Category Archives: montlucon

Tuesday 16th February 2016 – OHH NOO!!

As if I don’t already have enough to worry about, they seem to have discovered that it appears that I have a pulmonary embolism. No wonder that I’ve not been feeling up to all that much just recently.

That’s right – I went out to Montlucon today, thanks to Terry who drove me, and the hospital for a check-up. Rather like the young girl who came back home after a trip around Eastern Europe and told her mother that she was pregnant.
“How do you know?” asked mother. “Have you had a check-up?”
“No, mother” replied the girl “It was a Bulgarian”.

Anyway, here we are. I have to go back to hospital on Thursday for yet more tests. This is going to be a never-ending cycle and I can see it ending up like this as a rather permanent arrangement.

If that’s not enough to be going on with, they’ve decided that they ought to change my anti-coagulant for another brand. That’s right – just five days after I’ve spent €447 in buying a month’s supply. Of course, I’ll be reimbursed by my insurance but that’s hardly the point if I have to stand it out in the first place anyway. And so I told them flat that I’ll change – once this supply is exhausted (and when I’ll be exhausted too, I shouldn’t be surprised).

There’s news about the blood tests too. From now on I only need give the samples once per week. That might sound like good news but it isn’t necessarily, and for two good reasons. Firstly, I’m having the twice-daily visits of the nurse anyway, so I’m not really going to benefit by anything very much. And secondly, it says on the prescription that I’ll be needing them for the next FOUR MONTHS! That takes me up to the summer and I wouldn’t be surprised if things go beyond that too.

in case you haven’t already gathered, I’m sick up to the eyeballs of all of this. I think that we all knew that it wouldn’t be too long before I wished that I had my spleen back so that I could vent it. I shall just have to borrow someone else’s.

Still, on the positive side, it was nice to be out and about today. First time that I’ve been out for over a week – since I came back from hospital in fact. It was freezing cold, minus 1°C as it happens, and I felt every single degree of it. But at least I could get to the Amaranthe and buy a load of vegan cheese and some oats so that at least I’d have things to eat. But once more, I felt every bump in the road and I was so glad to sit down on the sofa back here.

I’d had a very leisurely morning though, which is just as well because I’d had a hectic night. Difficulties sleeping however, but now that I know the reason why, it’s no surprise. But once I’d gone to sleep, I was gone – and I do mean “gone”.

First port of call was at a football match in Scotland – a non-league game and one of the teams playing was pushing hard for the non-league championship so that it could be promoted to divisional football there. However, there was a TV programme broadcasting about how this would be unlikely to happen because several of the players at the club were friends with players at the club that risked being relegated. One of these non-league players even gave lifts to the star performer of his own team, to take him to matches. The TV programme was alleging that all of this co-operation would come to a shuddering halt in order to preserve the league club’s status, and that the non-league club would deliberately try to avoid winning the remaining matches. This then drifted on to a report about Aldershot football club. This club, as we know, went bankrupt years ago and was reformed, and fought its way back to Football League status. The new club had built a new stadium (which, of course, it hasn’t) and the TV programme was focusing on all the the problems that the club was having there – the drug abuse, vagrancy and delinquency of the area, all kinds of things going on on the car park affecting the club. It seemed that the club was bitterly regretting building this ground in the area where they did and how they were hoping that fate would be kind to them and enable them to move to a new ground in more salubrious surroundings.
Our next voyage concerned a visit to a man who had a collection of chimpanzees and monkeys. He had a cage, where he kept his chimpanzees and monkeys, fitted up as a room with all kinds of different signs, cut-outs and objects in it and he was training these monkeys to recognise all of these objects and behave accordingly. One of these signs was like a wooden notice-board that swung out from the wall rather like a door might do, but would fold back 180 degrees. It made a horrible squeaking noise when it swung open, and one of his monkeys could imitate the noise perfectly and this was quite an astonishing feat.
We haven’t finished yet either. I found myself in an office at a place where I used to work (it wasn’t the same office but the people were quite a mix of former colleagues from different places) and I was making myself a cup of tea. I’d run out of tea bags and so I “borrowed” one from someone else and while I was doing so, someone made a remark that I’d better hurry up or else a black man would be doing my work. A third person, overhearing, and being evidently surprised that I had not commented on the remark, asked me what the previous person had said. I repeated the remark, except substituting “grand-child” for black person, which took the wind out of her sales. She was clearly expecting some kind of racist observation.
From here we went on to North America and an outdoor event like a fair or some such. As we arrived, a stream of runners were returning from a race.It was about 14:30 and, apparently, the day always started at 08:30 with a marathon race and as we were arriving it would be when the main stream of runners would be returning, and this was what I was telling my companion. One of the runners was the President of the USA and as he was sitting on the floor recovering, two young boys came to interview him. However, we were all interrupted by my alarm clock going off.

Yes, I’m doing quite well again with these nocturnal rambles, aren’t I? it’s hardly surprising that I’m totally worn out with all of this travelling. I need to save my strength if I now have to cope with a pulmonary embolism on top of everything else.

It’s hardly surprising that I’m thoroughly fed up, but at least the food is second-to-none here at Liz and Terry’s, and no-one can ask for any more than that.

Monday 8th February 2016 – DECENT FOOD AT LAST!

Yes folks, I’ve been discharged – or released – or expelled. Make up your own minds. Liz came to pick me up at about 17:00 and that was that.

