Category Archives: dream

Saturday 3rd February 2024 – YOU MIGHT THINK …

… that the fact that I crashed out, and quite definitively too . round about 12:00 for a good couple of hours is indicative of the fact that the anti-potassium stuff isn’t the cause of this overwhelming desire to sleep at some point during the day0

However, I remain (for the moment) unconvinced.

The fact is that with the anti-potassium stuff I’m out like a light with no warning whatsoever and don’t even realise that I’ve been asleep. Today though, I awoke tired and spent most of the morning fighting off wave after wave of sleep.

It’s quite surprising really because it wasn’t as if I was late to bed or anything like that, and the night was nothing like as turbulent as some have been just recently.

For a start, none of my favourite ladies put in an appearance and from that point of view it was a very lonely night.

When the alarm went off I fell out of bed as usual and took my blood pressure. last night’s was an exciting 17.2/12.3. This morning’s was an interesting 18.1/10.7. and that’s after a relaxing night’s sleep. I wonder what it would be if one of the three girls had come and spent some time with me during the night.

Anyway, I wandered off into the kitchen for my medication and do on and then came back in here.

Things weren’t so simple to start off because I was so tired that I could hardly see. But anyway, after a good while, I began to transcribe the dictaphone notes. There was something about some kind of guy who had killed someone. The person had been put inside a coffin but he raided the coffin, took the corpse out and pounded it again. When he died, he was buried but a lot of people found out where he was buried, where his grave was, so they had this competition of throwing rocks at his grave until they unearthed his coffin, then they continued to throw rocks. He had some kind of coffin with special attachments etc and you could see that they had all been exposed and destroyed. It looked as if the top had come off the coffin but they were still pounding it with rocks. Then other people began to enjoy it. There were all kinds of mysteries happening about other coffins. We came to believe that one of the guys who worked for us was involved in this. The coffins that we’d set aside for us had been badly damaged somehow and no-one knew why. I suggested to my friend that perhaps we really ought to buy some more coffins. My friend immediately thought “that’s rather tempting fate, isn’t it with this guy working for us, making our drinks and food etc? Anything is likely to happen to us”.

As you can see, I have some exciting dreams during the night

But somewhere along the line we were dealing with things when past us in the window went a couple of coaches, old Plaxton Supreme Vs or something belonging to a company in the area. I suddenly remembered that what they did was to hire out their coaches to owner-drivers. They had a lovely V-registration (the old “V”) Volvo Plaxton Elite that was available for hire. I thought that next tie I took a private party onto the Continent I ought to think about maybe going to see them and talk to them about hiring the Volvo instead of hiring from Shearings or from the local company that I used in Crewe.

Later on I was with Hawkwind playing bass and we developed a really new number that we worked on. We were practising it and bashing it out. The producer came in. He heard that we were doing this song but said that there was one line that we had to change, one about being in Keele in April. The song might give the idea to people that everything was OK whereas in fact what we want was in the right character for people to know that it’s not OK … fell asleep here … Anyway so we had to change this lyric but when we did we found that it didn’t scan. I had to stop and think, to try to work on the previous line and the line that we’d just invented so as to make them scan. And then they needed to rhyme too and that was going to be quite a task. One of the players in the group who tried to play this line suddenly leant over and fell against the wall. We all then suspected that something else had been put in this coffee, not just chocolate powder, so we had to prepare a sample ready to go to a laboratory so that it could tell us exactly what it is that’s in there

But not that I would ever have ended up playing bass with Hawkwind of course, much as I would have liked to have done, but there’s a story here too. There are several Hawkwind tracks that I play where when I sing them I change one or two words here and there to change a meaning completely.

Sometimes they scan, and sometimes they don’t. I wonder if you could spot which word I would change in MOONGLUM for example.

And then I was with my friend from the Wirral. His life had completely changed. He’d had a divorce and was running some kind of photography place in the USA. He was over here so we met and we chatted about his new life etc. It turned out that it was his birthday so I said that I’d sent him a present. I had little 25-watt solar kits of a panel, a charge controller and one or two other little appliances. I thought that it would be nice to send it to him as a gift. I packed it up – it was much heavier than I expected – and I had to chisel his address out of him once or twice, his new address, but eventually I was given it. I wrote it down on the brown paper of this parcel but it didn’t stand out very well so I had to hunt for a marker pen to write it. Then it was a little indistinct. Anyway I picked it up and went off. We met somewhere on another car park. He felt the parcel and he thought that it was heavy too. I replied “never mind – it’s a little present for you that will come in the post”. Then I had to find a Post Office that was open. That wasn’t easy. I tried 3 or 4 and eventually found one that would accept it and send it off for me

By the time that I’d written all of that it was break time so I went for my coffee and toasted cheese sandwich, with my rock-hard bread. But nevertheless it still tasted quite nice regardless.

While we’re talking about bread … "well, one of us is" – ed … when I came back here afterwards I found that Sean had written to me about it. he thinks that I’m kneading my dough too hard and I ought to ease up and be as gentle as I was cutting that tile last night.

Looking at things, I do have a tendency to fight with my dough, I suppose. Maybe I shall have to pretend that I’m massaging the clavicles of one of my favourite young ladies.

But on the subject of bread, I remember very well my little voyage to Canada in 2012. I’d been writing a book ABOUT LANOUILLER AND BÉCANCOUR’S CHEMIN DU ROY and although the road was started in the 17th Century, you wouldn’t believe (but it’s true) that it’s still not finished.

Consequently I was determined to drive all the way down to the end to see what happens there.

It actually fizzles out into nothing but nearby is a port where there’s an icebreaker-supply ship that goes out through the ice to supply the outlying islands.

And so I turned up at the port and managed to blag my way on board the ship.

It dropped me off at one of the islands with a promise to come back in a couple of days to pick me up again (and apparently, my family and friends had a whip-round to pay the captain to leave me there) and I found a billet there with an old woman.

She made all of the bread for the island and I had an interesting lesson with her. And she used to have a real fight with her dough.

And one day she asked me to go down to the cellar to bring up a small sack of flour
"I can only see 56lb sacks down here" I shouted
"yes, that’s the small one"

When you are only approvisioned for 8 months of the year I suppose that you have to keep a good stock on hand. That’s what we had to do in the Auvergne – stock up with food. We could have half a metre of snow overnight and not be able to go anywhere for several weeks.

But anyway, I asked her what she did for fuel because there wasn’t a single tree on the island and I know all about Québec Hydro electricity prices.
"Everyone waits until the water freezes over then they go over on their skidoos to the mainland to cut down the trees and drag them back"
"Well, if you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look the type to go over the ice on a skidoo"
"I don’t" she replied. "But everyone else does. How do you think that they pay for the bread?"

That’s what I really call “kneading the dough”.

Yes, I learnt a lot, an awful lot on my voyages to the edge of the World. But as Samuel Gurney Cresswell said after a voyage with M’Clure, "A voyage to the High Arctic ought to make anyone a wiser and better man"

But having said that, look what happened on those last few days in 2019 on my final trip up there.

But I digress … "again" – ed …

Back here I began to write up the rest of the notes for my radio programme as best as I could with all of this sleep going on, but I ended up curled up on my chair asleep, despite the coffee. I must be immune to caffeine.

While I was asleep I was on one of the smaller Channel Islands walking down a footpath, behind a group of people who had a couple of young children. They were walking slowly but I couldn’t go past them. When the footpath came to the sea there were two Martello-type lighthouses really close together, one at the end of the island and the other that I imagined was a French one on some small rock in French waters. We walked on with the sea to our right and round a corner we saw that the crescent moon had a planet shining from within the horns of the crescent. I reached for my phone to take a photo but no matter how I tried I couldn’t switch on the camera. I tried for ages to switch it on but to no avail

That’s how deep the sleep was. I was miles away, quite literally too. But how many times have I had this dream about my camera not working? It was night after night after night some time not so long ago

This afternoon I didn’t do very much – just watched the highlights of a couple of football matches from last night and made a start on a little project that I’d been promising to do for a while.

Then I knocked off for an early tea. Burger on a bap with vegan salad and chips. Delicious as usual. My air fryer is really working well and I’m pleased that I decided to buy one.

Tea was early because there was football on the Internet – FALKIRK v TNS In the Scottish Challenge Cup.

Although it’s a Scottish competition clubs from England, Wales and Northern Ireland are invited to compete and TNS have fought their way all the way to the semi-finals

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … I’m no fan of TNS, and for several reasons too, but when they are flying the flag for the Land of my Grandmother (and mine) on foreign soil, they’ll receive all the support that I can give them

But what if they were playing a team from Canada? Having a grandmother from each country would make life rather complicated.

Anyway, I’m not going to tell you the score of the game. I’ve posted a link to the match and if you want to see how it ended, you’ll just have to watch it.

So now that I’ve finished my notes, I have to start work.

There are three lots of radio programmes that need to be dictated and that’ll take a while. But as Hamfast Gamgee said, "It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish" so I’d better get a move on.

After all, as Mona Lott said in “It’s That Man Again”, "It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going"

However I always remember a character in the old 1950s radio programme “Dragnet” say "It’s no crime to get lost" and so I will.

Goodnight.

Friday 2nd February 2024 – JUST FOR A …

… change, I’ve had a very quiet day today, with little in the way of interruptions.

In fact, apart from my cleaner coming in to bring me my mushrooms and to start this extra hour per week on deep-cleaning the place, that’s been about it

There were however two telephone calls from the hospital. One was asking why they hadn’t had the blood test results. Had I had the blood test and did I have them.

The answer to both questions was of course “yes” so I sent them off to them

The second conversation was much more useful. “You don’t need to take this anti-potassium stuff”. That’s what I call good news. I hated that stuff and the effect that it had on me.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … office after I’d finished last night’s notes, taken my blood pressure, had the night’s medication and so on I came back in here and played the guitar.

Bashing out quite a few tunes it was quite late when I finally crawled into bed.

No-one around to awaken me either. Just Billy Cotton on the alarm as usual and that was that.

Just after I’d finished my medication and stuff like that my cleaner stuck her head in the door (I’d forgotten about this one). Was it just mushrooms and what about the anti-potassium stuff? Has the new prescription arrived?”

“Yes and no”.

So she went off to do her work and to the shops on her way back home and I came in here.

Then I went back out again. I’d forgotten that I hadn’t made the weekend’s bread so I had a very pleasant hour or two making some bread rolls.

But once again, no danger of the dough rising very much. You can use these things for cannonballs they are so heavy. Bread is supposed to be light and airy and I’ve no idea where I’m going wrong but no matter what I do, the dough doesn’t seem to want to rise.

But still, the toasted cheese sandwich was very nice even if it was rather heavy on the stomach.

Then I came in here to transcribe the dictaphone notes, of which there were more than just a few. I was married and had a little cottage somewhere with my wife. We were both young. It was in rural France somewhere, in the depths of it. Just a little further down the road was another house that was quite old and had been abandoned. A single woman had bought it. She seemed to be slowly doing up the inside of the house although the outside of the house was a total mess and swamp. You needed wellingtons any time of the year to go to her front door. One day she came over and told us that the inside of the house was finished and was ready to start work on the outside, which would be good news for everyone. A short while later I needed to know something so I thought that I’d go over and ask her. I waded my way through the swamp and went to the front door. I knocked on it and when she opened the front door I noticed that all the inside was a total mess again. It was still far from finished. This went on, that every time she came over to out house and told us how her house was going on, it was finished inside. Every time I went over there it wasn’t. On one occasion she had some post for me and was going to hand it to me. I made sure that I stood away from the door so that she’d have to come out. She did, and handed me three envelopes. She’d crossed off the address on the front and scrawled our address on the back in black biro but in huge untidy letters. I thanked her and left. This was something that was totally bewildering me and my wife – why it was that every time she came over to us her house was finished yet when we went over there it wasn’t. It was as if there was some kind of magic or mysterious power gripping everything that was causing all this problem and her house was somehow possessed, or maybe she was.

People using magical or mystical powers during my dreams is exciting, that’s for sure

Back into this dream later. For some reason I received a message on my telephone. Instead of the usual telephone message it was another message alert sound that went off with the Monty Python “what is it, my good man? Do you have a message for me” sound. That bewildered me. We seem to have made it into some kind of big time with my guitar and her violin. My wife and I made it onto this folk circuit that was managed by this guy who used to do festivals. It looked as if the two of us would be doing festivals every summer which was very good news indeed. But we were still puzzled by this message that went off first thing after I’d gone back to sleep just now

And when the World is ready to hear it and the Statute of Limitations clicks in, I’ll tell you all a story about that

And while we’re on the subject of stories … "well, one of us is" – ed … that story that I told yesterday about the Byrds and SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO. It seems that I’m not the only one who likes the album.

Grahame sent me a “thumbs up” for mentioning it. I’m glad that it’s on your playlist too. It really is a most extraordinary album and well worth a listen

If anyone else wants to write to me, please feel free to do so. There’s a “contact me” button on the bottom right. Just be aware that if you’re writing to me on a Gmail address then it will be STRAWBERRY MOOSE replying to you.

Another reminder that, if you haven’t read the notice in the sidebar to the right, I’m an Amazon Affiliate. If you click on one of the Amazon links in these pages and subsequently order something via that link, I receive a small commission from Amazon. It doesn’t affect your purchase price but the commission helps me pay some of the costs of hosting these pages so it’s quite welcome.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed a friend and I were working on someone’s house. We were tiling the work surface in the bathroom. He’d already made a start but was having a lot of trouble. When I came to join in to carry on I looked at what he was doing and asked him if he’d started from the back or started from the front. He said that he’d started from the back so I told him that normally you’d start from the front and work backwards. After some complainin ghe took up what he’d put down already and made a start. I had to cut a tile so I used the small angle grinder with a cutting disc on it. Someone else came over to me and asked how good I was at cutting tiles. I said that I could cut L-shaped bits out but I wasn’t any good at any fancy work. Anyway he brought a tile to me and asked me if I’d cut a piece out of it so that it would fit around the sink somewhere in another job that was being done in the house. I said “fair enough” and cut out this piece and it actually worked.

Can you imagine it? me with a delicate touch with an angle grinder? I ask you!

Finally, in our building we had a bunch of kitchen assistants who were a really good laugh. We also had a colleague who was extremely tight with his money. He’d pick up the offcuts of carpet that we’d sold and sell them, and at strange prices like €19.83 or €20.41, something like that and I’ve no idea why. I’d been away from work for a while on holiday. I’d come back and it was break-time, and I’d found myself in the lift with this guy so we went down together. When we reached the bottom the door wouldn’t open. Jokingly I told him “well perhaps we’re out of linoleum and it’s €12:43 so that we can leave”. We heard someone at the other side of the door so we shouted “go on! Get this goddam door open!” in a voice of, like, impatience. Eventually the door opened and it was the two cleaners. In a kind-of mock anger one of them said “trust it to be you to give grief to people who are trying to solve questions about your sport and have them correct” so we made up and she asked me how my holiday went.

