of it so I’ll have to wait until I return home, whenever that might be. Furthermore, they make available the animation software that you need, but only for an i-Phone and my phone is a long way from being one of those.

But here’s something amusing. The postie came by this morning and brought three letters, all of which were for me! One was my blood test results and the other two were the long-promised letters from the hospital. I now know what is wrong with me and what they intend to do with me, and I also know that it’s going to be of long durée. so after this operation, I won’t be out of the woods – I’ll just have moved into different woods instead.

But it’s pleasing to know that I don’t have Hepatitis C, I’m not HIV-positive and that there are no traces of alcohol, tobacco or … errr … toxic substances in my blood. Not that there ought to be any of those things of course, but you never know what it is that’s going on when you are being injected with needles at least twice per day and receiving pints of blood from unknown sources.

So having had a nice, restful day, I can tell you about my nice restful night because for once these recent nights I didn’t get up to all that much. I started off doing something with one of the kids characters that I’ve created with the 3D modelling program that I use but I can’t remember what it was and which character it was (it was very likely K4). Anyway, someone (it might have been Cécile or Nerina) came around so see what I was doing but I explained that I don’t like people looking at my work until it’s finished so I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the idea. There was a new release of poses (for those who can’t create their own) for the character but these had to be applied only under certain circumstances. I applied them under all kinds of different circumstances regardless, but the characters came out all very wooden. I was wondering whether this was because I’d applied the poses in the wrong circumstances, or whether something else was going on.
I can’t remember where I was after that but it was Manchester or somewhere like that, at a concert venue below street-level and Man were due to appear. Instead of hanging around waiting for them, I went for a little wander around in the immediate vicinity and found another concert hall almost right next-door and this attracted my attention for a while. Then, returning to my venue, I could hear the music drifting upstairs so I dashed down, just in time to miss the last number! Drat! So I went to buy a beer (I haven’t had a beer in over 25 years, by the way) and there, sitting on a stool behind the counter as if he was supervising the place, was a boy who lived in the same village as me and who was on the same educational path and whom I haven’t seen for probably 40 years. But to buy a beer, you had to queue down a line of trestle tables until you reached the end, which was right up against the wall of the building, but the seats were so close to the trestle table that it as quite a squeeze to come back with your full beer glasses.

What? Me drinking beer? This really is becoming quite nostalgic. I’ll be eating cheese next, you just wait and see.

AND JUST IN CASE YOU ARE WONDERING why your comments on these postings aren’t appearing automatically these days – WordPress (which supplies the technical support for this blog) is being hit badly by another mega-spam-surge and we are being overwhelmed with spam-comments.

I’ve therefore had to delete the “automatic approval” setting for now and approve (or otherwise) all comments manually until the panic dies down. Normal service will (hopefully) be restored in early course (if I can remember how to do it).

Don’t let this hiccup stop you from adding your pearls of wisdom to my remarks.

0

Saturday 9th January 2016 – WE HAD SOMETHING …

… of a minor crisis here today – like waking up and finding a puddle on the floor of the kitchen. First job therefore was to dismantle … "disPERSONtle" – ed … the kitchen unit where the sink was. Sure enough, one of the water pipes was soaking wet.

This meant turning off the water and checking all of the joints. One or two rubber washers inside were rather perished so Terry replaced them all, and then switched the water back on. And sure enough, five minutes later, more water!

After lunch, further inspection revealed that one of the braided tap-hoses seemed to be distorted. It’s not that it ever is so cold in the kitchen that the water would freeze and burst the hose but it didn’t look right at all, and after an exhaustive search, Terry couldn’t find a spare one. So off to Montlucon and Brico Depot (a round trip of 110 kms).

He was back after 40 minutes. Passing by St Eloy, he noticed that the plumber’s was open. It costs twice as much in there as it would in Brico Depot, but it saves on time and on fuel. So crawling back underneath the cupboard, he wielded his spanner and … CRACKKKKK … the bottom of the tap broke off. There was a hairline fracture in it and it was this that was causing all of the problems right from the beginning.

So it was off to Brico Depot anyway, and all that I can say was that it was a good job that Terry didn’t go there before to fetch the hose. That would have been the end.

So now we have a nice new tap which works perfectly.It’s the same design as the ones that I bought for my shower and my sink in the shower room back home, and probably the one that I will buy for my kitchen, whenever that might be ready to need one.