I felt every single bump in the road on the way back, which is not surprising seeing that I still have my stitches in and I’m sore all over. but it was well worth it for a plate of pasta and mushrooms in a spicy sauce. You’ve absolutely no idea just how disgusting hospital food is. It’s so bad that it made me feel quite nostalgic for school dinners.

I had an early night afterwards – we’ve had enough excitement for one day.

Especially with what was going on during the night. I can’t remember now who I was with but there were four of us – a couple of whom were kids – and we were in an old black Morris 6-cylinder, the type that had a bodyshell that resembled an overgrown Morris Minor. We’d seen a small brick-built outbuilding built into a brick wall and so we parked the car to go to look in the building. It was full of bicycles, old French mopeds of the 1950s and an early 1950s Lambretta scooter, the type with the twin seats. However, I hadn’t set the brake properly on the car and it started to follow us down the hill. It hit a fence post and slewed across the road to the other side, facing the other way, just missing a car that had been following it. I went off for a wander and discovered a big medieval church a little farther around so I went in. It was actually an Abbey church belonging to a monastery where all of the monks wore white habits (are these the Cistercians?). When I left the monastery, I too was wearing a white habit and I was on my way, on foot, to another place 32 kilometres away. At least, I was planning to go on foot or maybe to find a lift en route but for some reason I kept on finding myself behind the wheel of different vehicles. I was passing through Spalding (although I don’t recall it as being anything like any part of Spalding that I know). At a set of traffic lights at a T junction where five artic lorries (just the tractor units) all of which had suffered front-end damage (a red one had a huge hole right where the radiator grill would be) and were being driven off down the side street. There was a policeman there forbidding other vehicles, especially other damaged lorries, from following these five because they didn’t want a trail of broken-down lorries all over the town. I went straight on and ended up going past Spalding harbour and the docks. There was a long brick wall that was formerly part of a huge warehouse that had been demolished, so beyond the wall was a large concrete pad, formerly the floor of the warehouse, that went down to the quayside. It was all abandoned, with just half a dozen abandoned cars and old small lorries dotted about
From here I ended up at a football match between Portsmouth and Manchester City. Manchester City were playing in their usual sky-blue strip while Portsmouth were playing in blue and white stripes rather like the Argentine national side. It was an indoor game and the Portsmouth goal was a simple large square outlined in white paint on the end wall of the building – leading quite naturally to a controversy about whether a Manchester City shot was “in” or “out”.

As well as all of this we had the usual interruptions during the night. There’s always a couple of people sticking their heads in asking if I’m OK (which is a totally pointless exercise anyway – if I’m not OK, I’ll ring the bell). Then someone comes into take my carafe, then we have the blood pressure tests, breakfast, the cleaner, the person who makes the beds and anyone else whom I may well have forgotten.

But at least with leaving today, I didn’t have the cleaners and the bedmaker. They will presumably give the place a good going – over once I’m on my way out. I was left pretty-much to my own devices for most of the day, which suits me fine.

Someone came round during the course of the afternoon with a huge pile of paperwork and I suppose that I’ll need to go through that in early course. But that’s not for straight away – I’m not in the mood. I just want to leave and go home.

Sunday 31st January 2016 – NORMAL SERVICE …

… will be resumed just as soon as I am well enough to continue. You don’t get rid of me that easily

Wednesday 27th January 2016 – WELL, PEOPLE, HERE I AM

All ready for the off, in more ways than one too. I’m now in my hospital bed waiting for sleep to overwhelm me so that I can have a comfortable night. I doubt if my next sleep will be anything like as comfortable.

Last night’s was, though. I actually had a night last night where I didn’t have to leave the comfort and safety of my stinking pit

Cécile’s mother came to join me last night on my nocturnal rambles – without Cécile! Cécile’s mother is well into her 80s – 86 or 87 I think, and yet there she was on the outskirts of Crewe going up Gresty Bank near Dubberley’s Farm (where we were the other night if you remember) waiting for a bus, all on her own, which considering that she has dementia issues, is a rather outstanding feat. She was having to travel to the Doctors’surgery in Shavington, which involves taking the bus to Goodall’s Corner and walking back 200 yards. Onto the bus she clambered when it stopped for her, but we ended up at a motorcycle sales office which was full of mopeds and scooters, inside as well as outside. Cécile’s mother had a little moped that was painted all yellow, even the chain, and there was rust breaking through the paintwork. I was looking at the other vehicles which were on sale but there was nothing that interested me of course – I wanted a real, proper motorbike. One of the salesmen took me through to the back and there were about 10 or 12 motorbikes from the 1960s and 70s – much more like it. What caught my eye (from a technical point of view) was a kind-of Triumph scooter. Not a Triumph Tina, but something that doesn’t exist in the real world and based on a T50 or T65. I was giving this a good look over, from a point of view of pure curiosity, and the salesman asked me if I was interested in it. It wasn’t at all the thing for me, as I explained to the salesman. I wanted a real motorbike.

At that moment, Liz’s alarm went off in the next bedroom and it woke me up too. 06:45 which, considering that my alarm was set for 07:00, it wasn’t worth going back to sleep so I went downstairs for breakfast too.