It wasn’t the kitchen staff with whom we had the best time. It was the staff in charge of dealing with the rubbish. They were a good bunch of guys and we always had a laugh and a joke with them.

They would always let us look through the skips and on one occasion I salvaged a complete computer and monitor that had been binned.

When I brought it home and got it to work I found to my delight that the operating system was GEM – Graphics Environment Manager, the forerunner to Windows. One of the languages in which I’d learnt to program was GEM (T223, anyone?) so I had loads of fun playing around with it

But that was all a long time ago of course.

This afternoon passed so quickly and I can’t think why. I wrote out most of the notes for the next radio programme and there are only a couple to do now, but I can’t think where the rest of the afternoon went.

But I’ll tell you where it didn’t go. No anti-potassium stuff so despite feeling tired, I haven’t crashed out today. And that’s a novelty. I wonder if I can keep that up or is it just luck and there’s another medication causing the problem.

Tea was air-fried chips with vegan salad and the last of that pile of vegan nuggets from Noz. The freezer is emptying rapidly now and I really do need to think long and hard about making burgers, baking pies and the like. I reckon that it’s time.

Then after a quite chat with Liz and a write-up of my notes I’m ready for bed. And quite right too. I’ve had far too many late nights just recently and I’m beginning to get a stiff neck.

It’s not because I’m sitting in a draught or anything like that. It might be in anticipation of one of my favourite visitors during the night and I haven’t swallowed the Viagra quickly enough

Thursday 1st February 2024 – I HAD A …

… visitor last night.

There I was, tucked well up under the bedclothes but in my head I could see my bedroom door

And then in came Zero

Whether or not I was dreaming, or whether or not I was hallucinating after taking another dose of that horrible sand-like medicine I really don’t know. It could have been either, I suppose

All that I could say is that it wasn’t for real. And isn’t that a shame?

It’s been a while since she put in an appearance. Apart from Castor who featured in a little voyage, the first for quite a while, a couple of weeks ago, my three favourite young ladies seemed to have fallen out of the picture.

Several others, such as The Vanilla Queen, have long ago dropped off the edge of whatever it is that goes on at night and I really would be disappointed if Castor, TOTGA and Zero were to go the same way, so it’s really nice to see Zero back in the fold again.

But while we’re on the subject of last night … "well, one of us is" – ed … instead of the nice early night that I promised myself, I ended up spending almost an hour cleaning the heads of a printer. How long should it take to print a medical prescription of one page of A4?

Having crashed out well and proper after tea, I was already running far later than I intended and that was the last thing that I needed.

And so in bed there I was and my mind was a-roving like it does. I was at work and one of my colleagues, a big aggressive guy, was complaining about one of our other colleagues who would never come when he was called. You had always to go to fetch him and he never seemed to be awake. This guy said “he’ll soon be awake in a minute. I’m going to sort him out”. He strode off down to the other end of the office. All of a sudden I heard my alarm go off and the strident tones of Billy Cotton, minus Band Show, shouting “WAYKEY WAY …… KAY!” followed by the opening bars of “Somebody Stole My Gal” just like he used to do on the radio when we were kids. I thought to myself “God! It’s not me he’s talking about, is it?”.

Yes, that’s my alarm call in the morning. I used to have David Bowie and WAKE UP LITTLE SLEEPY-HEAD but I’d sleep through that. No danger of anyone sleeping through Billy Cotton – not even my neighbours.

So having discovered that that was actually a dream, I fell out of bed and went for the blood pressure machine. A mere 17.8/12.7 this morning, compared to 17.6/10.1 last night. Obviously Billy Cotton gives me quite a jolt in the morning.

Mind you, having said that, I took last night’s blood pressure before I had the printer issues. I wonder what it would have been like afterwards.

In the kitchen, I had the medication – the last of this SODIUM POLYSTYRENE SULPHIDE and it really does say “polystyrene” on the label.

Last night I sent a mail to the hospital to say that if they wanted me to continue to use it they would have to send a repeat prescription, but they haven’t so it looks for the moment as if that’s it.

So it will be interesting to see if that’s the drug that’s causing me all these problems, or whether it’s one of the other new ones.

But on the other hand, thanks to my poor cleaner, there’s another new medication to start taking tomorrow, so that’s bound to stir up the deck a little.

Back in here I transcribed the dictaphone notes from last night, because there was more than just Zero and a rude awakening. There was another long dream that seemed to go on for ever about me playing bass in a band. We were supporting Hawkwind. A little later on I’d had my illness and Hawkwind held a benefit concert for me. Things were slowly deteriorating and I’d been called back to the hospital again. They were to review all of my medication and change some of it. That didn’t bother me because it’s not the first time. When I went back in there was a football match on TV. I was back in at a certain time but they were running hours late so I had to amuse myself during this particular time. On the TV was a football match between Crewe Alexandra against someone. It was a match that I really wanted to see. Crewe played really well and in the end won 3-1. It was extremely important because it kept their place alive in the promotion. Then it was one of these films in black and white, cowboys from the 1930s and 40s with John Wayne, but first a film that actually went back further than that to the date of American independence about them being in forts and travelling from one fort to the next. I really can’t remember much more than this about this dream but it went on for ever.

We also has the European Union launching a space rocket. We were involved in the final preparations for its departure. There was no actual countdown as such which surprised us completely because everyone would like to know how long they have to do various jobs. We were working away and occasionally a voice would announce “20 minutes to blast-off” or something but there was no clock, no person giving the time and we had no idea what was happening. In the end we had everything ready and were waiting for the astronauts. Of course one of them had to use the bathroom, didn’t he? That was when the timing became critical. he really had to rush and even the person who said “10 seconds to blast-off” made some kind of remark. In the end he must have been back because ignition took place on time and the rocket left.

On the subject of rockets, the British had a space rocket at one time and it was called “The Civil Servant”. When asked why it was given the name, a Government spokesman replied "it costs the country a fortune, it won’t work and we can’t fire it"

Somewhere along the line there was a young girl who somehow managed to fall into a lake. There were two of us walking through the park talking and we dived in, rescued her and put her back on land. We just carried on walking and didn’t think anything of it. A week or so later Nerina was talking about a colleague of hers who worked at the Council who had been fired because he’d been messing up all the street names. For example, Edleston Road in Crewe he’d now changed to Market Street but Market Street was somewhere else in the town. It was all starting to become crazy. In the end he was fired. Nerina told me a story about how he was painting the yellow lines marking the edge of pavements in the wrong place. On one occasion he’d put them so wrong at a lake that a girl had fallen in and two men had rescued her. I told her that that was us, me and the other person. She was totally surprised about that. She had no idea that I’d dived into the water to save someone.

This reminds me of a time when Nerina saved me from drowning when I once fell into a lake. When her friends asked her how, she replied "Simple. I took my foot off his head".

There was much more to what went on during the night, by the way, but you really don’t want to know about it, especially if you are eating your meal right now

After my nice strong black coffee and slice of bread pudding I attacked the Isle of Wight Festival 1968.

Much to my surprise, not only did I manage to track down tons of obscure material by many of the obscure bands that was there, I even found, embedded in a documentary, an elusive 40-second piece of music, the only known recording of the only known concert appearance by a group the basis of which went on to be “Queen”.

You’ve no idea how difficult that was to tease out of its setting, not being helped by being interrupted by my cleaner who brought me another lot of medication.

There was nothing whatever by the group that opened the Festival, an obscure isle of Wight band that didn’t last long and disappeared without trace long before portable home taping. However I found the name of the band’s guitarist and even found a short guitar piece that he played as an advert for a local pub on the island. So that’s in the mix too.

And then I found a major issue. Even though the Festival was officially advertised for the Saturday and Sunday, there were two bands that played on the Friday night to the assembled campers there so I can’t really say that the Festival started on the Saturday morning.

That means that what I’ve done so far will have to wait for another … gulp … five years.

So instead I began to prepare another programme for the missing date. I’ve chosen all of the music for it and even paired some of it off. I would have done even more except that, once more, I was out like a light with no warning whatsoever at about 17:00 and didn’t come round until 18:48 – and then I was in no fit state to do anything for a while.

Tea tonight was different. I have tons of tinned food around the place that I bought when I first moved in here as a kind of emergency reserve if I can’t manage to go out due to illness. It’s now becoming rather well out-of-date so tonight I made myself pasta with a tinned kind-of complement to a dish of couscous and meat.

Of course it wasn’t that simple. I friend some onion and garlic with herbs and spices and then added the couscous vegetables with some tomato sauce before I tipped it into the saucepan with the pasta.

There are chickpeas in the mix so there is some protein going in.

As I use up the tinned stuff I’ll be replacing it with more modern in-date food, but the stuff that I bought from Noz is irreplaceable of course so I don’t know what I’ll do about that.

So with no printer to worry about tonight (as yet – the night is young) and still over an hour to bedtime I’m going to have a bash on the guitar.

Over the last day or two I’ve been having fun with Tom Petty’s version of the Byrds’ version of Bob Dylan’s YOU AIN’T GOIN’ NOWHERE. I thought that the title was somehow appropriate given my state of health these days

“Strap yourself to a tree with roots” as the song goes, but I can’t even go outside to find a blasted oak, never mind a flaming beech.

But leaving that aside, the arrival of country musician Gram Parsons to the Byrds could have been a total disaster and could have completely ruined the band but instead they produced ONE OF THE FINEST ALBUMS OF 1968, which says a lot considering how many fine albums there were that year.

It brings back many happy memories for me singing IN SOUTH CAROLINA THERE ARE MANY TALL PINES as I was driving down through the tall pines of South Carolina in 2005 on my way to Rhys’s wedding.

"But now when I’m lonesome, I always pretend
That I’m getting the feel of hickory wind"

And wouldn’t it be nice to have the feel of hickory wind right now? But if I play my cards right I might not be lonely. Having had Zero through the door last night, whose turn is it tonight?

Knowing my luck, I can guess. It won’t be TOTGA or Castor. But as they used to say, you have to take things as you find them and make the best of it. "In the morning counsels are best, and night changes many thoughts" as Théoden said.

Wednesday 31st January 2024 – AS I SAID …

… yesterday … "and on many other occasions too" – ed … it’s the yoghurt – especially the soya yoghurt – that makes all the difference between a good curry and a really good curry.

So thanks to my long-suffering cleaner who raided the shops yesterday I had an absolutely wonderful leftover curry for tea tonight

The naan bread was cooked to perfection too so I had a wonderful meal and I just wish that there had been more of it

But in case you are thinking of going to emulate it (you should have done that beforehand but not while the train is standing in the station) you don’t actually cook the yoghurt. Just add it in right near the end of the cooking and stir it well in.

And then with a bit of luck you’ll have a curry that’s as good as mine.

Wouldn’t it be nice though if I could have a sleep as good as that though?

What might help would be if I actually went to bed at the proper time instead of being waylaid and distracted by other events. Going to bed after midnight and letting it all hang out when I have to be up at 07:00 is not doing me much good at all.

Especially as I have my nocturnal rambles with which to deal.

It didn’t tale long to start a-rambling last night. A mere 20 minutes from going to bed in fact. I’d just come back after being away for ages so I was looking for a job. Someone said that there was a job going in their department, in the accounts department of a big company. They gave me the details of how to go. When I arrived I found that they were also recruiting for a musician or someone with musical abilities. I happened to notice the person for that so I spoke to him about it. Then I went and this person brought out the application forms for me but said that the woman who was interviewing was actually free at the moment and would I like to go in? I went in and went upstairs and there she was, busy showing a couple of people around, one girl whom I knew and a couple of youngish girls. They were apparently taking an exam and so was going to invigilate while she was working. She had to have these young girls settled. She mentioned something about there being an extra place so I mentioned my friend the musician. It was an interesting situation but somehow I didn’t manage to speak to her. She was far too busy doing this kind of thing.

Later on I found myself at the hospital being treated for one of my regular visits. I had to go to another hospital so they had to help me down all the stairs into the basement where the vehicles pulled up where I could climb into another vehicle that would take me off to the second hospital. I was struggling down the stairs. She was asking questions about my blood pressure, my medicaments etc, all this kind of thing. I answered honestly that occasionally I had a great deal of problems to go downstairs etc so she asked me would it not be better to go to either Caen or Rennes for my treatment instead of coming to Paris. I replied that certainly going to Caen or Rennes would be a lot less stressful for me. Looking at my blood pressure figures I could do with a lot less stress in my life.

And that’s certainly true too. The figures for last night and this morning were 18.1/10.7 and 17.7/10.7. It’s not me having a heart attack though, it’s the hospital

But seriously, when I go back for my report on 14th February I can see that being offered to me, a change of hospital. And I’ll probably accept it too. It must be costing the Social Security a fortune to send me to Paris and sooner or later they’ll become fed up of paying.

Later still, there I was in hospital going through my e-mails and I’d been swamped with stuff from the hospital. Apparently I wasn’t the only one because someone else in the ward was complaining about it too. In the end one of the people caring for the ward turned round to the person in charge and asked “is it OK if she who is responsible for deleting all these messages?”. “Yes,” he replied. “That’s OK” with the obvious inference that the Moderator of whatever group this messages came from at this moment was a woman. That was probably something extremely surprising given the nature of the forum. Anyway he announced that other people could delete these messages if they really liked so everyone else got on with the job

So no nice young ladies of any description last night to sooth my fevered brow. If that’s not a real disappointment I don’t know what is

So when the alarm went off this morning I fell out of bed and took my blood pressure, and then went off to the bathroom to wash my shorts.

Since I had to call my cleaner to my bedside the other night I’ve taken to wearing something in bed just in case it happens again. I don’t want to give her a heart attack now, do I?

Then it was off to the kitchen for my morning cocktail of medication and that ghastly anti-potassium stuff.

The nurse came round a little later. It was Isabelle today and at least I was awake when she called – not like last week with Yoan where I was dead to the World.

She was telling me that this year there are 42 official floats for Carnaval, and probably twice that number of unofficial ones.

Granville is, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, home to one of Europe’s largest carnivals. It’s certainly the biggest in France and it’s taking place next weekend.

It’s all quite satirical and takes the mickey out of all kinds of officialdom. My nurse’s float is complaining about all of the concreting that’s taking place in the green spaces of the town and they’ll all be dressed as elves apparently.

So she took a blood sample – painlessly and with no effort – injected me with another Injection of Last Resort and then cleared off.

Once she’d gone I came in here and transcribed the dictaphone notes.

Having finished that I stopped for coffee and bread pudding, and then started work.

And by the time that I’d finished I’d chosen all of the music for my Hawkfest, paired it off and written the notes. I’ve also a good idea what the missing track will be and I’ve written well over half of the speech for that.

It’s quite handy knowing how long everything will be. I’ve worked out that the way that I dictate, 300 characters of text is equal to 17 seconds of speech so that gives me a rough idea of how things are going.

Mind you, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, we have had some spectacular failures in the past, mainly because I’m rubbish at maths

Now that the Centre de Re-education is finished, my cleaner came round today and began to shovel out the … errr … rubbish. This place was in a real mess.