But we needed one to do all of the washing-up after Liz’s glorious meal last night. A basil-flavoured tofu stir-fry with noodles and it was gorgeous too. And I had ice-cream for pudding – after all, I can’t have any more until that is finished.

Talking of finished, I certainly was! When the alarm went off, I switched it off and went back to sleep. It was only a car pulling up outside that woke me bolt-upright. The neighbour’s car, not the nurse’s as it happened, but I didn’t know that at the time and shot down the stairs, missing my footing and falling most of the way to the bottom. And after the nurse went, I crashed out again on the sofa until Liz and Terry came down.

There is a reason for this however, and that is that once again, I’d been off on a couple of mega-rambles. And these were so enthralling that I woke up twice during the night and dictated them immediately into my little machine. And it was only on typing them out that I noticed the first couple of them – I had no recollection of it at all and it does make me wonder what else that I’ve missed.

The first part of all of this concerned a young boy – aged about 11 but looking about 7 or 8. We were back in mid-Victorian times and in a court room. He was charged with stealing a barrel of beer that he and a friend had sat down and drank. While the hearing was taking place, he was in the dock being violently ill everywhere, crawling on his hands and knees on the floor. In the end, the bailiff of the court, someone like John Wayne, sitting on a chair, took this boy onto his lap but the boy carried on being violently ill. In the end, the judge said something like “this is totally insupportable. We can’t possibly continue with the case like this!” This was quite true as it was clear that the boy wasn’t capable of understanding anything whatever of the procedure in his current state.

I then had something going on, involving me and someone else being chased by a dragon. This was something to do with where I was working and although I recall nothing of this and it was a surprise when it appeared on the dictaphone, I did hear myself say, when it had us trapped in a corner, that I wish that this dragon would clear off and let us get on with some real work.