By 07:20 we were on the road and by 08:00 we were having a coffee at the café where I had a coffee yesterday lunchtime. And then we came up here. I’m all installed now for the foreseeable future in room 360. The fridge is full of chocolate, soya yoghurt and vitamin B12 drink and the cupboard is full of crisps, biscuits and so on, and I’m in the comfy chair in the corner with my feet on the footstool. I’m prepared for a long siege in here.

First thing that happened to me was that I had a shave. A nurse came along and did it for me. And I’m not talking about my face either. I have to clean my belly-button too and I’ll be given a special disinfecting soap with which I need to wash myself in the shower, tonight and tomorrow. I have to be really clean, apparently – a hopeless task as far as I’m concerned.

Second thing was to have a drain fitted in my arm. The nurse who did that was quite careful which made a very nice change. And, to my surprise, the nurse has a daughter who is vegetarian and so she’s well aware of my diet and the kitchen staff is expecting me, as my meals to date have shown. Not very exciting, but vegan nevertheless.

But all of these exertions this morning deserved a coffee, I reckoned. And much to my surprise, one was produced. I’m not used to this.

The blood transfusion took ages too. Two pochettes but there was a big delay in swapping them over. It could have been done in half the time. But then I’m not the only patient here and there are others in a worse position than me.

I’ve spent most of the day reading books on the laptop and listening to the radio programmes that I’ve downloaded from www.archive.org. But now, the special soap has appeared and I’ve already been reminded once about the shower. I suppose that I’d better go and do the business and I’ll hopefully see you all tomorrow.

Tuesday 26th January 2016 – I WAS RIGHT!

I had an absolutely dreadful night last night. They finally connected up the blood at 00:45 and then I tried my best to go to sleep. I know that I had dropped off but it felt as if I was awakened almost immediately. They said about an hour – but I was unconvinced – but anyway, they needed to connect up the second pochette.

So off to sleep again. And an hour later, we went through the pantomime yet again.

And then we had the blood pressure test

And then the blood sample

And so it went on throughout the night. Just as I was settling down, I was awoken yet again.

I came round when the breakfast was served and I even managed to scrounge a second cup of coffee, such as it is, for which I am always grateful. They even brought me some things to have a shower, and I found a razor and some clean undies at the bottom of my bag. But the shower was interesting – with the drain and the tube in my arm, I couldn’t take my nightgown off so I was involved in some interesting contortions, but at least I’m all clean.

We had a moment’s excitement too. Two young student nurses came to change my bedding. And when they had finished, they asked “do you need us for anything else?” Being in hospital clearly has its compensations – but I’ll be expelled yet again before much longer. I’ve never seen girls go as red as they did when I replied that that was the best offer that I’ve had in 35 years.

A short while later, someone brought round something for me to drink. It was absolutely disgusting. Upon making enquiries I was told that my potassium count was too high and this drink was to bring it down. Personally, I think that it was a punishment for teasing the students.

The chief nurse came around later. Apparently my blood count is now 7.6 and that’s not high enough. They plan to keep me in and give me some more pochettes. I’m totally opposed to that idea as you know. I have things to do and I can’t do them while I’m still in hospital. I explained that I would be coming in tomorrow morning for good and a blood transfusion is already planned anyway. It’s pointless. And in any case, the blood sample was taken ar about 06:00 and it’s now 11:20. Had they decided at 06:00 that they would be giving me a third pochette, I could have had it already and been long-gone from here.

And so she went off to talk to the surgeon.

20 minutes later, she was back. And we had another delightful conversation.
Chief Nurse – “the surgeon says that you can go home now and come back in tomorrow as planned”
Our Hero – “good. I’ll get dressed then”
CN – “but we are rather concerned”
OH – “what is that?”
CN – “your blood count has only gone up to 7.6”
OH – “and what’s the problem with that?”
CN – “I understand that you came in your car. We don’t think that you are capable of driving home safely”
OH – “but it was 6.4 last night”
CN – “so I’ve been told – but I don’t see how that’s relevant”
OH – “well, it’s like this. If you don’t think that I’m safe enough to drive home with a blood count of 7.6, how come you thought that I was safe enough to drive here with a blood count of 6.4?”
At that, I was allowed to drive home by myself.

They took the drain out, spilling onto the floor most of the blood that they had given me, and I was off. Just as far as the café by the crossroads on the edge of town where I stopped for a good strong coffee and baguette and to gather my wits.

I spent the afternoon round at my place doing a few major tasks and sorting out a few objects that I needed, as well as generally relaxing. Then Terry came to pick me up – Caliburn is staying at my house while my future is being sorted out.

We finished off the vegan curry and then I finished off the vegan ice cream. No point in wasting it, so they better hadn’t ring up now to cancel my appointment. Final job was to write the two letters that needed doing and now that’s it. Whatever else isn’t done will now have to stay undone until I come back.

If I ever do.

Monday 25th January 2016 – BGGR!

And so I had the phone call – at 17:27 precisely. “Mr Hall – you need to come into hospital for a blood transfusion. Your blood count has dropped right down to 6.8”. That is, incidentally, the lowest that it has been during this whole procedure except for the day that I crawled into the doctor’s.
“But do I really need to come in? I’m coming in for good on Wednesday anyway and I’m having a blood transfusion as soon as I arrive”.
“I’m afraid that you do – in fact you need to come in to the Urgences right away”.
And so after a brief discussion, I packed my bag. Liz had just come home from work and luckily, there was a vegan lasagne to hand in the fridge so I managed to have a meal this time before I set out.