It’s not that I’ve deliberately let it end up like it was but I don’t have any option because I can’t physically do things myself. I really am a wreck these days, you wouldn’t believe. All the people who saw me over the summer and early autumn will be horrified to see me now.

Tea tonight was, as I said, a leftover curry and it really was one of these absolutely delicious ones. It needed to be lengthened because there wasn’t enough but a couple of tiny potatoes did the trick there

So having crashed out once tonight typing out my notes (yes, only once for all day too! I must be improving!) I’ll clear off to bed, I reckon.

Tomorrow I’ll start chasing up stuff for the first Isle of Wight festival. That took place in 1968 and was nothing at all as big as what happened in subsequent years.

There were plenty of obscure bands that played there and they have taken some tracking down. Tracking down their music will be harder still.

But I’m not going to do it now. I’m going to bed. And with my day planned for me with this Isle of Wight business, who will come along and interrupt me?

The hospital has already rung me twice. Could I change Medicament X for Medicament Y if we send you a prescription.

That was before they had the blood test results too, so once they see them and absorb the contents I can expect further phone calls and e-mails, and my long-suffering cleaner will be wearing a path on the pavement down to the Chemist’s.

How long is it going to last? That’s the question. The prescription says “6 months” but I bet that it’ll be renewed after that too.

But I don’t understand it. They rush me to hospital and give me a blood transfusion, and then spend the next 6 months taking it all back out again. It doesn’t seem logical to me.

But at least there’s a nurse who comes to the apartment to do it. When I lived in the UK there was no such thing as that and you had to stagger down to the local hospital yourself.

On one occasion I couldn’t make it there so they told me "don’t worry. If you can’t make it to the hospital today we’ll send our vampire round tonight and he’ll take a sample"

Tuesday 30th January 2024 – JUST FOR A …

… change, my Welsh lesson passed really well today and for some reason that I don’t understand, it even rekindled some enthusiasm in me.

We weren’t all that many in class today but we all worked well together and covered a lot of ground. And with all of the hospital visits and ill-health over the last 15 months I’m still miles behind, but I’ve not quite dropped off the edge yet.

It’s quite surprising really because I had another late night last night. I didn’t go to bed until late.

After I’d had the medication I came back in here and had a play around on the guitar. I was overwhelmed for some reason by yet another wave of nostalgia and ended up trying to pick out the chords of A-Ha’s I CALL YOUR NAME

When I was shuttling between Brussels and the farm, 700 kilometres through the night through Charleroi, Charleville-Mézieres; Chalons sur Marne, Troyes, Auxerre, Nevers and Moulins, stopping just for fuel and to fill up my thermal coffee mug from my flask at Auxerre, I probably had just two albums going round on the cassette.

The N77, N151 and D977 roads wind through the Monts de la Bourgogne like a serpent but if you caught the rhythm of the road you could go flat-out (in the days before speed cameras) in old LDVs and Ford Escorts and new Ford Transits and provided that the tyres were good, you’d make every bend perfectly

No-one about at all at 03:00, 04:00 or 05:00 so I’d have the hammer down and for some reason there would always seem to be the same two albums that came round on the cassette at some point during that leg of the journey – STAY ON THESE ROADS, which was somehow quite appropriate considering the speed at which I’d be travelling, and SCOUNDREL DAYS.

Not what you might expect at first glance to be ever on my playlist but their first album full of pop songs that made their name took even them by surprise. However with Mike Sturgis, later of Wishbone Ash and Asia on drums, their next two or three albums had a much more rocky sound and if you haven’t heard them, they are worth a listen.

But where was I? Yes, on my way through the mountains to Nevers with A-Ha on the tape deck in the van, and not knowing why this sudden wave of nostalgia had overwhelmed me

Anyway, so late to bed, it was a very weary me who crawled out from underneath the covers when the alarm went off.

Despite the nice relaxing night, blood pressure was through the roof again. Last night we had 18.5/10.4 and this morning a mere 17.6/11.8. What was this about 14.0/9.0?

After the medication I came back in here to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night and, more importantly, if any of my favourite young ladies had come with me.

But no such luck. I was a folk guitarist last night on the acoustic guitar belting out numbers that related to the river than ran right the way through Middle Earth. They were all pounding acoustic numbers with occasionally someone playing acoustic guitar in the background. I can remember some of them and one reminded me very much of a Steve Harley song and I’ll tell you the name in a minute … "ONLY YOU" – ed … They were all about the river than ran through Middle Earth and they all took place along its banks in different places. It was a very relaxing even if it was rather noisy – sound and situation.

Back in that dream again later and I dreamed that I was in Middle Earth walking along the river and began to play the acoustic guitar. I played it loudly and pounded it out. In the end I had about 8 or 9 numbers that would turn into an LP so I made an LP of it. One or two of these numbers were really imprinted deeply in my mind and I can still hear them now. Yes, I actually fell asleep and dreamed that I was out there doing it and it was great

The guitar obsession I can understand but regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I seem to have an obsession right now with Middle Earth and I don’t know why that is.

But not to worry. "In the end it’s only a passing thing" as Sam said to Frodo in … errr … "quite" – ed …

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed, did I dictate the one about me being in a rock band etc? I’m sure that I did … "no you didn’t" – ed … That dream went on and on until we were all in France when the French Government announced that fines for Parking Tickets etc was increasing from €12:00 to €20:00. It caused a complete scandal around everywhere and there were all kinds of meetings called. I should have been going on board a ship – a big 2000,000 tonner – but instead I was called to my company’s offices and told to report back to Granville later. Before I left, I was there when they were loading this container ship and it had a list fore and aft of 40°. I thought that this was going to cause a real problem because the ship wasn’t designed for this kind of stress. If it hits a storm in the Atlantic it would have a great deal of problems with the hull at 40° to the horizontal but no-one listened to me

But talk about a 200,000 tonne ship here in the harbour at Granville. You won’t have anything much more than 2,000 tonnes coming through the harbour gates here, which is a pity.

Having dealt with all of that I prepared for my Welsh class and then settled down to enjoy it.

Actually I had a cunning plan. With my Welsh class I usually take a pot of coffee, a mug and my breakfast but these days I can’t carry it. I can only just about manage with me.

But my coffee pot is actually a thermos jug (I made sure of that) so I made my coffee, put the pot, the mug and my slice of bread-and-butter pudding on the trolley that I use for moving my washing about and pushed the trolley into the bedroom

And it worked perfectly too. I was impressed.

However, next time I’ll put a tray on it.

After the lesson I had a few things to do, like tidying up. So I promptly dropped the box of couscous from last night all over the floor.

It took about 20 minutes to sort out the vacuum cleaner, and then the pipe was blocked, and then the container was full. It was almost never ending, trying to vacuum that lot up. A simple five-minute job took nearly an hour.

My cleaner came around too. She’d been shopping and had bought some stuff for me, including the soya yoghurt. So my leftover curries will now go from being delicious to being absolutely delicious.

It was round about now that I crashed out again – and for about an hour too. Dead to the World I was as well and when I finally awoke, it took an age for the room to stop spinning.

And once I’d pulled myself together I finished sorting out the music for my Hawkfest. Thanks to Adrian Shaw, who was bassist with Hawkwind for a while and to the Estate of Nik Turner, the much-missed saxophonist and flute player who later had his own Hawkwind tribute band, “Sonic Attack” who played at several Hawkfests, I now have plenty of music from which to choose

So that’s tomorrow’s job – pairing off the music and writing the notes.

Tea tonight was a delicious taco roll with some of the leftover stuffing from yesterday. The idea of using couscous really worked and I might do that again as long as I don’t throw it all over the floor.

But right now, later than usual, I’m off to bed and sweet dreams, I hope. But my three young ladies seem to have deserted me. The last visit was from Castor on 13th January.

Doesn’t time fly? They say that time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like an over-ripe banana.

Monday 29th January 2024 – WHAT A SHAME!

Yes, despite fighting off waves of sleep I managed to keep on going until about 17:30 when this anti-potassium stuff bit in and I was out like the proverbial light.

And I’ll tell you how deep the sleep was – that I had two people send me messages on my internet messenger service while I was asleep and despite the raucous racket that the alert makes, I didn’t hear a thing. I was absolutely and completely out of it, all the way to 19:28

But this stuff really is dangerous. I had no warning of going to sleep and not even any recollection of feeling ready to go to sleep, if that makes sense. It really was as if someone had switched off a light. Imagine if I’d been driving a car.

It was something of a surprise that I kept on going for as long as I did because I’d had yet another turbulent night

It was after midnight and I’d been letting it all hang out before I’d gone to bed. And then it was a night with quite a lot going on while I was asleep, as I found out when I went to transcribe the dictaphone notes later.

But when the alarm went off I fell out of bed and then took my blood pressure. 18.9/10.9 will give them something to think about at the hospital. My blood pressure figures are ridiculous though. Last night it was as high as 19.5/9.7.

But anyway I went to shovel down the medication , check the mails and messages and then back in here to check the dictaphone notes. And as I said, there was a lot to check. There was a dream about watching some kind of race with kids climbing up and down the steep side of a hill. We were all watching from the hedge or side of the fence as the kids were running up it. The person with me entered into a conversation with someone else who was watching there. I heard my name mentioned although they weren’t talking to me. I could see that she was explaining my situation to this person. Then a young girl came up. There was something about her pony tail so I had to take out the clip and put it back into her hair at a higher position. That seemed to bring out some comment from someone as well. For some unknown reason trains were mentioned. There were these single-coach multiple unit things, one of those, and attached to it was half of a two-coach unit so it was two coaches but you couldn’t walk between the two. There was something about that that was involved in the discussion too but it didn’t seem to make any sense or fit in anywhere.

Not that my dreams make any sense to start with of course.

There were then these two large creature-type things that were humanoid but basically just mouth and body. They were humanoid, coloured human and so on with human skin for what there was. They were in the corner talking about philosophy and the meaning of life etc when they suddenly realised that they were there with no legs and two very feeble hands. How are they going to move? Here they are, having spent the last so long running down the human race, how they were the masters and how they could control everything and they suddenly realised that they couldn’t move without the aid of the human beings to push them around. That was a rather humiliating experience for them

Did I dictate this dream about being ill and not being able to walk? … "no, you didn’t" – ed … I needed something doing so I telephoned the ambulance company to ask them if they could do it and bring it round here. So they did but a while later in a conversation with someone else we were talking about how I was feeling at that particular moment. The question of other people turned up. I said something strange, which was “can you imagine the feeling that I had when the driver turned up and it wasn’t the one whom I wanted?”. The person with me replied “yes” but he remembered a certain game of Blind Man’s Bluff where the same thing had happened – where someone had ended up touching him so he took off his blindfold to look at the person and was so disappointed that it was not a certain person who had touched him but someone else completely.

There are more than just a few points in that little dream with which I can relate too.

Then I was round at someone’s house. They had 2 children, one aged about 2 and the other aged about 4. It must have been the kid’s bedtime. To my surprise the parents made up their bed on the sofa in the living room which I thought strange. My host asked me “do you want to put them to bed Eric?” so I called the youngest one over and picked her up. Then all of this “gooey gooey” language that you use with small babies and children. I put her into the bed there, made sure that she was comfortable in between the sheets and that the blanket was good. Then I did the same for the other, carried her across the room from where she’d been standing and lay her on the sofa, lined her up and tucked her in. Now that we had these 2 kids on the sofa and we were supposed to be socialising, but it’s impossible to socialise without making a noise but this was what my host’s idea was. I was totally bewildered by this

We were talking about my contact lenses and I was supposed to wear them but I was just putting it off and putting it off. In the end one of my friends cajoled and encouraged me. In the end I went to see about them. I finally had a pair, had them fitted. They were on a 3-month trial. They were a kind of corrective contact lenses that are supposed to improve your eyesight. What they would do was to work on your eyes, massage the muscles etc. You had 3 months and at the end if there was no improvement you simply handed them back. Once I had them installed my friend said “there, you see? It was quite easy and you were making such a fuss of it” etc. Almost immediately someone came in and said that so-and-so was leaving. That was the guy who had been to collect my contact lenses and signed for them. When he came into our room I asked him when he was leaving. He looked terribly defensively and asked why. I said “so that you could apologise on my behalf to the firm that supplied the contact lenses. If you picked them up, you’re the one who has to return them. But not to worry” I said. “We’ll sort it out somehow”.

But as for contact lenses, I used to wear contact lenses until one heady day in 1997 bringing my boss back from a meeting in Luxembourg. Roaring back up the E411 on a warm autumn early-evening with my window open, a lorry on the opposite carriageway threw up a small stone that hit me squarely in the eye.

Without thinking I rubbed my eye, like you do … "like YOU do" – ed … and a piece of grit not only shredded my contact lens but scratched my cornea too

After I’d dropped my boss off I went round to our office’s Emergency Service. They confirmed the damage to my eye and sent me to an eye specialist in Antwerp.
“We can repair this with laser surgery” he replied. “But for an extra 6,000BF (£120) we can repair the sight in your eye too so that you’ll have good vision”
“What will it say on the receipt?” I asked
“Simply ‘laser surgery to repair eye defect'” he answered. He wasn’t stupid
“Well, as long as it does say that and only that, go ahead”.

And as it was classed as an industrial injury, it was reimbursed 100%

There was a follow-up to that too.

As I now had one perfect eye and one poor eye, I was having a lot of rouble with perception and depth of vision, which for a Ministerial chauffeur was a serious issue.

So after a lengthy discussion with our Medical service it was back to Antwerp to have the other eye done – reimbursed 100%

Laser surgery is the best thing since sliced bread and I’m really glad that I had it done. Of course, as I’m starting to reach a ripe old age, growing riper as I grow older, my near sight is going but there’s not a thing at all wrong with my distance vision.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed, when I was at work the local nursing home needed some cover. Seeing that I was due some time off I decided that I’d take it and go to work there. That was what I did. On my way home I didn’t feel like cooking. I thought that I’d order a meal. The only meal that seemed to be there was a potato and egg soup followed by something else. The soup of course wasn’t vegan but what did I care at that moment? I ordered it anyway. When I returned home it arrived. I decided to eat it and took it out of the container, looked at it and suddenly for some reason all my appetite completely disappeared.

When I’d checked my messages earlier there had been a couple on there that needed answering.

One of them concerned a project of work that needs doing in the building. It’s pretty straightforward really – contact Batiments de France to see if we can do it, and if so, then contact the relevant associations that deal with autonomy of the elderly and infirm to see if a subsidy might be obtained.

Batiments de France is the French equivalent of whoever looks after Ancient Monuments.

As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … this building is a listed building with Batiments de France – an ancient Monument and the fact that I’m living here is quite appropriate seeing as I’m an ancient monument myself.

In principle at least, you can’t even knock a nail in the wall without permission from Batiments de France, and certainly not in a public part of the building where anyone might see it.

Now the procedure that I outlined doesn’t sound complicated but you’ll be surprised (or maybe you won’t) at the Byzantine nature of French administration. This is not a job of 5 minutes.