From there, I went on to dealing with some issues of Marianne, who had miraculously come back to life. Nerina and I were looking after her (in the same way that Cecile and I did) and she was living in a duplex apartment, part of which were premises where I was working, on the floor below. I was down there trying to work and trying to do loads of other things too. but to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … Marianne passed on once more, and her body was still in the apartment – it not being possible to find someone who could come and take her away. It was Monday and no-one could come before Thursday. Nerina came back from where she had been and we had a chat, and I wasn’t sure whether I should allow her to share my bed or even stay the night, with all of this confusion going on right now. It was quite late by now and I was ready for bed at this moment, in my jammies and dressing gown. We were having a little cosy chat around the table in my room and suddenly, the door burst open and my boss from a job years ago, an absolute swine, stuck his head around the door, and cleared off again. And Nerina had to clear off as well. I escorted her to her car. Now earlier on in the day, I’d been having trouble with a TV camera – it would show TV programmes if you pressed the correct sequence of buttons but this was such a complicated sequence that I had managed to do it once but never again. ever since, every time that I pressed a button it made the boom arm collapse onto my head or something like that; So after Nerina left, I was out on this car park having yet another play with this camera. And then HE appeared again, brandishing a pink brochure of some kind. “Mr Hall, how DARE you tell the tea-lady that I was going to be here for the St Something-or-other (which implied that he was going to be at a dance that was taking place on that day)?” but my response was that I had said nothing of the kind. “I said that you were going to be here ON that day – a completely different thing altogether!”. He burst out laughing (for a reason only known to him) and said that he would see me about it in the morning. “Be afraid – be very afraid!”. Naturally, I thought that this was totally ridiculous.
We’re a long way from finishing yet. After a trip down the corridor at about 03:40 (having a timer on my dictaphone comes in quite useful) I was back in the arms of Morpheus and this was yet another really bizarre voyage. I could only recall some of it and I wish that I could remember all of the rest. For a start, I wish that I could remember who I was with. It was another young girl, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the much-maligned Percy Penguin (who doesn’t appear in these pages anything like as often as she deserves) but it wasn’t her, however it’s someone else that I’m sure that I know too. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we were in New York and after a major ramble (I couldn’t remember a thing about this ramble when I awoke) but we found ourselves at the tip of Manhattan, in Battery Park (although it’s nothing at all like the real Battery Park) and the park was quite high up, but surrounded by tall buildings, which meant that there was no view of East River, except in one particular place where the building was quite low. We were waiting for a certain ship that was going to dock at a certain quay – Quay 34 if my memory serves me well (as Julie Driscoll once said). This ship displaced 26,000 and a few tonnes which was quite small (such is the logic of these night-time rambles). We had no idea where Quay 34 was but in another astounding fit of nocturnal logic, a small ship would go into a small quay and that would be where this small building would be. Seeing it is one thing – being able to arrive at it was quite another, so we set off in the direction that we thought would bring us there. The idea was to walk all around the edge of Manhattan and hopefully we should arrive at it. A short while into our walk we came to the Deutschlander Tör – the gate that leads into a small Park in Manhattan that had been given in perpetuity to Germany by the USA Government for some act or other – it was not part of the USA but part of Germany. The gates were wrought iron, black and gold, about 4 metres tall and with impressive emblems. Crowds of people were milling around, photographing them, and just as I went to take a photo, a woman directly opposite me went to photograph them from the opposite direction. We would each have included the other in our photos. So we had a smile and a laugh, and I called out “one, two, three” and we took our photos simultaneously. Once we had sorted ourselves out, the girl and I continued our walk into the park. Here, we met up with a coach party, ours of which we were part, in fact, that we had somehow managed to miss during our ramble around the city. They were preparing to leave, but we weren’t. And in any case we weren’t going back with them an the day that they were flying back but staying on and going to Canada. I was looking for the toilet because both of us needed to go. A park guard pointed us in the right direction, indicating a girl in the distance with an orange “Home Depot” plastic bag. The entrance was right by there and he would walk up with us. One of the women from the party offered to come with us as well, and while we were chatting to the guard, this woman was talking over the top of our conversation, saying how inconsiderate some people were, talking loudly while others were trying to have a conversation, the irony of what she was doing having gone completely over her head. And everyone on this coach was urging us to come back as the coach was leaving at 19:30 as they were flying out at 21:00, despite my explanation that we weren’t coming back with them anyway but going on to Montreal (although our proposed route would take us nowhere near Montreal, not that this has ever bothered me in a nocturnal ramble). We eventually arrived where the guard had indicated, and what there was was merely a window sill that everyone was using. I let the girl go first and I went second. But – once again – who on earth was this girl who was so familiar?
Strangely enough, some of the scenery and background, particularly of the bit about the route to Canada, has appeared in a nocturnal voyage a while ago when I had flown to New York and hired a car to take me out into the rural area to the south-west across the Hudson River where I could see the surreal urban landscape of the city and the enormously high elevated highway that would bring me back to the city.
And this isn’t all, either. In the 15 minutes that I dozed back off to sleep after the alarm, I was gone yet again. I was in France, back at my house (although it’s nothing like my house at all) and I decided to go for a bicycle ride along the trails in the woods. I went on the blue and silver racing bike (I really have this, rescued from a house clearance a couple of years ago) which had no brakes and no gears. On a particularly steep bit across the ravine I could see the neighbour’s children having a great deal of fun amusing themselves and looking over at them, I stalled and I just couldn’t get the bike going again no matter how I tried. I pushed the bicycle up the steep hill towards the houses and the shops and there at the top of the steep bit, coming down the hill on a bicycle was a girl aged about 11 or 12 in a tube top kind of outfit, cycling past the houses and the shops. It was at this point that the car pulled up and slammed its door – the real car outside – and I was off downstairs.

And that’s your lot for today – all 2237 words, another new record, and most of which is total rubbish. No wonder it took me so long to type it. I really ought to be charging you to read this rubbish. Don’t forget about the Amazon links aside.

0

Wednesday 6th January 2016 – WE WENT OUT …

… this morning – all the way to Montel de Gelat. and all for no good purpose too.

I’d had to arrange an inspection of a fosse septique – a septic tank on behalf of Terry for some project that Terry had on the go, and this was for this morning at 11:30. And so we duly presented ourselves at the premises.

And waited

And waited.

Terry had forgotten his mobile phone and I didn’t have mine either, so in the end Terry went back home for his phone and the phone number of the person who should be visiting, leaving me in possession of the field for the moment.

It was absolutely taters out there, with a high wind blowing like crazy and I was frozen to the marrow. In fact, I spent my time sitting on a small electric radiator. But I made a friend and had company all the time I was there. A young ginger moggy came across for a stroke and, of course, strokes are second only to food in a cat’s order of importance.