It also gave me an opportunity to reflect on my last night’s voyages, where for the first time for ages, I was accompanied by no-one that I knew (except for a very brief cameo appearance right at the end).

We were in the USA last night. There were three guys, two of them were quite sedate teenagers and the third was quite wild. Something had happened involving the farces of law and order and they had had to flee from their homes. This is the story of their drive to safety, something like Thelma & Louise or Fandango as they fled north towards the Canadian border. The two sedate guys were fleeing together and eventually the police caught up with them and flagged them down. The third guy turned up on his own a short time later, bringing with him some shoes that he had … errr … borrowed along the way. He found himself on this fuel station and was immediately surrounded by the police, so he gave himself up. It turned out that the person who had been doing all of these dreadful things against these boys, causing them to flee, was wanted by the police himself and on some quite serious charges too, and once this had all become clear, they began to be treated as witnesses rather than as criminals themselves. The third boy, the one with the shoes, was told by the police “ohh yes, you were bringing the shoes to us, weren’t you? You were coming here to meet up with your friends and to bring us the shoes as evidence”. Of course, he immediately agreed and so this car chase ended on a happy note and everyone lived happily ever after. This fuel station where we were was one of these places that was clad in green corrugated iron (the modern angular stuff) that was quite close to a road junction that was a diagonal T-junction. The main road was flanked by a row of buildings with the side turning diagonally backwards and the petrol station was up the side turning behind the buildings on the main road. And in the corner right up behind the service station right up against the back of the buildings was a kind of café in a portakabin made of the same material. I’d been reading some instructions somewhere in this fuel station about petrol stations that sold bottled gas for parties, barbecues and so on. It listed all of the places where you could go to buy it, and one group of places that was listed was a group of petrol stations that were struggling to survive now that they had lost their Phillips Petrol franchises. I remembered something in the back of my head that I had heard while I’d been on my travels about Phillips Petrol Stations not being allowed to sell bottled gas. But as soon as they had lost their franchises, they had started to sell everything, including bottled gas, as they fought for survival. Anyway, these two boys decided that with peace having broken out, they would go home and this would be the end of their adventure. The third guy decided that he would carry on, head north and into Canada, pawn the car that he was driving (which was someone else’s car anyway) and make a new start in Canada. I decided that I would go back to Canada with him. But as I came out of the service station building onto the forecourt I had this astonishing feeling of déjà-vu that I had been here before – maybe when I had crossed over into the USA I had come here to buy some fuel and buy a coffee in the café. We can’t be all that far from the Canadian border here. As these two boys were leaving, they were going through their receipts and statements of their expenditure. One boy had a look of horror on his face “TWENTY …… ONE THOUSAND dollars for candy” in a very indignant tone. “really, I don’t think that I’m allowed that!”. The third boy and I had smiles on our faces. How on earth had he managed to spend that much money on sweets?
A little later, we had the story of two brothers, one of whom was brilliantly successful and the other who was not. The unsuccessful one lived in a big house and was clearly sponging off his other brother. A deal had been done somewhere and the successful brother had ended up some $150,000 light on it. On making certain enquiries he discovered that some document were missing. He went round to see his brother and they went through all of the papers and in the end the poorer brother admitted that he had them and this was part of the fraud that he had committed on his brother. The rich brother then asked for them back and put some very heavy pressure on the second brother. In the end the papers were handed over but the second brother then put his hand into his desk drawer and pulled out a recording unit. he had apparently been recording this discussion which had contained details of some of the evil deeds that the rich brother had done in order to get where he was today. Of course the richer brother wanted to have this recording but the poorer brother wouldn’t let him and so there was a fight and the richer brother ended up beating the second brother to a pulp in order to lay his hands on the incriminating recording. He walked back out to the front of the house where the second brother’s wife and some friends had been having some kind of party, but he explained that he had to go. He got into his car, which was a red Toyota kind of thing and drove away. A short while later, his wife said that they should go and check up on the other brother – it was the thing to do and they had other things to to anyway – so she went back to check. On returning, she said that he had crashed out and was having a really good sleep by the pool but she hadn’t looked really closely. And should they ring him up? It might spoil his sleep. The first brother, who had been something of an actor, ended up disguising himself as some kind of a tramp with 2 days’ growth of beard and shabby clothes. He walked into this Greyhound bus station and this was where I entered the scene. I was with someone else – it might even have been Rosemary but I’m not too sure and I was saying “this is how bus stations are in North America. It was in the open air, with the soil being that red compacted sandy soil that you find in the Utah Desert. We had apparently been talking about the pie huts in American bus stations before and here was one exactly like the one that we had mentioned, right on the corner at the bottom and there were loads of poorer people around here. We went into the waiting room, which was like a portakabin of exactly the same type as the café at the garage earlier this evening. We waited for our bus and this brother-disguised-as-a-tramp was in there talking to a girl. This girl was a network-marketeer and she was in someone’s network at quite a senior grade,called a Scooby-Doo in her network. She did a good deal of the motivational talks as she was really keen and really enthusiastic about it. This brother wasn’t really all that keen or enthusiastic about it – not really interested at all, but he needed someone to talk to in order to make some kind of convincing cover for himself.