While I was at it, I had to sort out some accommodation. Our little travel club has decided that its next meeting will be here in Granville in early June so three people from Central Europe are going to descend on me and they’ll need somewhere to stay.

Anyway, that’s all organised now. They won’t be sleeping under a hedge.

Having done all that (and you’ll be surprised how long it takes) I turned my attention to my own things.

Firstly, I made an executive decision – and for the benefit of new readers, of which there are more than a few just now, an executive decision is a decision that, if it turns out to be wrong, the person making it is executed.

"Better counsel comes overnight " said the German playwright and philosopher Gotthold Lessing.

So having given the matter some thought, what I’ve decided is that that mess that I loosely termed a “radio programme” that I prepared yesterday has now gone the Way of the West and I’ll do it all again. In a way it was a good decision too because the notes that I wrote under the influence of this wicked stuff were garbage and so I rewrote many of them this morning.

So having rewritten the notes and waiting for quiet moment (whenever that might be) to dictate them, I started on my Hawkfest.

My opening segue of three tracks is now all assembled and my final track is ready. I’ve tracked down several pieces of work from artists who have been at one of the Hawkfests and I’m up to 36 minutes. I need another 17 minutes and a guy in Congleton who was onstage at one of them will send me some stuff and then the difficult bit of tracking down whatever he hasn’t sent me begins.

Some stuff that I’ve received from an Australian band who were onstage at the second Hawkfest is pretty awful as far as quality goes though, but the music and its context makes it worth including.

At about 17:00 I broke off to go and have a really, really good wash. And I did too – a nice, deep scrub that made me feel so much better. But it was while I was sitting on the sofa changing my socks that I hit the wall.

When I awoke, it was teatime so I made a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg.

No bulghour so I based my stuffing around some couscous that seems to have been here from before the Dawn of Time. And that’s not an exaggeration either because I haven’t been in the shop that sold it since I went to live in Leuven.

However it did actually work and I was quite impressed. Just as well because there’s plenty left for a taco roll tomorrow and then to add to a leftover curry on Wednesday.

So right now, having been shaken about by Rosemary during an Internet text exchange, I’m off to bed.

There’s a Welsh lesson tomorrow but on this anti-potassium stuff I’ve never felt less like going. But we awaken tomorrow and plod on wearily towards the end.

"Dawn is ever the hope of men" said Aragorn, and it will have to be mine right now.

All that I can do is remember the words of Gildor when he said "Courage is found in unlikely places. Be of good hope" but I’m not sure what unlikely places there are here in my little apartment, because I won’t be going anywhere else for a while.

So what I’ll do now is to take my blood pressure. One of the unlikely places where I would like to be would be in the laboratory to see their faces when they receive the results.

The last time that I was in a laboratory was at one of the University’s laboratories in Milton Keynes. There we had a pleasant summer school for two weeks in 1998 where the highlight of our achievement was to discover a cure for which there was no known disease

Sunday 28th January 2024 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what the hell is going on here.

Back in the old days, like 6 months ago, I could sit down with a clean computer screen and in 4 hours bash out a radio programme all the way from the very start – like choosing the music – to the very end, like having it up and running.

So having dictated the notes last night, all that I had to do today was to edit them, assemble the programme, choose the final track, write, dictate and edit the notes for that and add it in. So here am I, it’s quite late in the evening and I’m nowhere near finished.

It all went wrong last night. What I dictated was, as I expected, total rubbish and having tried unsuccessfully to edit some of it, I gave up and re-dictated it.

But it’s hopeless trying to dictate anything here during daylight hours at a weekend. I lost count of how many times a motorcycle went past the window causing me to stop and after it had gone past, going back and re-dictating from a point farther back

Having edited it and halfway through assembling the programme I noticed a couple of places where I hadn’t gone back far enough so I re-dictated the segments.

Then I couldn’t make the tones of the new part match up with the old parts despite trying for hours. So in the end I ended up having to re-dictate it yet again.

Where I’m at at the moment is in the editing stage.

But at least I know how long the gap is for the eleventh and final track so that’s all ready and the notes dictated and edited. LOVE AIN’T FOR KEEPING is one of the most beautiful love songs ever and you don’t need me to tell you when was the last time that I played it to an audience

And it was an audience of one too.

But anyway, I digress … "again" – ed … I’m fed up to the gills with this blasted stuff that’s making me sleep, making me see all kinds of strange things when I close my eyes and totally churning up my brain so I can’t concentrate on anything.

More by luck than judgement I’ve fought off waves of sleep today but everything is turning into a total mess. I try to keep the notes on my whiteboard tidy so that I can follow them backwards if necessary, but that’s a total shambles too.

It’s all a total morass at the moment, and in years to come, people are going to look at the notes from this last week or two, shake their heads and say to each other "I don’t know what he must have been smoking when he was writing all of that, but I wish that he’d passed it around to the rest of us"

It’s like the time that the Cambridge boat sank in the middle of the Boat Race and everyone going round, pointing at the crew and saying "they were totally out of their scull".

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed, I had something or a better sleep last night. Maybe that accounts for why I managed to go through the day without actually crashing out.

It was about 01:00 when I finally went to bed, and I awoke (but that’s not to say that I left the bed) at about 10:00.

It was a leisurely start to the day, as befits a Sunday, but eventually I managed to make a start on the dictaphone notes. We started off with the story of a small girl who was elected for some kind of competition because she could run so fast. She was taken to somewhere like the Centre de Re-education for a medical examination. There, she was confronted by a bear and then by a polar bear. When people asked about that, the answer given was that where she’s going she might actually encounter these animals so she’ll have to know what they are, what they look like etc and whether she could out-run them. While she was having her medical they were preparing the meals. The meals were very scanty, that’s for sure, but specially prepared to give the most energy from a small amount of food. They came to me and asked if it was true that I was a vegan. I replied “yes” so shortly afterwards they gave me a chicken salad type of thing which of course didn’t go down very well at all. Then the giri was made ready for this competition

That reminded me of the time that I was up in RED CANYON IN UTAH IN 2002.
A tourist there asked one of the tourist guides "is it true that a bear won’t attack you if you carry a clove of garlic in your pocket?"
The guide replied "it all depends on how quickly you can carry it."

Later on while I’d been asleep I’d received a mail from a friend about a group of people who had bought a field and were going to use it as a kind of forum for telling jokes. The jokes were going to be kind-of middle of the road jokes so that they could develop a kind of middle of the road humour that would satisfy most people about the political correctness of the modern world and those who are upset about the outrageous nature of some crude jokes. He went on to show some kind of complicated maths calculation that went down to something like the 3rd or 4th line of a multiplication problem. Much as I’m pretty good at simple maths I couldn’t get my head around this of something like 2/3 of 5/8 of 7/8 of 3/7 or whatever it was. Also in the field was an old school bus up on jacks that was going to be their office. All in all I thought that it was going to be a strange situation for anyone to be in to come to this place and maybe give it their support

This would be one of those occasions where I’d have to call on the services of my namesake the mathematician who told me once that three fifths of five eights was … errr … nothing

But actually this is quite apposite, especially as my teatime viewing at the moment is SPACEBALLS. It reminded me of the famous Mel Brooks quote that "good taste is the enemy of comedy".

There was more stuff on the dictaphone too but good taste notwithstanding, you really don’t want to read it, especially if you’re eating a meal right now.

So after lunch I attacked the radio programme, and that’s where I am right now, stuck in the middle of all of that nonsense wishing that I could get out of it

There was the usual series of breaks to deal with the pizza of course, and quite enjoyable it was tonight too, even if it was the wrong flour that I used. But that’s the problem – on line, I can’t order the flour that I really like so anything will have to do as I go by trial and error.

But now everything is finished I’ll go back to deal with the radio programme. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, once said "The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well"

However I feel more like the Duke of Marlborough on his way to do battle in Flanders. "God knows I go with a heavy heart, for I have no hope of doing anything considerable"

Saturday 27th January 2024 – SITTING IN MY FRIDGE …

… right now, even as we speak, is a bottle full of carrot and broccoli water from when I blanched and froze those carrots and broccoli the other day.

That’s right. Brain of Britain here forgot about it and so didn’t use it for making his broccoli stalk soup today

Mind you, the soup was still really nice and I enjoyed every last drop of it. I thought that I’d made enough for two days but after the first couple of drops soaked up into a lump of bread roll made fresh yesterday, the idea of saving anything for another time went right out of the window.

There have been plenty of broccoli stalk soups that have passed through these pages so if you want to see the recipe, just click on the “broccoli and potato soup” tag at the foot of this entry and it will take you to several pages.

In these pages I talk a lot about my cooking, and for several reasons too.
Firstly, my mother was a hopeless cook so I spent a lot of time later living out of tins. It wasn’t until I met Nerina that I began to eat really well. With an Italian mother, what do you expect? I learnt a lot from Nerina, and from Liz and also from that Italian Restaurant in Wandsworth where I worked one winter
Secondly, I’m proud of what I cook. Although it’s pretty basic stuff, I eat really well considering.
Thirdly, with not going out or anything like that I have plenty of time on my hands and I need a good hobby. I’ve arranged my kitchen so that if I prop myself up in the corner between the sink and the hob, almost everything except the freezer in the bathroom is at arm’s length and I don’t have to move anywhere
Fourthly, if anyone can ever suggest any improvements in my recipes feel free to send me some tips. I’m always grateful to receive them.

But that Italian restaurant was a riot.

It all began with a friend of mine living in Newcastle upon Tyne complaining that he was unemployed and couldn’t find a job. I told him to go to London where there were plenty of jobs. But he found excuse after excuse to everything I said.

In the end I was so fed up that one winter when I had nothing to do I put an ad in one of these local newspapers in London asking for a room. And I had one in Wandsworth arranged within half an hour.

On the train (I was determined not to use the car) I came to London, the Underground to Wandsworth and then a bus to my digs. I was installed.

Before I’d even unpacked I walked down to the High Street past a parade of shops where there was an Employment Agency and an Italian Restaurant. And within 15 minutes I had a day job driving a bus for schoolkids for Merton Borough Council and an evening job delivering food

The Christmas period was chaos though. The schools had closed so I was full-time in the restaurant. There at 06:00 to prepare for opening (as a café) at 07:00. Close at 14:00 and then prepare for the evening.

When you finished, everyone slept underneath the nice warm pizza ovens for three hours or so before getting up at 18:00 ready to open at 19:00. When the restaurant closed, you’d prepare for the next morning.

No question of “that is your job, this is my job”. Everyone did everything – cooking, waiting at table, preparing, driving. My tomato sauce actually passed muster in a professional environment, thanks, Nerina.

It was absolutely insane, but I daren’t tell you how much money I took back to Brussels after three months, all in used fivers in a plain brown envelope.

However, let’s turn our attention to last night. In bed nice and comfortably for once, rather later than I was hoping, I was asleep quite quickly as you might expect after this anti-potassium stuff.

However, it was quite a turbulent night . On the dictaphone there was a ton of stuff, much of which has an important significance so it really must have been quite interesting too.

I started out with my rock group last night. There was something going on, whether it was a rehearsal or something I dunno. I was in the middle of playing one of our numbers when wherever we were was raided by the police. We managed to get the young girl violinist away before anyone said anything but the police wandered around, noticed that she wasn’t there and insisted that she be brought. We said that it was impossible so they threatened us for a blood test etc. They kept on insisting that she turn up. This was going to turn into a rather nasty situation. I was in some kind of school hall or something I dunno. When the guy with me said “have you ever seen the dawn rise in the morning?” he took me outside and we watched the sun slowly rise over the horizon.

And you’ll be surprised about how much truth there is in a short tale like that. One of these days I’ll tell you about it but the World isn’t ready yet to hear the story.

That thing about me and the World War that broke out. The Germans bombed all around Mill Lane and the British denounced them as terrorists yet all around Mill Lane (wherever Mill Lane might be) were all kinds of ammunition factories therefore it was all perfectly legitimate so the UK should not have denounced them at all, particularly when you consider some of the things that they were doing

You’ll be surprised at how much truth there was in this story too. One of my University theses for my degree (I actually wrote two) was ABOUT COVENTRY AND IEPER and reading the howls of indignation about the bombing of Coventry in 1940 despite the fact that it was clearly a legitimate military target, yet three years later when the UK had acquired the technology to do so, they were shamelessly targeting the civilian population of Germany with no restraint whatsoever.

By the way, if you want to read MY SECOND THESIS, all five pages (there was sixth one added to finish off the story) were redacted for the web.

Having had a great deal of trouble completing the practical work for some of my modules (or not even starting it at all) due to the chaos that ensued after September 11th 2001 I was miles behind with my course and I chose two modules with theses and no practical work so that I could write them in the car while sitting on places like deserted airfields in former East Germany day after day after day, all of that kind of lark, in the hope that that would pull my score back up.

However, as we all know, there’s a huge problem with “mature” (I use the term loosely) students.
Firstly, we were too old, too experienced and too worldly-wise to be herded around like 18 year-olds. Many of the tutors who came in from other Universities had no experience of dealing with people like us and their attitudes and attempts at discipline just didn’t wash
Secondly, life tended to get in the way of course work. “This assignment should have been handed in yesterday”. “Yes, but my baby was sick” or “my house burnt down” or “I had to go on a mission for my boss”. These were genuine excuses that many of the tutors didn’t understand. These weren’t “18 year old” problems to which the tutors were accustomed.
Thirdly, and this was my great problem, I wasn’t studying for a career path and desperate for a degree. I had my career all nicely planned out and I was heading where I wanted to go (that’s not to say that it didn’t change dramatically once I graduated, but that’s another story completely). I was studying for my personal interest and if there was a qualification after it, well, that’s nice but it wasn’t the name of the game. I’d find something that interested me and follow that trail for miles and miles, suddenly finding that I’d departed a long way from the core of the course and was totally off-target. But did I care? I was totally absorbed and having fun.

However, as an aside, I can still add “B.Sc.Hons” to my name if ever I feel like it.

In another dream I had to go to Manchester – I’m not sure whether it was work or for the hospital but I awoke rather late and wasn’t sure whether they knew about my trip etc. As I was dressing I turned on the radio and found that I could pick up the channel on which their cars broadcasted so while I was washing i listened to any sign that they might be coming to pick me up. I got as far as my T-shirt and undies off and was washing myself waiting to hear that the taxi company was coming to pick me up but I wasn’t really optimistic that they’d written it down or remembered.

At one point during the night I was turning around over and over trying to be comfortable when I felt that the bed was moving and suddenly stopped with an almighty jolt but it can’t move as its a fixed bed. It did it again later on too. I’ll tell you what – I’d get good money for this anti-potassium stuff on the back streets of Granville if only I could walk out there.