When Terry returned with the necessary, the matter quickly resolved itself. It appears that the former owner lived in the Creuse and so he had the phone number of the Inspector for the Creuse region. To reach the property where we were, you have indeed to leave the Puy-de-Dome and enter the Creuse and turn immediately right, but the land straddles the border of the two departments and the property itself is actually back in the Puy de Dome. I hadn’t seen the postcode of the property until today, and I could see that the postcode began with 63 – the Puy de Dome’s number.

Anyway, the inspector had realised that too this morning. It’s out of his area so he’s not authorised to inspect it. He had left a message on the phone but of course, we didn’t have it with us.

So back here for soup for lunch and then in accordance with my usual agenda, I crashed out on the sofa for an hour or so. And that’s no surprise because I was exhausted after last night’s adventures.

In fact, last night’s voyage was so special and so well-detailed that I sat bolt-upright at about 03:30 to dictate it into my machine. And finding the batteries in there to be flat, I sat down and typed it out then and there, so that I wouldn’t forget it.

I was back in Crewe again, back with Nerina, back running my taxi business and I’d just moved house. I was busy trying to fit the stereo and the chests of drawers and the like all round the walls of one of the rooms in which I was living, but there wasn’t enough room so I was going to have to stack them some how one on top of another. I ended up with one of my huge hi-fi speakers (the ones that I had bought from a guy in Tunstall in 1992) stuck on top of something else in a corner behind the armchair. That would never do but it was the best that I could manage right now. Nerina came home from work in Stockport and told me to stop what I was doing as there was much more to do that was more important. In fact we ended up in West Street with Paul, one of my former drivers, going to the chippy for meat pies and chips. They weren’t particularly generous with the chips so I gave mine to Nerina, who expressed surprise at my generosity where food was involved. “Never mind” I replied. “Here we are in West Street with two more chippies within 100 yards. I’ll buy myself another portion”. So I went into the next chippy for two large portions of chips and gave one of those away to someone, but I was depressed that my “large portion of chips” turned out to be a very tiny portion of chips and a tub of baked beans. We carried on walking past the desolation of the south side of West Street (it was all being demolished at that time) and Nerina told me about a confrontation that she had had with a bailiff. It was over some money allegedly owed in Stockport but she had had a statement from Stockport Metropolitan Council to say that she had overpaid by £0:02. The bailiff accused her of having forged the letter and said that he was going to come round and “sort her out” with threats of physical violence. We ended up on the Elm Drive estate, having added to our entourage the guy who married my younger sister (twice in two nights?) walking back towards town, discussing the merits of the two pubs on the estate, the one on the roundabout (which of course isn’t there) and “the Brunel” (which is actually the Royal Scot but which was a white-stuccoed pub, nothing like the Royal Scot, and the real Brunel Arms is in, would you believe, West Street, where we have just been) down a side street. I said that when I lived in Elm Drive (which I did, for a short while) I went to the pubs out on Sydney Road which was dangerous for coming back because they switched off the street lights and we were always walking into things. Further on down Elm Drive, towards the town end, we went to the home of the girl who answered the telephone, and she joined our little party. We told her that if the phone rang, we didn’t have a car available for half an hour (which was rather pointless as she wouldn’t reach our house to answer the phone before we did). We turned into Middlewich Street and walked down the hill to the railway bridge at the bottom near Henry Street. Here in a triangle of waste land in between the railway line and the new road were a few vehicles parked up of which two interested us. One was a Volvo B10M coach with an Alizee body, M-reg (as in 1994) and carrying the name of a dance troupe, parked up just before the railway bridge in fact, and an old Volkswagen or Mercedes van dark blue with a white top and looking as if it had stood for years. There were crowds of people across the new road, milling around as if they were waiting to get into a night club, so we reckoned that we had better get a move on and get home to do some work – it was already 20:30 and the night was drifting away. But we were then embroiled in a (friendly) dispute about the quickest way to reach home. I was all for the short cut up Meredith Street but each one of us had his own favourite way to go.

And all of this goes to show that it’s nothing to do with Liz’s cooking, despite what I have said recently, because I had nothing whatever to eat yesterday that had any connection whatever with Liz’s culinary delights.