I had my blood test after this (as mentioned above) and then breakfast. And then I found myself alone. Liz had to go off to work and Terry had a job on for today. I wasn’t up to much and so I stayed behind and did some work on my 3D project, wrote a letter and generally had a quiet day. That is, up until my phone call at 17:27.

I was on the road again at 17:50 heading north to Montlucon, stopping at the Intermarché at Pionsat to buy some bananas and a packet of biscuits. I’ve been stranded in the hospital without food before, as I’m sure you all remember.

There was a parking place outside the Urgences when I arrived at 18:45, so I didn’t have far to walk. I didn’t have long to wait in reception either, but once I’d crossed the threshold, the problems began. My previous history means nothing at all, apparently, and we had to start right from the beginning yet again, even down to the electro-cardiac tests. I had two doctors examining me too, and each one of them asked me exactly the same questions and did exactly the same tests.

While I was lying on a trolley in the corridor waiting to be assigned, a woman came over to me and had quite a friendly chat with me, as if she knew just who I was. It took me a while to figure it out but eventually I realised just who she was. She’s the surgeon who will be attacking me on Thursday morning. And doesn’t she look different in civvies? She reckoned that the horrible solution that I Just had to drink – allegedly to reduce the amount of potassium in my blood – was in fact a punishment for some misbehaviour that I’ve carried out.

But one thing in which she totally agrees with me – and that is that to have a blood count of 8.6 last Monday, and for it to be still 8.6 on Thursday and then for it to dramatically drop to 6.4 (because that’s what it was by the time that I arrived here) today is quite simply not normal. I’ve mentioned before another set of abnormal results from the Laboratory and so I wonder whether there’s something not quite right about the Laboratory.

The blood has finally arrived anyway – at, would you believe, 23:40. I’m being moved to a private room so they can feed it in. I foresee a very restless night.

Tuesday 12th January 2016 – I REALLY DON’T KNOW …

… why they pay some of these people. If I were in charge, they would be paid in washers.

It’s no surprise to anyone to learn that neither of the two letters that I was promised, by two different secretaries of the hospital at Montlucon, has been prepared – let alone signed and posted. And so we had another fifteen minutes of unpleasantness at the reception counter when I went to collect my droit d’entrée to go to see the anaesthetist.

However, this was resolved in rather dramatic fashion while I was talking to the head of the accounts department. She told me (again – because she had told me this three or four weeks ago) that I needed to have the authorisation of my insurance company for the hospital to send the bills for consultation directly to them, and for this, I needed a letter from the doctor who was treating me.

I then (rather patiently for me) explained that I was in total agreement, but having asked for those letters on 23rd December from my Doctor and again on 4th January from my Surgeon, I had still received nothing despite the re-assurance on the telephone the other day, and in fact the letters hadn’t even been typed out.

At that news, the head of the accounts department picked up the telephone, dialled a number and had what can only be described as “a frank exchange of views” with someone on the other end of the line, including the phrase “do you realise that you are holding up the work of the hospital?”. And after she hung up the receiver, she gave me the form that I needed.

I don’t need all of this stress, and even less so when I’m ill like this. And I just go back to the very first day that I was admitted to the hospital, back in late November, when I handed my insurance card to the hospital. As you may remember, the hospital refused (and on a couple of occasions too) to telephone the insurance organisation as I was admitted. Hod they done so, they could have opened a file ON THE SPOT and established all of the information necessary to establish the necessary procedures and coverage ON THE SPOT and all of this unpleasantness could have been avoided. I don’t know enough about hospital procedure to be able to explain to anyone else what is happening and what to expect (from an accounting point of view), and the procedure in Belgium (where my insurance organisation is based) is so much different from that in France.

It’s all so unnecessary.

But abandoning yet another really good rant for the moment … "thank God!" – ed …
let us retourner à nos moutons, as they say around here.

The alarm went off at 07:00 and I crawled agonisingly out of my bed. I’d had an early night and crashed out really quickly.

And during the night, I’d been trying to go to a rock concert somewhere but I had never managed to make it. And so I was at home somewhere or other (a house that I actually know but I can’t put a name or address to it, although it strongly resembled Davenport Avenue), and the musicians arrived! The three of them fitted into my tiny bedroom and started to play, just for me. The group might have been “Rush” or it might even have been “Strife” (I’ve been talking a great deal about them on my social network account just recently) but one thing was sure and that was no matter who it was, there was just one musician – the bassist – from the group and the other two members were the guitarist and drummer with whom I used to play back in the 1970s. And when they finished, the bassist said something along the lines of “that’ll teach you to come to our concerts next time”.
So from here, the drummer, guitarist and I had to catch a bus back to Crewe (we were in Chester at the time apparently – scene of many of my earlier musical successes) and so we waited – and waited – and waited – and no bus came (back in those days the C84 ran every hour). Eventually another bus came. This was a bus of the type of the mid-60s – an early Bristol RE single-decker with a green lower and white upper, but with large windows and very curved rather than angular corners – and on the headboard it was indicating “Whitchurch”. Buses heading from Chester to Whitchurch usually travel down the A41 through Christleton and that way but this bus was on the road out of Chester in the general direction of Tarvin, so I assumed that it might be going to Whitchuch via Nantwich, from where there were buses every 15 minutes to Crewe. But chatting to the driver, it appeared that he was only going so far down the Nantwich road, turning off just after Tarporley somewhere in the general area of Bunbury. And so we were there for a good while – the guitarist, the driver and I debating whether or not to take the bus, alight where it turns off the main road and wait for the very late C84. But what if the C84 overtakes us along the route? We’d then be even later and that would clearly be no good (the idea that if our C84 wasn’t running, we would be stranded wherever we were hadn’t entered our heads at all, apparently). The driver said that he could as a favour, pass by Aston Juxta Mondrum (which is nowhere near where we want to go and in any case didn’t have a bus service to anywhere) and drop us there, but we stood for ages at this bus stop, haunted by indecision and being totally incapable of making up our minds.