Someone called Ruth was running some kind of garage in the neighbourhood and had become friendly with me. Although I liked her coming around, I wasn’t really interested in a relationship. One day I was hurt and had to go to hospital. I knew that she would be coming round later in the day so I didn’t say anything to her. I had my cleaner help me when the car came to pick me up and take me off. I had a good chat to my cleaner about the situation and a chat with the taxi driver too. It seemed to be the best solution that one of the two of us (Ruth or me) move away. She was probably the most likely to move as the garage wasn’t doing very much. I had my treatment and asked “what time is it?”. It was about an hour to return home and it was 14:00 and she was coming to see me at 15:00 so I thought that we’d make it fine. He set out to drive me home. On the way back he asked me a riddle about the United Kingdom but I can’t remember it now. I could actually work it out, which was quite impressive. We talked again about this woman on the way back. When we arrived it was 15:00. We were just arriving when on the way back we went past her garage and there were just 2 cars on the front, an Austin Maxi at £1745 and another vehicle for about a similar price. I thought “she’s not going to make any money trying to sell those cars at that price. No-one is going to pay that much money for them”.

And considering what I wrote earlier, it’s totally ironic that someone called Ruth should appear in my dreams later on. But the owner of a garage? I really don’t think so.

I was going through another long rambling dream concerning Norman Smith, the recording engineer better known of course as the rock star Hurricane Smith who produced several albums and was going to produce an album for a woman who sang with Abba which was to be filmed on a dusty petrol station near where we lived so we went along to see. But once more I ended up being taken to hospital again where they checked me over and took my blood pressure. I was polite to them but I didn’t see why they needed to take my pressure. The nurse who was rather like Oddjob in GOLDFINGER came along and soon quietened me. This went on for a while with a lot of intervention. Eventually I was let go at about midday so I reckoned to the driver that we could make it back at 13:00 when all of this began. I can’t remember any more about the rest but I know that it was very interesting.

One thing that I did remember about that dream that comes back to me was talking to the taxi driver about death and dying- him saying that if I did decide to take my own life I would probably be disappointed because there weren’t all that many people in the concert hall to watch Hawkwind which I didn’t believe at all. I was polite enough not to say. However my brother-in-law who was a part-time goalkeeper went flying past somehow on some kind of mission for someone – not on an aeroplane etc bust just floating in the air flying along overtaking a car.

A group of us had gone off to climb Mount Everest or something like that. We’d set out early one morning. There were several other people making their way up the mountain. We all trudged in a weary line until it became early evening. There was a kind of café-restaurant there so we all swarmed in. After everyone else was seated there was only one place for me, by a young girl. I went and sat next to her and we slowly began to chat. It turned out that she was from Montréal although she spoke English. We talked a lot about Montréal and when she found out that I’d lived in Chester she talked about her visit to Chester. We were handed a menu. I had a look down it and there was only one vegan dish. She told me what she wanted so I ordered it and ordered my vegan one. She seemed to be quite pleased at that. We carried on chatting and ever so slowly my arm went around her. She slowly cuddled up against me which I thought was unusual. My brother came along, as he would, and talked about going to fetch something from the shops. Someone gave him their order and someone else ordered something else. The two of us ordered something (we were definitely “the two of us” by this time). He wandered off to the shops. Every now and again we saw some people come back. She would ask “is that him?”. I replied “no, he’ll be walking with a limp”. She asked “why is that?”. I replied “because he’ll be shocked having to spend all that money”. Eventually he came back and handed her a receipt for repairs to her car. I found out that she had an old Zephyr 6 which impressed me greatly. He said “you know that your repairs are going to cost you over £1000”. She didn’t say very much to that. We walked outside this restaurant and there were parking places at the back for cars. She asked if they were private places. I replied “yes they are”. She replied “if I leave my car here I won’t have to come back, will I?”. In an automatism I gave a despairing “Awww” – actually a real despairing Awww too. I could see the look on her face slowly change to one of happiness. I thought to myself “whatever is going on here now with this girl?”

Yes, “whatever is going on here now with this girl?”. Here we are, almost on the point of finally Getting The Girl and the dream grinds to a halt. And we can’t have a dream like this without at least one person from my family coming along to try to spike my guns, can we?

Incidentally, we – or rather my father when we were kids – had a Zephyr 6 mark III, a black one, 3816 TD. I remember it well.

And after I sold my MkI Cortina (which features regularly on these pages) I had a MkIV Zephyr 6 for a short while but it caught fire. We’d been to see Jethro Tull at that venue in Ardwick, South-West Manchester … "the Apollo" – ed … and I’d parked on a demolition site around the corner. Coming off after the concert, I grounded out on some rubble, not realising that it had scraped away part of the fuel line and there was a fuel leak that ignited.

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errrr … bed I’d forgotten something about the girl. We ended up back in a rented apartment that I’d rented. There was only one bed so naturally I explained to her the situation. She seemed to be quite comfortable with it so that night we slept together, and slept together for a considerable number of nights. After that she came to Granville for a look around to see what the town has to offer. As her visa was about to expire she went back to Canada and I hoped that I’d see her again and that she wished to come back.

And so Our Hero finally Gets The Girl after all of these years of dreaming. And it takes the French Government’s Interior Ministry to intervene this time and put a stop to whatever is going on. Do you ever get the feeling that you are just not going to win?

Back in this dream … "which dream?" – ed … I met a car with 4 boys – I don’t know if they were the four that I mentioned before, if indeed I did mention them … "no, you didn’t" – ed … I had a Ryobi drill and was doing some things with it. In the end I took the mandrel off and fitted a huge mandrel like a bolt thread that you’d use for drawing nuts up long distances. For some unknown reason it wouldn’t go in and I didn’t want to force it. The guy next to me said that he’d done it on his old car and it will fit so I had to squeeze it very tightly to open the internal jaws on the drill and fit this attachment in. Then I couldn’t find the nut so he asked if anyone had a nut. One guy replied that he had one but it was on his A40. We ended up talking about old cars – I had the Cortinas, ha had the A40, someone else had an A50 and the conversation became quite interesting.

So after all of that – well, most of it anyway, the alarm went off and I arose from the Dead.

Once more I’ve no idea what they will make of the blood pressure figure this morning. Not wracked with pain so it was only 18.0/11.6. What did the letter from the hospital say? Ahh yes – “target figure maximum 14.0/9.5”.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages I came in here to begin to transcribe the dictaphone notes. There were that many, as you have seen, that I was nowhere near finishing them when I went off to make my delicious broccoli stalk soup.

Back hereat my desk at 11:15 after all of that and despite two cups of strong black coffee I crashed out immediately. Really, this stuff that they are giving me is ridiculous.

while I was asleep, crashed out in the morning I was waiting for a tram in Haslington. Along came the mother of The Farmer’s Daughter, someone who has figured a few times in my dreams in the past. She said a few encouraging words which quite surprised me – I was half-expecting her to tell me to keep away from her daughter. She said a few other things too that quite surprised me. After she’d gone my mother came along. She said that she’d heard a few stories about the woman, including that she was terrorised by her husband who seemed to control her far too much. I said “you know, you aren’t the first to say that. You aren’t even the second”. “Why?” she asked “Who else has said that kind of thing?”. I replied “what do you think she’s just been saying to me then?”.

It was 12:48 when I awoke and do you know what? I hadn’t felt a thing. It was only the fact of meeting that woman in my dream that made me even realise that I’d been asleep. It was just as if someone had flicked a switch and I’d gone out like a light.

It took an age for me to get my head together after that and continue with the dictaphone notes, stopping and almost dozing off every 5 minutes. It took me almost until hot chocolate time to finish them.

After the hot chocolate I started work but Rosemary rang me later. Only 1 hour and 28 minutes this time. A short ‘phone call then. We spent tons of time chatting about nothing at all, as friends often do. She’s also talking about coming to visit me, which will be nice

Tea tonight was, seeing as I have run out of those lovely quorn fillets that I so like and Leclerc had none in stock, a burger on a bap with air-fried chips and a vegan salad. As I said, my food is quite simple but it isn’t half delicious.

So hallucinating badly every time that I close my eyes and trying hard not to fall asleep I’m going. I might crash out for an hour or so and then I have the radio notes to dictate.

God alone knows what’s on them. This stuff that I’m taking is making me talk – and type – total rubbish in this confused state in which I find myself right now

Not half as confused as the old woman in the Old People’s Home who once hurled a volley of abuse at the old Queen Mother.
"Don’t you know who I am?" asked the Queen Mother indignantly.
"No, dear" said the old woman. "But don’t worry. Ask the Matron. She’ll tell you."

Friday 26th January 2024 – MY BREAD ROLLS …

… were prepared quite early.

Much earlier than I expected too. When the alarm should have gone off at 07:00 I was already sitting working at my desk while the dough that I’d made was quietly rising away in the kitchen.

It was about 04:30 when I awoke, with a stabbing pain in my right foot (which is a surprise because usually I can’t feel very much in there). It turns out that these socks that I have to wear had been rubbing on a certain spot on my ankle joint and it had suddenly erupted.

Nothing that I could do would ease the pain and go back to sleep so round about 05:30 I gave up and arose from the dead. If I can’t sleep now I’ll probably sleep later, but I do that anyway so what’s the difference?

Mind you, I don’t know what the hospital will say when they see my blood pressure, taken as I was being wracked with pain. A reading of 19.8/11.7 is enough to put the willies up even the strongest of spines.

After I’d had my medication and a little pause to catch my breath, I switched off the alarm because, knowing my luck, the alarm would go off as I’m up to my elbows in dough, and then I attacked the bread.

You would think that after all of that I would have slid down another black hole but oh no! The optimistic mood prevailed. I found an antiseptic pad from about 100 years ago still in its sealed packet and strapped it around the wound with half a roll of sticking plaster. Then I could put on my socks.

Surprisingly, the pain began to ease and I could actually walk again so I walked back to the bedroom and the big computer where I transcribed the notes. And here we go again. The anti-potassium stuff that I have to continue to take did its stuff again. Apparently at some point I awoke again with that radio playing that I mentioned yesterday. I’ve no idea what’s happening here.

Later on I was in hospital and was listening to the news. There was a woman who was in Court for refusing to pay a taxi fare because the taxi had called her “Miss so and-so” instead of “Mrs so-and-so””. The taxi driver said “I’m here and you want to go there and you need to travel” so she went with him but didn’t pay. She complained about the extra £3;50 extra terrorism charge on the same day that her husband was arrested and had to identify himself and prove that he wasn’t a terrorist himself which was obviously a mysterious decision all the way round, and then there was another story about a certain company director who was denying rumours that he was paying for everything in gold coins after his company had declared untold wealth and profits and he’d been seen out socialising with someone senior from the Bank of England.

Not a lot on the dictaphone tonight but it’s not bad for only 5 hours sleep at most. And it seems that my favourite young ladies have deserted me again for the time being

For a change I made myself a quick mug of instant coffee and having checked on my bread to make sure that the dough was OK (well, sort-of) I came back and had a nice long chat with Liz. She’d found me a recipe for a black bean burger that she reckoned might work well with other sorts of beans.

As for where I’m going to find some of the ingredients, I’ve no idea. I bet that Leclerc won’t have them in stock. I can see my poor cleaner having to make a diversion via Biocoop on her way to Leclerc.

Earlier on I’d rolled the dough for my bread into a long sausage and then cut it in three equal portions. Now that it had proofed (I wouldn’t actually say “risen” – my bread is proof that I’d be no good as a spiritualist) I baked it and then made a toasted cheese and tomato and onion roll.

It was lovely with really fresh bread but I wish that I could make it rise. It’s compacted and as heavy as lead. But still nice of course.

Having had two mugs of strong black coffee, I came in here to sit at the computer – and promptly crashed out. This anti-potassium stuff really is wicked because it was a deep, complete and absolute sleep that lasted quite a while.

As a result, my lunchtime fruit was more like a mid-afternoon fruit, made even later by the fact that I did some tidying up in there as well. Imagine that! Me, tidying up!

There was some personal stuff that then needed my attention so I dealt with that and then went into the kitchen to make some hot chocolate, only to bump into the cleaner coming in through the front door with some post for me so we had a chat.

After she left I made my drink and then came back in here, where I crashed out yet again.

And if you thought that the last one was deep, what about this one? I even managed to go off on a nocturnal – although I suppose that you would say “diurnal” – ramble. While I was crashed out in the early evening before tea I was with my friend from the Wirral. He’d had some major disappointment and needed to make a phone call. There was a phone box in a cabin by the pavilion in the park where we were so we set off that way. It meant crossing some rough ground where I lost sight of him. Instead I saw a girl whom I knew so I shouted out to her “I thought that I’d lost you” and went over to take her by the hand. However I met my friend and we ended up at the pavilion. He asked me if I knew the dial code for Italy so after some thought I said that it was either 41 or 45 … "it’s actually 39" – ed … He went off to dial and I sat on the floor outside. There was obviously some kind of event taking place because a large queue built up for the Gents – all men in frock coats and top hats. Meantime I was counting out my small change because I’d promised him some liquorice allsorts but was dismayed to see that I didn’t have enough money and after some thought, decided that I’d have to use a note. Pretty soon this queue built up considerably and I found myself in the way. Some of the people began to moan and one or two people whom I knew from work told me that I ought to move or else there might be trouble. I just sat there totally impassively. Just as things were becoming quite heated my friend appeared. “Are we ready” I asked, and when he nodded I stood up and departed with him, leaving those people in the queue to sort things out themselves.

You’ve no idea, by the way, how much truth there is in a small story like that.

And not only that, have you ever had to try to work when you are totally wrecked by this miserable anti-potassiun stuff? I couldn’t see, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t write yet somehow I managed to pour out the remaining notes for the next radio programme. God alone knows what I’m going to find when I come to dictate them.

But I can’t keep going like this. It’s simply not possible. It’s only 21:30 and I’m wrecked yet again.

There’s nothing much to do over the weekend except a radio programme. I’ll probably have a day off tomorrow, spent totally unconsciously as I sink under the weight of this crazy medication.

Tangerine Dream will still be going round on the playlist as they did today but I bet that I won’t hear all that much of it. "To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub" said Hamlet, but Richard Thompson told me that YOU DREAM TOO MUCH. IT’S GOING TO END BAD.

Mind you, Richard Thompson was singing in my ear to KEEP YOUR DISTANCE very loudly, and quite right too when I first encountered Castor and I took no notice. "I played" and I was ohhh! so close to being "stung", so what’s going to change this time? I didn’t regret it for a moment at the time, I still don’t and I will live on the energy and emotion for the rest of my life.

Mind you, that’s not saying all that much, is it?

Anyway, I’d better pack up and go to bed nice and early before I slide back into the pit again.

At least the good news is that with this knee brace stocking kind of thing I can move about a lot easier and in less pain too. Liz has found some more so if I’m lucky she says that I might end up with an early birthday present.

Nevertheless it did rather remind me of that famous story from the Crewe Memorial Hospital back in the 60s when a patient was in there with a bad leg injury

"We have some good news and some bad news, Mr Smith" said the surgeon
"OK. Tell me the bad news"
"I’m afraid that we’ve amputated the wrong leg"
"Jesus!" cried the patient. "So what’s the good news?"
"Your bad leg is getting better"

Thursday 25th January 2024 – I’VE BEEN OVERWHELMED …

… by a fit of positivity today, and I’ve absolutely idea where it came from.