But as an aside, back in the mid-late 1970s (a good few years before I met Nerina) we would indeed go for these mega-rambles around Crewe on a Saturday night. Crewe used to have some really decent pubs (neither of the two pubs mentioned came into this category, by the way) but they were scattered right across the town. We’d inevitably visit three or four, having a quiet pint in each, but most of our time would be spent on foot walking for miles around the town, and a visit to a local chippy en route would be always on the agenda. Good beer, convivial company (there would be three, four or five of us), excellent food (because in those days the chippies in Crewe were really good).

A really good night out. There wouldn’t be the slightest hint of misbehaviour because whatever alcohol we had consumed in one pub, we would walk off with travelling to the next one. And, strangely enough, all of the walking that we were doing would keep us really fit.

Those were the days of innocence really. You couldn’t do it now of course. Firstly, half of the pubs have closed down. Secondly, the chippies have changed ownership and I’ve yet to find a Chinese chippy that can cut and fry chips like an old-fashioned English chippy (although the popularity of Chinese chippies these days shows that I’m clearly in a minority). Thirdly, and sadly, British society has changed for the worse. People no longer know how to drink responsibly. The aim seems to be to drink as much as possible in the shortest space of time and as a result, I’ve seen loads of reports about town-centres being no-go areas after 21:00. Not that I would know too much about that these days, and to be honest I have no intention of finding out.

But why am I becoming all nostalgic? I could understand it if it had been during my waking hours but there’s clearly something happening in my subconscious that’s bringing all of this to the fore.

So having woken up from my snooze this afternoon I made a start on my Animation course but I didn’t get far. I’m not as energetic as I used to be. We had tea and after a while I went off to bed – another early night.

I really can’t last the pace but it’s hardly surprising today. This mega-ramble around Crewe last night has totally worn me out.

0

5th January 2016 – BACK IN HOSPITAL

I told you yesterday that I had been summoned to the day ward today for a blood transfusion, so after at 7:00 am alarm and breakfast, I was off. There wasn’t much on the roads – at least as far as Montlucon – so I was lucky to arrive early and finding yet another good spec for Caliburn, right outside the hospital building.

And I’d remembered to take the second bank card too so that I could stop off at the bank on the way in. And now the Fighting Fund is looking a little healthier.

It was a good job that I arrived earlier at the hospital too because they were … errr … somewhat under pressure. I was lucky in being the first to arrive, for I could have the pick of the chairs in the day ward – right in the corner by the window by the power point. The others weren’t so lucky and to give you some idea of what was going on, our little ward for two people ended up with five of us in it – two on the beds, two in armchairs and one on a trolley. Maybe they REALLY couldn’t have fitted me in yesterday.

Putting the drain in my arm was another complicated manoeuvre that didn’t do me too much good and I can still feel it now.

We did have a stroke of luck though. Just after I arrived, the woman in charge of the kitchens came up to our ward to chat to the staff there just as they were counting heads for lunch. Hearing that I was “difficult”, she came over to chat to me about my vegan diet and, much to my surprise, at lunchtime I ended up with couscous, chards in sauce and a portion of lentil salad. It just goes to show what can be accomplished if you happen to fall in with the correct people.

Another surprising thing was that the blood was already there waiting for me. But it was freezing cold, so to warm it up I had to stick it up my jumper (and I bet that you think that I am joking too – the old traditional methods are much more effective than anything that modern science can come up with). And that meant that by 13:30 I was all done and dusted, and they threw me out.

Not too far though. I had to go up to the ward where I will be confined during my surgery, to pick up a letter from my surgeon. Of course, it goes without saying that it wasn’t ready (half a day is far too short a notice for a civil service secretary) but it did give me an opportunity to spy out the land while I was there. And I’ll tell you something – there are a few nurses up there who can sooth my fevered brow any time they like! There have to be some compensations for being seriously ill.

On the road again, I went round to Amaranthe to pick up some vegan cheese, only to find that it was closed for stocktaking, and to Leader Price to buy some Cheddar for Terry, but was sold out in both the branches that I visited.

I had more luck at the Clinique St Francois where I was finally able to pay my bill for the blood tests. And I’ll tell you what – I’m glad that I’m not having my operation there. The back wall of their clinic is the side wall of the local cemetery. I suppose that it’s quite handy for discreetly disposing of the surgical failures – a quick heave over the wall in the middle of the night – although it must be a discouraging view for the patients in the rooms at the back.