I was on the road by 07:30 and pulled into Pionsat at more-or-less the same time as the nurse (she who runs the pie hut at the footy) and so paying for my consultation from the other day was quite straightforward.

I arrived at the hospital in Montlucon at 08:30, having found a good spec to park Caliburn, and despite having had a little adventure on the way. It was pouring down with rain and round about St Gervais, the driver’s side windscreen wiper became attached from the arm. Luckily, I was able to rescue it and replace it but it came loose again and so I drove all of the way there without wipers (once you go through the initial 5 minutes of blindness, you’ll be surprised at how clear the view is through a “liquid windscreen”). Subsequent enquiries in the daylight revealed that the blade hadn’t been fitted correctly and I was able to deal with that.

It was just as well that I was early at the hospital. Once more, I had the choice of seats (the one in the corner by the power point) for we ended up 5 people in a room made for two and they were turning people away, to wait in the waiting room until there was a space for them. It really is no surprise that they couldn’t fit me in last Monday afternoon if this is how busy they are in the day hospital.

It was the efficient nurse who dealt with me today. Not only did she fit my drain at the first attempt, it hardly hurt (in comparison to all the others who have tried). And then we reverted to the marvels of modern 21st-Century technology, warming up the blood by stuffing it up my jumper.

I took advantage of my stay there by having a browse through www.archive.org. I discovered a while back that they are now grouping as *.zip files many of the old-time radio programmes instead of having them as individual downloads, but 1.4GB is beyond the capacity of my internet connection at home or here chez Liz and Terry. But not at the hospital where a real (as opposed to “notional”) 600kb/s is readily available, and so I downloaded all of Beyond Our Ken, all of the Sherlock Holmes radio shows of the 40s and all of the Philip Marlowe radio shows.

If I’m back next week (which is more-than-likely) there’s the Clitheroe Kid and the Navy Lark to download. And then I’ll be keeping an eye out for ITMA and Much Binding In The Marsh. And if it keeps on and on and on, I’ll end up with more radio shows than the BBC.

I declined the lunch that was offered, and for two reasons too.

The food in the hospital is disgusting
I was hoping to be in and out long before I became hungry

and wasn’t all of that a silly mistake?

I was indeed finished early – at 12:45 in fact. So much so that I had time for a coffee in the café, but I won’t be doing that again. Coffee from the machine is just €0:60 but in the café it’s €1:70, and it’s not as if the surroundings are any more pleasant than the hospital foyer. It did give me an opportunity to spy out the land there and check the food on offer (I need somehow to supplement the hospital diet) but there was, as I expected, nothing there that I could eat.

Then it was time to deal with the anaesthetist, and this is where we had all of the nonsense mentioned above. By the time that I had finished, it was almost 15:00 and how I wish that I had had lunch in the hospital earlier.

I gave the usual spiel to the anaesthetist. “I hate tubes, injections, internal cameras and all of that kind of thing. I don’t want to know what you are going to do to me – just do it and get on with it. if you find anything else when I’m opened up, do that too because I don’t want to come back a second time. But when I wake up, I want to have both my hands and both my feet, and I don’t want to see any tubes, pipes and cameras”.
“Both your hands and both your feet?” said the anaesthetist? “Not your head?”
“I lost my head years ago” I replied.

So we had a nice friendly chat. He’s an old guy, probably my age, with a sparkle in his eye and a devilish sense of humour which makes a change from most French people whom I know. I wish that there were more like him. And then I went for another spy around the 3rd floor to see what I could see. There seems to be a nurse there who would love to sooth my fevered brow, but I’ll be b*gg*red if I let him.

I did some shopping at Amaranthe, the health food shop. A pile of vegan cheese (we’re running low here) and a few other vegan bits and pieces. I bought myself a big pile of vegan muesli biscuits for lunch and nibbled them throughout the afternoon Liz didn’t give me a shopping list for the Carrefour so I had to improvise, and ended up forgetting a pile of stuff that would have been useful to us.That’s a shame, because I feel that I ought to be paying my way while I’m here, and a load of shopping each week would certainly help.

A new pair of slippers and a few pairs of sock was on my shopping list though. The slippers that I have are falling apart and my socks are … errr … quite religious. There was a special offer of 6 pairs of socks at €5:99. Terry asked me if they would last any kind of distance, to which I replied that maybe I only need to worry until the 27th January.

I didn’t feel like much in the way of tea. Too stuffed up with muesli biscuits I reckon. And then I had an early night, leaving you to digest a mere 2000 words this evening.

And serve you b*gg*ers right too!

5th January 2016 – BACK IN HOSPITAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not so lucky, are you then?