It’s probably something to do with the choice of music. When I make up a playlist of Hawkwind or Help Yourself, Marillion or Alquin it brings back far too many distant memories that I’ve long since consigned to the dustbin of history – or, at least, I thought that I had

And as Gimli said to Legolas in LORD OF THE RINGS, "Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror"

Instead, I’ve been making up a playlist of Tangerine Dream. By an amazing coincidence, Edgar Froese, John Kay of Steppenwolf and my friend Lorna’s mum were in the same refugee column that fled from Tilsit in East Prussia in the winter of 1944/45 before the advancing Red Army.

Lorna’s mum, who was 12 at the time, told some horrific tales of the flight that people would have found hard to believe before the news of the events in Ukraine broke

But I digress … "again" – ed …

Tangerine Dream bring back memories of happier times – the hot summer of 1976 where we lived at an abandoned sand quarry near Congleton and the next couple of years when I was struggling to get myself and my life together again after several years in the Wilderness and ended up going from living in an old van to owning a brand new semi-detached house in the suburbs of Winsford in just 3 years.

Albums like TANGRAM, WHITE EAGLE, FORCE MAJEURE and EXIT with the two magnificent tracks PILOTS OF PURPLE TWILIGHT and CHORONZON that can only ever be played one after the other.

Then there is CYCLONE, the best of all the Tangerine Dream albums with two tracks that have never ever been off my playlist, BENT COLD SIDEWALK, and RISING RUNNER MISSED BY ENDLESS SENDER.

But maybe it isn’t. I found an old elastic knee reinforcement that I used a few years ago and I tried that last night. I’ve been wearing it ever since on my right leg and since then the pain seems to be manageable. Perhaps it’s that which is making me feel better

However, it’s still something of a misery in bed and I was moving around all night trying to find a comfortable position. Not that you would have thought so with the amount of stuff on the dictaphone. Even when I was asleep it must have been quite restless, and there were some strange, very strange comments on the dictaphone, such as “you can tell that I’ve been on this anti-potassium stuff. There’s a radio playing somewhere, there’s a speaking voice that I can hear presenting a radio programme from somewhere. There’s absolutely no radio anywhere near where I am and this time of night no-one would be playing a radio so loud that it would penetrate solid grès de Chaussee solid granite walls 1.20m thick. I’ve no idea what’s happening except that it’s really confusing me”.

And then I awoke (so I said in my sleep) in the middle of a dream. I was in a French class and was late back from a break. Everyone else was there so I had to fight my way through the crowds to a seat at the back. The teacher had given everyone an exercise that they had to write a letter as if they were in the final throes of preparing a music festival when someone had written offering his services as a singer. I had to hunt for the question first – it was on page 80 of our notes so eventually I managed to find it. When I went to begin to write I found that my notebook was completely full. I reached under my desk, went into my backpack, pulled out a scrap pad. The people around me were amazed that I had so much stuff and was so well organised that I even had a spare notepad. I just gave a smile and began to write down the question on the spare notepad so that I’d be ready to answer it and writing it down gives me a little chance to think a little

Talking of surprises, I think that the whole wide world would be surprised at the amount of stuff that that I have. I’m probably sitting on a fortune of stuff that I’ve never had time to deal with. And as for being well-organised, I think that even I would be surprised at that.

They’d … "who?" – ed … been playing in a rock band with Declan McManus of Leek’s sister and somewhere in the middle of the Sunday hall they’d been overcome by something or other. They thought that it was just grief but maybe there was some slight predicament that was needed but it grew worse as the day went on. His leg was positively killing him at night so they arranged for an ambulance to come and collect him and have a look at whatever it was but I don’t know the name of the film now but I remember thinking that it was an excellent film and deserved to be shown on mainstream television.

And apart from the fact that Declan McManus doesn’t play for Leek but for TNS in Wales, you don’t really expect a dream to make sense, do you?

After that we were suddenly in Crewe again. I was sitting rather than going for a walk and suddenly had an appalling fear or suspicion that someone was watching me and I couldn’t shake it out of my mind …fell asleep here…

At a later moment a bunch of crooks had stolen a pile of antiques from a place in South-West London, rather similar to something like one of the Ealing comedies. I was involved merely as a spectator. The retreated to their headquarters with all of their loot. They tried to take taxis in order to disperse but all of the taxis were booked. In the meantime I was ringing a friend of mine in Chester to tell him that I’d left my job there as an underwriting clerk. If he was still looking for a job there was one vacant and he ought to apply. I was greeted to a pile of silence so I said “right, see you there” and hung up. I went back into the room where they were arguing. Eventually one of them grabbed his share of the loot from the table, said “right, I’m going by bus”. Someone else replied “the buses from here don’t go to Finchley Central”. He replied “I don’t care. I can take a bus to the Angel, take a bus to somewhere else and catch a bus there. It’s better than sitting around”. That propelled one or two others to start moving, particularly the fellow who had organised it to suddenly get to grips with what was going on and get a settlement to the airport so that they could fly out of the UK quickly

Did I dictate that I was with Marillion last night? … "No you didn’t" – ed … Things had been slack for them on the music scene and they’d become taxi drivers. Someone had gone up to Fish to tell him that they’d seen a dead body somewhere. He was at the taxi rank picking up a fare so as soon as he dropped off the fare he went with this other person to go to look to see if they could find this body. The rest of his group turned up too to help. Then the alarm went off so I don’t know what happened next

It was a struggle to make it to my feet which is no surprise these days and to give you an idea of what’s going on right now, getting dressed, going into the kitchen, taking my medicine and then coming back in here took me 50 minutes. What kind of state is that to be in?

First thing was to check the mails and messages and then to transcribe the dictaphone notes. And then afterwards, seeing as I was in a malicious mood I rang up the garage to find out why they hadn’t been for Caliburn.

After the usual excuses they’ll be here for him on the 8th of February to take him for his annual controle technique.

And that’s a shame because just when I was getting myself under control and feeling as if I might manage a trip around the block, I have this really bad fall that knocks the stuffing out of me and sets me back.

While I was now in something of an aggressive mood, I rang up the supermarket to complain about why one of the products that i’d ordered and they’d delivered yesterday was damaged. I sent them a photo by e-mail and they agreed.

The result is that I’ve had the purchase price credited back to my account and I can keep the product. They were really quite nice and helpful too which made a lovely change.

Next task was to go one better than David Crosby, presumably because I hadn’t had the flu for Christmas and was not feeling under par. It’s been a while and it was growing quite long – at least, for how I like it these days – but now it’s all short and bristly thanks to the sheep-shearer in the bathroom cupboard.

Strangely enough, sitting on the chair in the bathroom after I’d finished, I crashed out for 5 minutes. While I was away with the fairies there was something going on in my subconscious about two cats having a playfight and someone picking up one of them.

Of course, that made me wish that the tenant in my apartment downstairs would hurry up and find somewhere else to live so that I can move downstairs and have a moggy adopt me. Only 16 more months until the lease ends but I can do with her clearing off a long time before that. The way that I feel right now, I’ll be finished off a long time before the lease is.

Once I’d returned to the Land of the Living I loaded the washing machine and gave the clothes a whizz around while I went to eat some fruit. Only apples and clementines – I don’t like the pears that they have and they had run out of the Eco bananas at the delivery site.

There was even some time to play the guitar – the first time for several weeks. But how sad is it that I can no longer stand up to do it and sing? I’m really surprised that I kept my good humour.

Once I’d hung up the washing to dry I went to sit down. I reckon that I’d done enough today. I really don’t know what had come over me with all of this effort, as Monica Lewinsky one famously said.

After my hot chocolate and Christmas cake (there’s not much of that left now) I carried on with the radio programme and wrote a few notes for some of the tracks that will be figuring in the programme. Just a few to dictate now and it will be finished and I can go back to my usual routine and record it on Saturday night.

In the meantime I’ve been giving my “Hawkfest” and “Isle of Wight 1968” programmes some thought, about who will feature and so on.

The Hawkfest isn’t too difficult. Back in the good old days of the anarchy of what was loosely called “Usenet” down in the bowels of the internet quite a comprehensive list of the first Hawkfest performers was “published” and I tracked a few down, even someone who lived in Congleton who had been up on the stage performing, but the first Isle of Wight is not so easy. There was a big pile of extremely obscure groups who played there, including one that at one time had had on bass guitar Lewis Collins, later actor in The Professionals.

Even finding their names wasn’t easy, and tracking down any of their work will be much harder than that.

As for tea, I changed my mind about what to have.

During the course of the day my mind had gone from gravy to cheese sauce and I don’t know why, but nevertheless I steamed some vegetables in my microwave vegetable steamer and cooked some falafel in a nice thick cheese sauce which I poured (well, it was too thick to pour, but you get the meaning) over the top. And it was just as delicious as I expected.

So right now I’m going to go to bed. And hope that I awaken in the same positive mind tomorrow.

First task (and straight away too) is to bake my bread for the weekend. That’s important and it needs to be done early ready for my mid-morning cheese on toast.

My bread rolls were a success so I might do that again, but this time hope that the bread rises more than it did last time. I really don’t understand why my bread doesn’t rise like it ought to.

It reminds me of the time that I went to the doctors to ask for certain “help, advice and assistance” about my meeting with a certain young lady of my acquaintance in April a couple of years ago and who has figured in these pages on occasions too numerous to count, especially during the night.

He took one look at my “problem” and said "I’ll give you the number of a spiritualist whom I know"
"Why’s that?" I asked.
"I’m a doctor" he replied. "It’s my job to heal the sick. It’s his job to raise the dead."

Wednesday 24th January 2024 – SO THAT’S MY …

… cure at the Centre de Re-education over.

And it went out not with a bang but a whimper or, for those of you of my age who are old enough to remember the film HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH, “not with a bang but with a Wimpy”.

And whatever did happen to the Wimpy Bars of our adolescence? We used to Zoom along to Wimpy quite regularly, and sometimes even used to Woom along to Zimpy.

But anyway, my cure at the Centre de Re-education ended as it did because quite simply, I didn’t go.

It beats me how people are totally unable to follow simple instructions. I told them right at the very beginning of all of this that I can’t go in the mornings. and so I hadn’t noticed that today’s final sessions were arranged for this morning.

So where was I this morning at 10:00 when I should have been climbing into a taxi? The answer is that I was curled up on my chair here, totally dead to the world.

If there’s a deeper sleep that the one that I had on my chair this morning, I’d love to have it. There were two unanswered phone calls on my telephone, which must have been the taxi driver trying to contact me I suppose.

But could you imagine anyone, never mind me, sleeping through the strident tones of the late, great Micky Jones, Deke Leonard and the legendary John Cipollina as they bash out 7171-551 which, starting at 01:11, is the ring tone on my phone.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, which I’m sure you are, the song title is actually the old ‘phone number of Monkee Mike Nesmith, someone whose other claim to fame is that his mother invented Tippex (and I’m sure that you think that I’m making that up).

Meanwhile, retournons à nos moutons as they say around here.

There can’t be too many people who, knowing that they can only sleep comfortably in one position during the night because of problems with the right leg, arrange to have a Holter machine fitted in a position that actually prevents them from sleeping in it.

Consequently it was another long, dreary painful night watching my fitbit go on, and on, and on, and on.

At some point though I must have gone to sleep because there was something on the dictaphone. This was another long, rambling dream; but I was with a girl who was rather young. We were together and hanging around with a lot of people on the music scene etc. I was keeping a very close eye on her to make sure that she wasn’t led astray, except by me of course, but that’s another story, one that you’d all have to pay good money to hear. This went on and on and on. One night we all had to go home. I had that much stuff that it was all bagged and crated. When we finally turned up at this girl’s house her mother must have begun to unpack it while I was asleep. Right at the bottom on the floor she found 7 or 8 tablets. Of course they were medicine tablets from the medication that I take but she was quite horrified. She stormed into my room with this chariot thing and shouted my name. She shouted it so loudly that I immediately sat up (for real, not in a dream) and began to look round for her thinking that she was actually real and she had actually come into my room

So I’ve no idea who it was who shouted me, but regular readers of this rubbish will recall that it’s not by any means the first time that that has happened.

And so I was wide awake waiting for the alarm to go off at 06:15.

As soon as it sounded I leapt out of bed and tore off the Holter machine and put it in a bag for the driver who came at 06:30 on the dot. It was someone whom I’ve met before.

Once he’d cleared off I had my medication, including the dreaded anti-potassium stuff and awoke to find the nurse shaking me. He’d knocked on the door, had no answer, come in and shouted and still no reply and in his own words, "I was worried".

What finally awoke me was the front door bell, at 10:38 precisely. And it’s a good job that hadn’t gone to the Centre de Re-education because I’d forgotten that I’d sent off an order to Leclerc. I would have been in a right pickle if I’d gone off while that was on its way.

So after she left I spent a happy hour and a half cleaning, dicing and blanching 2kg of carrots ready for freezing, followed by a broccoli.

Sitting in the fridge, even as we speak, is a bottle of carrot and broccoli water and a set of broccoli stalks, all ready for Saturday morning and another broccoli stalk soup.

My cleaner came by and was surprised to find me at home and not out at the Centre de Re-education so she came back and began to clean it. And not having been done for several weeks, it really needed it too.

However, seeing as my condition is worsening by the minute we agreed that she would come on twice a week starting at the beginning of February, one hour to do as she is doing now, and another hour to start a programme of proper deep cleaning, like the windows and so on..

That will certainly do me some good.. It might even start to look as if someone is living here again.

Tea tonight was a beautiful left-over curry with naan bread, and tomorrow I will be having vegan pie with broccoli – for the simple reason that the freezer is now full to the brim once more and needs emptying of some of the big stuff that takes up space.

With carrots peas, mashed potato and gravy of course. It will, I hope, be simply delicious. Then there will be just two slices left, one for my birthday and a second for some other special occasion, although I’m not sure what that might be.

But right now I’m off to bed, to sleep I hope and if I’m lucky, to dream.

"Never Underestimate the Power of Dreams and the Influence of the Human Spirit" said Wilma Rudolph, who overcame polio to win a bagful of medals at the 1956 and 1960 Olympic Games.

To be honest, I’m not sure what influence my dreams have over my spirit but they keep me rolling along when these days I can’t even walk. I just hope that they keep on coming because as I have said before… "and on many occasions too" – ed … I have far more excitement in them than I am having locked in my little prison right now.

Tuesday 23rd January 2024 – SO THAT’S ANOTHER …

… French hospital that I can add to my ever-growing list. And remind me to cross it off my list of ones to revisit. Florence Nightingale was there and dropped her lamp on my toe.

But seriously, old and creaking though the hospital might have been, I couldn’t fault the service that I had yet again

“But I don’t want another one of these 06:30 starts again” said he, setting his alarm for 06;15 tomorrow. “I’m not as young as I was”.