At Pionsat I picked up my outstanding medication, and so I went off to blag my way into the doctor’s for the injections that I need to have done to bolster my immune system (once the spleen goes, I’ll be relying on those to keep me going) but it appears than Bane of Britain has forgotten to bring the prescription with him.

But here’s a thing. Diesel at the Carrefour in Montlucon is currently 104.9 centimes. At the Intermarché in Pionsat, it’s just 99.9. It’s the first time that I’ve ever seen it cheaper there. Of course, I took the opportunity to fuel up – it’s over 100kms round trip to Montlucon and back even if I don’t go anywhere else, and that soon gets through a tank of diesel in Caliburn whose maximum range is about 750 kms or so. It’s a good job that I don’t have Strider here, who is much more thirsty and struggles to do 450 kms.

Back here I crashed out. I wasn’t up to anything at all. No food, no drink – nothing. Just like in the bad old days in mid-November. I had my injection and then crawled off to bed at some ridiculously early hour – even more ridiculous than the 20:00 of late.

Talking of bed, I’ve forgotten to tell you about last night’s adventures. I bet that you were counting your blessings, thinking that you had escaped from it all.

Not so lucky, are you then?

Anyway, last night was yet another night where there was so much going on and yet I can only remember a small amount of it. Going to bed at 20:00 or thereabouts just recently is certainly doing something for me.

We started off back at a house that I clearly recognised, but which I can’t now recall. I’d been somewhere in a car (and I can’t now recall which car) and by the time that I returned, the car was full of rubbish and totally untidy, not an unusual occurrence of course. I needed to empty the car completely before the long-suffering Nerina came back to witness the disorder, and my brother (what’s he doing here again?) came along to give me a pile of gratuitous advice. Nerina did indeed turn up, and sooner than expected too, but her car was in an even worse state than mine although that didn’t deter her from making a few acid comments.
I then moved on to another house where I was living with my family, although I don’t recognise this house at all. It was crammed with people and, furthermore, we’d let a room to three young men, a French guy (someone whom I’ve known for years but who bore more than a passing resemblance to a guy whom I know in Germany), the guy who married my youngest sister and a third guy, who may well have been the brother of the second. This had involved shuffling around the rest of the inhabitants and it was certainly causing a whole pile of confusion. It started off with me having to help a young boy of about 5 years old feed himself but that wasn’t working. He was being difficult about it and so I had to go up to the room where he had been sleeping to fetch something. He was one of the people who had been shuffled around but I had forgotten this, so I barged straight into the room where these other three people were. Back downstairs, by the time this boy had finished his meal, I reckoned that it was time for him to go to bed but he wasn’t convinced. There was only one clock in the house that was anything like reliable, and that was the bedroom where he had been sleeping. So up I went to check and, forgetting about the change of rooms, barged yet again straight into the room where these three guys were, without knocking. I was full of profuse apologies, to which they replied “it’s not a problem – it wasn’t as if we were doing anything”. My response was that knocking was a form of politeness (a comment that has a strange parallel with an event that occurred in “real time” a couple of days ago). Anyway, the young boy was correct – it was only 18:30 and far from being his bed time. It was however dinner time for the grown-ups and all of the family was there tucking in. And a few minutes later we were joined by our friends from upstairs who had to fight their way into the table as our family gives no quarter when it comes to sticking our snouts in the trough.

But all of this is really bizarre. There are several people making little cameo appearances in my night-time rambles. There are some to whom I’ve given no thought whatever for probably the last 45 years (if I ever gave them any thought back then), some people who wouldn’t give me the time of day in real life (and boy, could I tell you some stories about that), some people whose actions on the second plane totally contradict their actions on the first plane, and some people who remain totally true to type no matter on what plane of existence they are.

But never mind. As I have said before, and I’ll say again … "and again and again and again" – ed … my nocturnal rambles are much more exciting that what is going on currently in my real life, and that’s not something to be rejected.

I just wish that it was me doing the casting, choosing the characters who could take part in it. I’d have a much more exciting cast than this current lot (one or two people excepted).

0

Monday 4th January 2016 – SO NOW WE KNOW!

28th January is the day that is set aside for my operation. I need to come into the hospital the day before, at 09:00, so that I can have a major blood transfusion prior to the operation. And I can guess why.