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

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

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

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

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

Monday 4th January 2016 – SO NOW WE KNOW!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday 1st January 2016 – IT’S LIZ’S COOKING …

… that’s causing me to have these delightful and intense nocturnal rambles – no doubt about it.

Yesterday, I had nothing that came from Liz’s kitchen or anything that I had cooked that she might have influenced, and as a result I had a relatively static night.

Mind you, there might have been another reason. And that was that in one of the cubicles in the casualty ward where I spent last night, there was a poor old guy clearly suffering from dementia who was having a rather difficult time. Even with my head buried deep under the pillow down the bedclothes, I couldn’t cut out the noise and the time dragged on SOOOOOOO slowly. At one stage, I was even contemplating sneaking out and sleeping in Caliburn.

But I must have gone to sleep at one time because I was rather rudely awakened by two nurses coming in with the tensiometer to take my blood pressure.
“Yeeuucchh!” ejaculated Our Hero. “What time is it?”
“Five o’clock” replied a nurse. “Plenty of time to get more sleep!”

That’s what they think. There I was, turning round and round in my bed, and just as I was on the point of dropping up, I was reminded that I had forgotten to cancel the 07:45 alarm. You don’t need much imagination to work out exactly HOW I managed to forget it.

So that was my night totally ruined so it’s no surprise that I didn’t manage to go anywhere.

We had the usual hospital breakfast too
Nurse – “we have coffee, biscottes, jam and orange juice for breakfast”.
Our Hero – “Mmmmm – a nice, hot, strong coffee”.
Nurse (after what can only be described as a “pregnant” pause) – “well, it’s coffee”, and I suppose that it might have been too.

I managed a shower too. One of the nurses came round with a clean gown, a towel and a flannel. And seeing that my bed was just two feet away from the bathroom, I couldn’t resist the opportunity. It was gorgeous too – probably the best part of my stay in the hospital.

The doctor came round a little later to discuss my case. He told me that I need to have a blood test tomorrow morning and then telephone them as soon as I have the results so that if necessary I could be called in tomorrow afternoon. I explained that I wouldn’t receive the results until after 17:00.
“Which laboratory handles your blood?”
“Clermont Ferrand”
“Okay, I’ll send someone round to take a sample now”. Personally, I don’t see the point of giving me this blood if they are going to take it straight back out again.

A couple of hours later, he was back.
“Your blood shows 8.0 for haemoglobin” he said. “What is it normally?”
“It was 7.2 when I came in” replied Our Hero, “but the first time that I came here it was 3.8”
And do you know – I’ve never seen a doctor fall off his chair before.

Anyway he went off to make further enquiries. he seemed to think that I might need a third pochette. And he did want to know how I would return home once I was discharged.

However the third pochette was not to be. Half an hour later a nurse came in.
“Would you like some lunch before you go?”
What? With a friendly neighbourhood Liz in the vicinity? You must be joking.

In the corridor, I bumped into the doctor again.
“Drive safely, and if you feel tired or ill make sure that you stop and rest” The fact that I’d driven all of the way to Montlucon with less haemoglobin that I was going home with had gone over his head completely.

Back at Liz’s I had a leisurely lunch and then a leisurely afternoon, dozing off every now and again to catch up with the sleep that I missed

And with Liz’s nut roast at lunchtime and Liz’s home-made vegan lentil and pepper curry for tea, it’ll be interesting to see if I go back on the road tonight.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to you all. I wish you for 2016 everything that you wished for everyone else in 2015.

Thursday 31st December 2015 – I HAVE SPENT NEW YEAR’S EVE …

… in some strange places, but this evening will be about the strangest. I’m back in Montlucon, back in the hospital and in the casualty department connected up to a couple of pochettes of blood.

This morning I had the usual blood test and at 17:15 I had the phone call. Apparently my blood count has collapsed and it’s down to 7.2, which means that in 4 days I’ve lost 15% of my haemoglobin. There’s no Day Hospital tomorrow (yes, I now know the reason why I have blood tests on Mondays and Thursdays – that’s because the Day Hospital is usually open from Monday to Friday, Bank Holidays excepted of course, and they can call me in the next day if the results are bad) and so it has to be done in Casualty.

And so I rode off into a rather symbolic sunset – symbolic in many senses in that it’s the final sunset of 2015, bringing down the night onto the end of a rather significant year for me, and that I have a rather uncomfortable feeling that it’s bringing down the night onto a significant chapter in my life and that whatever happens to me once a new dawn breaks will be completely different to that which I’ve experienced to date.

Nevertheless, at the Site Ornithologique just outside St Gervais, one of my favourite photography spots, I stopped to take a photo of the sun dipping down under the horizon.

And I wasn’t alone here either. Liz was here too. She was on her way back from the airport at Limoges, having taken her family back for their aeroplane to East Midlands, and she was impressed by the view too. We had a little chat and then I was on my way.

Evening meal for me, my “special treat” for New Year’s Eve, was a large packet of crisps, a packet of biscuits and a banana. There wasn’t any time to prepare any food back at Liz and Terry’s because the hospital wanted me in and out before the midnight rush of drunks began, and so I had to pick up what I could find en route.

At the hospital, I was lucky enough to find a parking space for Caliburn close to the casualty entrance, and once I was inside, I was whisked straight into the casualty ward and prepared for transfusion, with the second-most-painful insertion of a drain. And this is when I discovered that the claim, on the telephone earlier, that “the blood has already been ordered” was somewhat economical with the truth. It didn’t arrive until 21:30 in fact.