Indeed I’m not. It took me over half an hour to wash and dress this morning which meant that I didn’t have time to make my sandwiches for the journey. Consequently I’ve been without food and drink all day until I returned home.

That’s actually not a bad idea either. It’s something along the principle of a long journey where “what doesn’t go in won’t want to come out” at an inconvenient moment.

The taxi was late arriving so I had to ring up to chase them up. And when it arrived, what kind of state was I in to stagger to the car in my condition? This is really beyond a joke now.

But eventually we set off, with the driver telling me that she had no idea where the Hospital St Antoine was so she programmed it into her GPS.

She was … errr … past her prime, shall we say, and moaned and complained all the way to Paris about just about everything.

When we reached Paris we zigzagged up and down the streets as she kept on misreading her GPS, we almost speared another vehicle on a couple of occasions as she swerved dramatically across carriageways and nearly took out a couple of bollards as she did another handbrake turn at a missed junction.

A proper olde-worlde taxi driver she was, and I’ll tell you something for nothing, that I’d travel with her again. She made the journey quite interesting.

Finding the hospital was one thing. Finding the building that I had to visit was another. And then finding a parking space was something else quite difficult. In the end we negotiated with two ambulances and persuaded one of them to leave.

It was a desperate, agonising crawl on my crutches to the lift, to the reception and then to the waiting room. And my driver was helpfulness itself. Nothing was too much trouble for her and once she was away from the steering wheel she was actually quite a pleasant person.

We were 30 minutes late, not a problem because I telephoned them en route to say that we were “held up in traffic”. I suspected that something like this that happened.

There were quite a few people waiting but I jumped the queue and they saw to me straight away. Now I have a machine and its terminals stuck to me until tomorrow morning.

Yes, they want me to bring it back by 10:00 but they are of course joking. I’m not going back tomorrow. If it’s that important they should have given me a bed for the night.

Anyway I have the Holter Machine now, and I left the Technical Department here, the Haematology Department at Hospital Pitié Salpetrière and the taxi company fight it out between them if the hospital wants it back tomorrow.

Whatever the outcome was, the net result is that I have to be up and about to hand it to someone at my door at 06:30. And I suspect that it will be what my old boss when I was chauffeuring in Brussels would call a “Spanish 06:30”, meaning “any time they like”.

Having done all that, we set off for home. On the way back I had a message from the Hospital Pitié-Salpetrière – "Please stop taking medicament X and we’ll send you a prescription for medicament Y instead".

And I bet that After the blood test results on Wednesday There will be further changes.

We arrived back early, which was nice, and my helpful cleaner met us at the door to help me up the stairs. I’d be totally lost without her.

Once I’d settled down I made some hot chocolate and a nice baguette sandwich of lettuce, cheese and tomato which was excellent for a starving man.

And then back here I downloaded and printed the prescription for my long-suffering cleaner to take to the pharmacy tomorrow. She came down to collect it and we had a chat.

Then there was the dictaphone notes. Tons of them. I travelled miles during the night. I can’t remember much about this dream but it was one of those that rambled on. I was back at home with my family. One of my niece’s children was there. Everyone else was there. The girl was in a wheelchair because she’d had a problem and was going to the doctor’s very soon. They were going to give her a respray of her artificial suntan before she went. There were 2 other people disabled in that house and me too. I said to my mother “don’t you think that there’s something wrong somewhere with us that you have so many disabled people here all at once,”. She replied “yes you don’t usually have that many disabled people in a household do you?”.

Disabled people apart, there was a lot that was wrong about our family and household and disability wasn’t one of them.

There was then a dream about my youngest sister. A woman had decided to teach her to dance some kind dance. She held her backwards so that my sister couldn’t see what was behind her. They began this dance. There was a huge snake that lived in this room. When my youngest sister had her eyes closed and was dancing near that direction. Someone shouted “it’s OK baby. The snake (they used the snake’s name) has her jaws closed quite tight”. Obviously the inference being that this woman was going to lead my sister up towards the snake and the snake would devour her. My sister was immediately on the defensive and became much more nervous and tight in this woman’s arms than she had been before that person shouted out that comment.

And then my sister was there again later on. There was a digger there that slowly picked her up. She was dangling over different parts of the audience of the State Fair. Then she happened to fall or something fell from her hand. Instead of reaching for it this machine’s hand took her higher until she was in some kind of despairing reach of what she’d dropped. It slowly lowered her and she kept that position. The arm of the machine moved around. My sister actually soared up and went off in a very nice aeroplane. Someone standing by me tried his best but was carried away and the plane once it got going went more and more out to Haverfordwest. Before she left she gave me this little ball of dough and told me how to ply it and pull it apart … becomes very indistinct and tails off …

Not much of that latter dream makes sense but it was really difficult to decipher, especially as I began to taper off into nothingness. I wonder how it would have ended had I not done so.

Then I was back in a dream from a while ago, I think about some people investigating a murder. They were following up several clues, one of which was something that had fallen from a TGV. Anyway, a TGV was going full speed ahead when there was an enormous bang from underneath. They slowed right down and stopped. This stopped the whole TGV network. They looked underneath the line but couldn’t see anything so they walked slowly back along the track to see if they could see anything. They came to the TGV that was following them but was stopped. he said that just 20 metres back he had run over a dead cat. He was certain that it wasn’t there before when he was on the outbound trip. They began to look for this cat but couldn’t find it.

This dream moved on to someone having been killed. They’d picked up some evidence about a vehicle being seen somewhere. They made a few enquiries at an isolated farm in the vicinity. The farmer said that he knew absolutely nothing but it was the pace that his denial went that made them extremely suspicious They looked further around and came across another farmer who had a vehicle but something about this didn’t seem to fit anything. Eventually they found a third farmer who had had a Bedford CA van but had taken it to be scrapped. He was in the area at the time but had left the van unattended for a while and then gone back to it. He was sure that it had been moved. They were then convinced that they’d found the vehicle that was used so they went and bought the van and drove it back, deciding that rather than have it forensically tested they would try shock tactics and drive to the first farm in it. As soon as the farmer saw the van coming he ordered his men to open fire. A couple of them did but when he saw that it was quite pointless he put his gun to his head and shot three bullets through it, finishing himself off.

There was plenty more where that came from, but you don’t really want to read it especially if you are having supper or something.

My supper tonight was a taco roll with rice and veg – really delicious yet again. I don’t know why I complained about the taste yesterday. And with no sauce left I made my own with olive oil, wine vinegar and lemon juice with some garlic paste. Totally delicious.

And now, having already crashed out twice and an early start in the morning, I’m off to bed. Today has really exhausted me. But there’s my blood pressure, my medication and my on-line food order before I can go to sleep, not to mention my early start tomorrow.

It’s never-ending, isn’t it?

Monday 22nd January 2024 – THIS PERISHING RUBBISH …

… that I’m taking to control the potassium in my kidneys is going way beyond what is reasonable.

After having the helping at 07:30 or so with the morning medication by 09:05 I was out like a light and the next thing that I remember was that it was about 11:00. It was really as if someone had simply flicked a switch.

And when I awoke I was in a state of utter confusion that has continued to some extent or another throughout the day

Surprisingly, I found that I had even been on my travels while I was crashed out on the chair. I was in Nantwich and noticed that there was a big hotel right opposite the railway station, right by the bus station (which it isn’t) so I had this idea of going round France and the UK, finding similar hotels located in similar good positions and marketing holidays aimed at the pedestrian tourist with luggage. When Hawkwind awoke me with ANGELS OF DEATH I was busy setting up a stand at a railway junction in the Gironde somewhere in order to greet my passengers who were changing trains there.

That’s exactly how deep a sleep it was.

But returning to last night, I didn’t need much rocking when I went to bed loaded up with this anti-potassium stuff, that’s for sure. I was soon away with the fairies.

And quite literally too. I must have travelled miles during the night. I dreamed that I’d had one of those drinks again (and that’s bad news, isn’t it?). I remember so vividly mixing it and drinking it and thinking that this time of course it didn’t taste so bad so what was I worried about? Thinking that it was the nicest one yet. When I turned over I awoke from the pain in my leg. I looked at my watch and it was 00:25 and I was still in bed so it was something that I obviously must have dreamt but it was so real.

Later on I was in my blue MkI Cortina. I was out with a girl again last night. I had to take her home so we drove home. As we went through Haslington there was a sign that said “Winsford Station” and it was 8.5 miles away. I thought that that was a strange thing to see. I brought her home and parked outside the door to her apartment. I asked her for a kiss but she thought that it was rather too much of a public place. But we had a bit of a kiss etc parked outside her door then she went in. I wish that I knew who she was. She was very familiar to me but I just can’t think whether I knew her or not. Just round the corner from there was a golf club. I wanted to use the bathroom so I thought that I’d go there. I went in and did what I needed to do. I thought that these toilets are much higher than the usual ones and I felt much more comfortable sitting on these than I did on the one back at home at the traditional height. It was easy for me to dress afterwards. As I turned to wash my hands I noticed that someone had left a golf cart and golf clubs right by the sink. I washed as well as I could. I picked up my crutches but there were some other crutches there too. I picked those up and walked outside. There was a cleaning team there because it was time to go home and close the building. I explained to one of them, a young guy, that there was a set of golf clubs still in the toilet. He thanked me and said goodbye. he told me not to forget all my crutches. I realised that I had the ones that weren’t mine so I told him about those too and handed them to one of the people.

But I wish that I knew who that girl was. She seemed so familiar to me that I’m sure that I recognised her but I just couldn’t put a name to her. And isn’t that a shame?

And then it was common knowledge that I was leaving the hospital so a day or two before I was due to go a whole crocodile of people passed by my bed in a kind-of conga dance to say goodbye to me. I was drugged up to the eyebrows so I was rather unaware, rather unsure. One of the very last people to go was something small dressed in pierrot’s clothes and a STRAWBERRY MOOSE hat on it. With it being small it can’t possibly have been someone who worked there. Then I remembered that one of the staff had a very young daughter and brought her into the hospital every now and again. She’d been to see me a few times so I reached out, touched her arm and began to stroke it in time to the music. A horrible thought came over me “I wish that I knew who this was and I hope that it was that young girl otherwise this is going to be a terribly embarrassing situation in which to be”. I forgot to mention that right at the very beginning I was asleep. It was someone blowing a hunting horn of some description that had in fact awoken me, just blowing 2 blasts on this horn so I was awake and that was how, because of this horn

Next off I was with Nerina in a house somewhere. I can’t remember very much about this dream. I’d prepared a programme for the radio and had sent it off. Very near the end what I’d put in there was wiped out and Thierry’s voice came over, introduced a song but it only played so many seconds of it before it cut to the News. I heard him say “oh blast!” but I wasn’t sure whether it was for real or on the radio. After the news his voice carried on and went well over the hour so I had no idea what was happening. In the meantime I was planning on buying a house. I’d seen one out in Brittany that I’d liked , a farm cottage type of place on the edge of a village with outbuildings at the back for the cars. I’d bought it but trying to obtain possession was proving to be really complicated. I knew that it would happen and I knew that it would come but trying to actually physically obtain it was proving to be extremely difficult

After that, someone came along and awoke me and said that it was time so I began to get up but I thought that it was rather early. My pianist, who was sleeping in the same room got up and told everyone that she would help me. That seemed to satisfy them all. After some debate and discussion they all left. In the meantime I went back to sleep again. Then I awoke and wondered why the alarm hadn’t gone off for a second time. I looked at my watch and it was 05:46, a long time before the alarm goes off so that part must have been a dream too.

And who was this pianist? Surely not the 12-inch pianist that my rather deaf fairy Godmother brought me once.

When the alarm went off I was busy being interviewed by a Colonel from a Home Guard regiment in Normandy. They were creating this to defend the land against the invading Germans and wanted volunteers so I went along. He laughed and said that I wouldn’t be any good. I explained that I couldn’t march and couldn’t run but I could fire a gun. I could be the battalion reserve. In case of invasion they could just put me somewhere with a machine gun and I could act as their hold-up man while they went off and found some better positions somewhere.

There was even more that this but you really don’t want to know about it, especially if you are eating your lunch right now.

So I staggered on my crutches into the kitchen to pump myself up with more medication, and then back in here to check the mails and messages. and I do appreciate all of the mails and messages that I receive.

Having transcribed the dictaphone notes I promptly crashed out as I said just now.

It was a very bleary-eyed and comparatively incoherent me who had to speak to the nurse from the hospital ringing up to find out how I was. I told her about the problems with the anti-potassium medication and about water retention, the ack of ability to walk etc.

She replied that she’d speak to the doctor about it but as yet no-one has come back to me. They are probably waiting for the result of this week’s blood test.

And so am I if it means that I can stop taking the blasted stuff.

There was an exciting phone call over midday too. I was speaking to my neighbour on the phone when suddenly she had to go because there was someone at her door.

No sooner had she come back and restarted the chat when I had to go because there was someone at my door. It was my long-suffering cleaner who had brought me my next lot of injections. And there are more to come too, which will be here on Wednesday. I hope that there will be some room in the fridge.

We finally managed to finish our ‘phone call and then I had to chase up this bon de transport to go to Paris tomorrow. And the doctor had actually already sent it – to the taxi company.

And he’s put the address incorrectly. It’s not actually the Hospital Pitié-Salpetrière where I’m going but the Hospital St Antoine. I hope that the taxi driver knows the way and it won’t cause any complications, because the doctor has filled out bon de transport is for the Hospital Pitié-Salpetrière.

The ambulance company that brought me home on Friday rang me too. There’s some confusion in their office about my health cover

Apart from that I’ve been weaving my way through the next radio programme. I listened to the one for this week and sent it off and then made a start on another.

And how difficult is it when you have all these interruptions and your head is going round and round after this drink? It took me an age to choose the music and pair it off, and I’ve only written half of the notes. I really ought to be doing better than this.

But not right now though. I’ve had tea – a stuffed pepper that somehow didn’t seem to be as nice as usual and I don’t know why, and now I’m off to bed ready for my … gulp … 06:30 alarm clock.

Before I go though, I’ll leave you with THE HIGHLIGHTS of the game from the weekend. When that ball hit the bar after 55 seconds, I could hear it from here, never mind on the computer.

In case you’re wondering, which I’m sure you are, the team in purple are under-21 stars of a team that’s pushing for promotion in the English Championship. The team in white and green are basically Saturday afternoon players from Wales.

But look at their third and fifth goals. Aren’t they peaches?

Sunday 21st January 2024 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

… another one of those days where I have emulated my namesake and done three fifths of five eights of … errr … nothing.

And that’s hardly a surprise. In between my leg and this blasted stuff to cure this excess of potassium, I’ve not been in any fit state for anything at all.

While we’re on the subject of this anti-potassium stuff … "well, one of us is" – ed … after taking the stuff last night I stayed up to see how long it would be before it overwhelmed me if I tried to fight it.

It’s as well to know these things, I suppose.

So I stayed up, and up, and up, and fought, and fought, and fought, but by 03:30 I was well and truly done and I crawled off to bed as best as I could.