But as for the rest of the details of the operation, my card is marked ne veut pas recevoir des informations – “doesn’t want to have any further information”. Yes, what is going to happen is going to happen regardless of whatever they tell me about it, and if they start to tell me about it, I’ll just spend the next three or four weeks losing sleep worrying. Frankly, I’d prefer to be walking calmly across the car park, to be clouted from behind by a pick-axe handle and wake up to find that the job has been done.

As it is, I’ll be spending at least a week in hospital afterwards while I recover – if I do – and that’s something that ought to worry all of you a great deal because if it does all go wrong, then I’m going to come back and haunt the lot of you. Especially if you are a female reader. I wouldn’t mind putting the willies up quite a few young ladies of the female sex and I have a list already prepared.

We can start with a young lady who has featured on these pages before. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall my mentioning a girl described as “the one that got away” from my evil clutches 20-odd years ago. She’s put in an appearance or two on these pages since then, and there she was again last night. I can’t remember where I was going or what I was doing for the first part of last night’s journey, but she was certainly there and her card will be amongst the first to be marked.
But after a nocturnal ramble down the corridor to the porcelain horse and back into the arms of Morpheus, I had a different partner in crime and I can’t now remember who it was. But whoever it was, we were also in the company of a couple of regulars from the Carry-On team, Sid James and Joan Sims included. We were somewhere up the north -west coast of Spain near the cape, whatever it is called, where one turns into the Bay of Biscay. The cape is a kind of headland that shelters a bay to the north-east and there was a big run-down house overlooking the bay, with a big sandy beach, rather like a cross between the setting in And Then There Were None and the old house in Carry On Regardless. Everyone was planning on going down there for a couple of days so my companion and I decided that we would seed the house with all kinds of practical jokes. This worked in spades and we certainly succeeded in putting the willies up the rest of our company.

From there, I waited for the nurse who was to take the blood sample and then I could have breakfast, followed by a nice hot shower. I must make myself all clean and tidy for the hospital after all.

At Pionsat I went to the pharmacy for the next round of prescriptions and then to the Intermarche for some bread and tomatoes, and then off to my house to inspect the property and see what else was going on. It was cold in my attic too, although not as cold as it might have been.

Back on the road I headed for Montlucon and tracked down the office where I need to go to pay for my blood tests. They’ve sent me a reminder. I didn’t stop and go in because there was nowhere in the vicinity to park and I didn’t have the time to walk any great distance. I went off to the Hospital for my interview with the surgeon and it was really busy – I found possibly the last parking place on the overflow car park.

The surgeon who will be operating on me is only a young girl (which is more an indictment of just how much I have aged than any criticism of her) and we had quite a chat, much of which was in Flemish. There has been quite a commentary on these pages about a certain hospital, the Universiteit Ziekenhuis van Leuven in Flanders – a hospital that has received several good remarks in its favour, and guess where this surgeon did her training? That’s right, the Universiteit Ziekenhuis van Leuven. And so it looks like I’m going to have the best of both worlds. I’m sure that if I ask her nicely, she’ll bring me a plate of fritjes.

In fact, I had quite a chat about my diet with one of the nurses there. She suggested a food hamper too.

In a desperate effort to kill two birds with one stone, I went up to the oncology department to see if they had received my blood results. Apparently not, so they rang up to enquire. Just 7.7, a decline of 0.3 in just 2 days. This is starting to become silly.

I do need to have a blood transfusion, according to them, so I explained about my 100km round trip to the hospital, explaining how it was wearing me out. But to no avail. They couldn’t do me now, sir. I’ll have to come back tomorrow. I went to the Carrefour and did some shopping instead.

We had a minor disaster on the way back. I’m using my Belgian bank account as a kind of fighting fund, but when I went to draw some cash out (there’s a branch here in Montlucon) I found to my dismay that my card expired at the end of December. That’s going to halt me full in my stride, without a doubt. I need to do something about this.

Vegan vegetable lasagne for tea (Liz’s gorgeous cooking is the one positive side of being ill, no doubt about that) and then another early night. I can’t keep it up like I used to, and having to go back to Montlucon means that I need another 07:00 start – never mind 07:45.

I shan’t be sorry when all of this is over, regardless of the outcome.

0