It was round about 10:50 that I finally awoke, and that’s no sleep at all for a Sunday.

And I had a head like lead too. I don’t know what’s in that stuff and I really don’t think that I want to. But it really is the pits, as John McEnroe would say.

So having made it out of bed and dressed, I staggered off into the kitchen for the next batch of medication, and then back in here it took a good while for me to come back into the Land of the Living.

Once I’d gathered my wits, which, seeing as I have so few these days, takes much longer than it ought, I sat down to listen to the dictaphone to find out if I’d been anywhere during the night. I was living in Wistaston last night with a group of people last night and had to go into Crewe. I set off on foot and I went down to the end of our road which was a dead end, and found that the obstruction had been cleared away and we could walk through. I carried on walking and ended up in Crewe on Brookhouse Drive. I thought “this is going to be convenient if they leave this footpath open like this without the obstructions that they’d had before. I went to do my shopping and then came back and announced to everyone “do you know what they’ve done? They’ve moved the obstructions from down the road now so that we could walk through”. Someone made some kind of remark and my mother showed me an article in the newspaper about how they’d now created a road between Wistaston and Shavington. “I suppose that that’s it” she said. Reading the article I thought that it looked like it. That’s bad news because they would be building apartments or something like that alongside and there’s a little more greenery gone so I was disappointed. I mentioned it to a couple of people but they weren’t sympathetic at all. One of them was certain that apartments would be built and thought that it was a good thing. In the meantime there was some more school to attend that morning. It was Saturday morning and I had my music lessons. My mother wrote out a shopping list. I asked “do you want directions to this new street?”. “No” she replied. You’ve been there once, you’ll know it now”. She put 2 extra streets on this list and handed it to me. It was just like the usual shopping list with these 2 extra streets on it. I set out and halfway down I came to some kind of yard like a school yard. There were people playing so I went in. Somehow I ended up on my knees so I walked on them instead. When I was inside I met a guitar teacher. He had a girl whom I knew with him. She was about 10. I said “hello” to her because I knew her. I had a look around the yard and then I left. I said to her “not going to music school today, are we?”. She asked “why not?”. I explained that it would be 10:00 soon and it’s a long way to go. She said “it’s only 5 minutes and it’ll take me less time because I’m not on my knees” which I thought was rather insulting but never mind. I smiled and laughed with her. I set off on my knees on my travels down this new footpath thing. There were many people on it. I thought that it was looking like the M6 on a Friday afternoon these days.

Yes, I know. My family yet again.

Mind you, I had better luck next time. I was with my Dutch friend. She’d come to visit me in the Auvergne. We were talking about all of our friends because she was now living in a commune. She mentioned someone who had transformed a cellar there into a small apartment. It sounded really interesting so she asked me if I’d like to go. We went along and had to climb down these steps. It was really nice, what he’d done. It was very small but everything was well laid out to make the most of the space. I was quite impressed. He didn’t have very much in there so I said to him “it’s rather Mies van der Rohe, isn’t it?”. he didn’t understand the significance so I said “you know – less is more”. He said “yes, certainly”. He had a friend down there who was caulking the joint between the skirting board and the wall, doing a good job of it. It really looked quite nice. My Dutch friend and I ended up back in the main house again. I said that I’d come to see her in a couple of days. A couple of days later I set out from my house. I was nearly hit by a car reversing out of a driveway. He pulled away but I overtook him and carried on. He was behind me for a while but then disappeared. I turned up at my friend’s with an old denim jacket that I wore occasionally. I’d mentioned earlier to her about embroidering it. She’d agreed to do it so I had it with me. My friend and I ended up in bed together but it wasn’t a sexual thing, just lying there talking. She said “I can’t pay you, except maybe for an afternoon or something like that”. I said “you don’t owe me anything. There’s no need to pay me anything at all. Let’s just stay here and be comfortable

With a little voyage like that, what would you do when you had read all of the notes. I gave her a ring and said "I dreamed about you last night."
"Did you?" she asked.
"No" I replied. "You wouldn’t let me"

And Mies van der Rohe – there’s a name to conjure with. He was a director of the Bauhaus, the modernist school of architecture in Germany and after the excesses of the Victorian period of architecture, pioneered the idea of minimalism in design and construction with his famous slogan of "less is more"

The ghastly buildings of the immediate post-war period prior to the arrival of the even more horrific Brutalist movement of the 60s and 70s can be laid fairly and squarely at the feet of Mies van der Rohe and his fellow crew of Bauhaus barbarians

Having finished the dictaphone notes I went off for my porridge, cheese on toast and strong, hot, black coffee. I’m back eating again after the last few days that I mentioned when my appetite went for a while.

However, having said that, I’m not sure how long I’ll continue eating because I’m in total agony every time that I try to stand up and try to move, with this perishing leg. I really have done it a major mischief but a scanner and a handful of X-rays can’t lie, I suppose.

And it’s no good if I can’t stand up because I can’t make any food to eat.

And then there’s the question of this anti-potassium stuff. This is killing me. Every time I sit down I either fall asleep or if I close my eyes I begin to hallucinate again. If I could walk I’d be forging prescriptions for this stuff and hawking it around the back streets of Granville.

It goes without saying that I’ve crashed out more than once this afternoon, and quite definitively too.

Whenever it’s been possible, I’ve been chatting to people here and there. Ingrid rang me for a chat, then Liz and a couple of my neighbours have been texting me too. I seem to be in demand these days, which is nice.

In fact I was speaking to Ingrid for so long that I forgot about my pizza in the oven. It’s not like me to forget my food, is it?

As I said yesterday, it’s the wrong flour so the pizza wasn’t the dazzling success that it might be, but it was still nice, edible and filling.

So that’s it for the day. I’m off to take my blood pressure, take that nasty horrible stuff with the rest of the medication and then go to bed. I’ve had enough for today and I’m not sorry.

Tomorrow I restart work after my Christmas break, hospitalisation, recuperation etc. But I don’t feel much like it. Not with this flaming leg and this blasted anti-potassium stuff. If I could stop those I’d probably feel a little better but if I don’t, then when I come back from Paris on Tuesday I’ll start writing out my … errr …. instructions. It’s about time.

What I hope for is that someone will give a good and loving home to STRAWBERRY MOOSE.

As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve travelled halfway round the World and well into the Polar regions with, quite often, only him as company. My faithful companion and I have travelled miles together and so he deserves a nice comfortable retirement somewhere where someone will look after him properly.

Saturday 20th January 2024 – THIS BLASTED DRINK …

… that they have prescribed me to alleviate the excess potassium in my kidneys really is driving me mad.

Last night I had a drink of it before going to bed and was stark out of everything, including my head, for several hours once I’d gone to bed. Fair enough, it was after midnight when I finally retired but until about 03:20 when I awoke, in exactly the same position as when I went to sleep, I remember nothing whatever.

And then after the helping this morning I was slumped over my desk fast asleep until 11:20, and then it took a good while before I felt in any condition to stand up and make my cheese on toast.

There should have been a helping at midday too but I eschewed that. I just couldn’t imagine the idea of being stark out for several hours during the afternoon.

And so as you can imagine, I haven’t done very much today . And surprisingly, I didn’t do much during the night either. I was working on the radio at one point night and was trying to prepare a programme. We had a visitor, a little girl rather like Shirley Temple, come along so naturally I let her do a little here and there and I played a song for her etc. A few people gathered around the doorway to watch. After we’d done about 3 or 4 songs I said that we were going to continue the programme and I’d play a song for one of the girls standing at the door so I wanted everyone to be quiet. That brought something of a dispute and discussion from some of them. I thought “this isn’t going to be very good radio at all”. Eventually when I had everyone quiet I was just about to play the song when the girl … shall we say … made a noise. Of course the whole studio dissolved into a huge fit of laughter. I thought “God, this is no way to run a radio station with all of this kind of thing going on”.

Later on, my friends from the Wirral and I were out in the red Cortina estate going somewhere when I needed to stop for fuel. There was a little wayside pump at the side of the road so we stopped there. There was no cashier, no owner’s sign and no price displayed. By the time I went to fuel up it had transformed into a proper fuel station with shop, cashier, café etc. My friend told me that he’d paid so I began to fuel up. The car was quite empty so it needed a lot of fuel. I asked him how much he paid but he didn’t answer. Instead, a figure of £91:37 flashed up on the screen. I didn’t realise the significance of this so as he hadn’t answered I asked him again. Again he didn’t reply but once more the figure of £91:37 flashed up on the screen. After another couple of times of asking I suddenly realised that the figure of £91:37 was what he’d paid. The actual total was less than that. He and his wife said “I didn’t realise that you were so poor”. I asked what he meant and he said “the car stereo – you’re using something different and DAMNATION ALLEY is playing. I actually had a micro-card reader with memory card plugged into the aux socket of the car stereo. I reminded him that he needed his change but he seemed to walk away so I had to remind him to collect his change. However we ended up going into a little shop on the site. We had to queue to go in so my friend’s wife reminded me to look for some marmalade. When we finally reached the head of the queue my friend asked for a tin of something that was displayed on the wall behind the cashier. It was written in Chinese characters and was a kind-of duck-egg blue. He studied the tin for a while and said “I think the type that I have is a darker green colour” so the guy pointed to another one on the side wall. It looked the same to me and my friend’s wife whispered to him “never mind. We’ll go to (a shop name). We get more points there anyway”.

And when I awoke, “Damnation Alley” was indeed playing on the computer. How about that for foresight?

And the red Cortina estate again? It’s probably tired of sitting in the warehouse and needs a run out. It’s not been run since 2000 when I drove it from Brussels to Montaigut towing a scrap MkV Cortina on an A-frame.

That was an adventure and no mistake. No rear brakes on it either so I came at night down the autoroute in the darkness and was only stopped once by the Police

But it’ll make someone a lovely, and valuable vehicle. It needs the head refurbishing, especially the valve guides replacing as it burns a cloud of oil when it starts up, which is no surprise due to its intergalactic mileage. But then the head will need refurbishing anyway to comply with “unleaded” standards.

There are no rear brakes, as I said. There’s a strange vibration from the back axle that vibrates the rear brake pipe and fractures it at one of the cylinders so it leaks fluid. The easiest answer is to blank off the brake line and drive carefully.

The wheels need refurbishing too. They are alloy wheels but they are letting out air.

Apart from that, it’s all original, never been welded and it’s a beautiful car that’ll look really nice on someone’s drive or on a Summer Sunday drive.

But I digress … "again" – ed …

So that was the story of my night. When the alarm went off I fell out of bed and took my blood pressure – still slowly rising and I don’t have a clue why – not that I am too bothered because I can’t do anything about it anyway so why worry?

Then we had the usual pantomime of me trying to dress and then I staggered off to find my medication, including this blasted drink stuff.

Back here, as I said, I crashed out for several hours and then I wasn’t in much of a state to do anything.

When I finally started work, whenever that was, I carried on with de-duplicating my computer . I disposed of quite a few files that were duplicates or earlier versions of ones already there and one of the directories (yes, I grew up with DOS 5.0) is looking a little tidier now.

While I was searching for something I came across a live football match – Pontypridd United v Cardiff Metropolitan. And I’d watched 55 minutes of it before I realised that it was from last year and I’d seen it before.

There was football later on – TNS v Abertawe under-21s in the final of a cup competition run by the Football Association of Wales.

Not that I’m a big fan of TNS by any means at all – quite the reverse, and for a variety of reasons too that would take far too long to explain. But when they are up against one of the five teams that turned their backs on the Welsh pyramid when it was created in 1992, I’ll be their biggest fan.

Of course, it’s quite true that TNS, based in Oswestry, are in effect an English club But there’s a huge Welsh heritage in Oswestry , which was part of Wales until comparatively modern times and a survey taken in 1972 indicated that a return to Wales would be popular. And the situation has intensified since.

However the big clubs have turned their backs on their country and continued to play their football in the English leagues purely for financial reasons

It’s a long and complicated story but to cut things short … "hooray" – ed … Abertawe’s under-21s made it to the final where they met TNs and I am delighted to say that TNS stuffed them 5-1 in a historic result.

Down the centre of the field it was all pretty much even but TNS’s wingers tore Abertawe’s full-backs to shreds, which you’ll see in due course when the presenting company posts the highlight video.

In the meantime, HERE’S AN INTERESTING MATCH in the second tier between Caerfyrddyn and Rhydaman. I don’t think that I have ever seen so many “sitters” missed in one game in the whole of my life.

Tea tonight was delicious baked potatoes done to perfection in the air fryer, and a vegan salad and vegan burger.

And I’ve reached a crisis because I’m running low, very low indeed on the burgers that I like, the vegetable mash type that are covered in a kind-of battery breadcrumbs. I shall have to smile sweetly at Liz and pick her brains on a way of making them. We had an interesting chat this evening and I should have asked her then.

Or anyone else’s brains if anyone else has any ideas too. Someone always comes up with something.

So that’s it for today. I’ve done enough. And no baking tomorrow means that I can take it easy. But what a life, locked in my apartment and daren’t go out in case I can’t climb the stairs on the way back.

But I’ve been thinking about this nerve issue. I’ve said before that after I’ve had a fall I always seem to feel worse.

And so I’m wondering if it’s not the fall that causing the sudden dramatic deterioration each time, but the dramatic deterioration that’s causing the fall.

Remember when I was at Noz a few months ago when I had that sudden, stabbing pain in my left (the good) leg that caused me to fall down? Maybe it’s that that’s happening in the right leg but because the senses there are dead, I can’t feel it.

If you can imagine an electric discharge or shock in your system for example that scorches down your leg and burns out a nerve, something like that.

So I’ll talk to the specialist when I see him on 14th February. Meantime I’m off to Paris again on Tuesday to have a Holter machine fitted – a machine that monitors your heartbeat on a permanent basis.

Rosemary thinks that that’s the first step before having a pacemaker fitted. I suppose that they’ll have to try to do something to keep me alive, even if it’s just to watch THIS RARE BING6NEEL SYNDROME advance through my body.

"It’s just like you, that is, not to have a simple illness like everyone else" she complained.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Category Archives: dream

Saturday 3rd February 2024 – YOU MIGHT THINK …

Friday 2nd February 2024 – JUST FOR A …

Thursday 1st February 2024 – I HAD A …

Wednesday 31st January 2024 – AS I SAID …

Tuesday 30th January 2024 – JUST FOR A …

Monday 29th January 2024 – WHAT A SHAME!

Sunday 28th January 2024 – I DON’T KNOW …

Saturday 27th January 2024 – SITTING IN MY FRIDGE …

Friday 26th January 2024 – MY BREAD ROLLS …

Thursday 25th January 2024 – I’VE BEEN OVERWHELMED …

Wednesday 24th January 2024 – SO THAT’S MY …

Tuesday 23rd January 2024 – SO THAT’S ANOTHER …

Monday 22nd January 2024 – THIS PERISHING RUBBISH …

Sunday 21st January 2024 – TODAY HAS BEEN …

Saturday 20th January 2024 – THIS BLASTED DRINK …

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