And in the meantime, I was in a small room right by the entrance to the Casualty Department. Ambulances, with blue flashing lights and sometimes sirens, were pulling up right outside my window and the electric door into the Department was right next to the door to my room, which was open. Each time I closed my eyes, an ambulance would pull up, the electric door would open, and I’d be wide awake. And then I’d close my eyes again ready to doze off and the procedure would be repeated. And as New Years Eve approached and the stream became a flood, I gave it up as a bad job and asked for a coffee.

Yes, some let the New Year in with a glass of champagne. I let it in with a plastic beaker of coffee.

By 01:30 they had finished with me, and they offered me a bed for the night in the ward at the back of the Casualty Department. I didn’t really feel too much like the drive back to Liz and Terry’s and in any case they would be well asleep by the time that I returned, so I gladly accepted the offer.

And here I’m staying until tomorrow.

Mind you, it’s hardly surprising that I wasn’t up to the drive back. I’d done quite enough driving last night on my nocturnal travels.

I’m not sure now exactly how I started out on my travels but I was definitely in my chocolate-brown Cortina 2000E, TNY143M, that has featured quite a few times just recently on my nocturnal voyages and I’m not sure why. But as our story unfolds, there was a huge argument in a car park that abutted, albeit about 20 feet higher up, onto the street where I was parked. It concerned some kind of illicit behaviour involving a taxi company or two, something that would be of great interest to me of course, being in the taxi business, and a girl was having a huge argument with the driver of a big black saloon car parked on the edge of this car park. The net result of this argument was that she grabbed hold of the driver’s briefcase and flung it high into the air. The case landed at my feet with the papers scattered everywhere so I quickly gathered up the papers, half-expecting the driver to come charging down the bank after his possessions. Instead, he got into his car and cleared off quickly leaving me holding all of the evidence, which would make good reading in the taxi licensing office. I walked back up the hill to the pizza place on the corner of the main road and ordered, inexplicably, a chicken pizza. While it was being prepared, I reckoned that I had better go and recover the Cortina and bring it up outside the pizza place where I could keep a better eye on it and its contents. So back in the pizza place and the server asked me if I wanted ham and some other meat on it – they hadn’t even finished preparing it, never mind cooked it. I had a feeling that this would go on for ever and I didn’t have the time to spare.
So never mind – I’d planned to go to the cinema that evening but I could go earlier and I could watch the film twice. But this meant going on the bus so off I went. And at the end of the first showing, it meant going back on the bus again, doing a round trip and then back to the cinema. And here on the bus this time around I met a girl, someone who had made a couple of cameo appearances in my travels during the autumn. The bus took us on a guided tour of the town and stopped at a big desolate area of waste land, with the driver telling us that this was formerly the old medieval centre of the town which had been demolished and a modern town centre built elsewhere. We were being asked all kinds of quiz questions about street names and the like too.
After the cinema I took this girl home with me, which I realised too late was probably not a good thing to do, because before going out I’d emptied out the van and having nowhere to store the stuff, I’d stacked it, all kinds of rubbish too, into the living room so there was hardly anywhere to sit. My Aunt Doreen (she who hanged herself almost 20 years ago) had been there and so I asked the girl if she would write a note of appreciation to Doreen. However, we couldn’t find a single blank page in any of the notebooks in which we looked. Clearly we weren’t doing so well here. I also asked someone else, who was present at the time, to take out a pile of vehicle hubcaps and dump them in the bin, but then I had a change of mind, thinking that they all might come in useful at some time.
From here I drove back to the family pile in Shavington, followed by my father and my brother (no idea how come they have appeared on my travels). And near the top of Gresty Bank before the corner where Dubberley’s farm used to be, in the road in the southbound lane was a woman with a trestle table doing the washing up. We had to wait until she had finished but she took so long to arrange her crockery that I emptied her washing-up bowl for her. However, the woman in the car immediately behind me was so close that I couldn’t reverse my car enough to go around this obstacle, so the car and I had to duck under the table.
Back at the family pile, I was horrified to see not only the state of the place but the fact that the house was stinking hot with the electric heating going full blast – so hot in fact that all of the windows had been opened despite the heaters being on. There was so much waste and untidiness (and the untidiness must have been bad if it upset me) that I reckoned that my father would be appalled when he arrived. But it was my brother who appeared first, so I challenged him about it, but he replied that our father wouldn’t be coming – he had gone elsewhere. In the hallway there was cat food all over the place but he said that it was the fault of my cat, who wouldn’t eat any of it.

The alarm went off at this point and after a few minutes spent gathering my wits (it doesn’t take very long as there aren’t too many of those) I came downstairs to wait for the nurse and the prise de sang.

Once he had gone, I could have breakfast but I’d run out of muesli so I had to borrow some of Terry’s. And then we had the confusion as all of our visitors prepared to leave. I had a few big hugs, which was nice as I don’t have too many of those these days, and it goes without saying that Strawberry Moose had quite a few too.

Once everyone had left, Terry and I had a coffee and a relax and then I went off to St Gervais with a shopping list from Liz. I try my best to do some shopping here once a week – it’s the least that I can do to recompense Liz and Terry for all of the effort they are making in looking after me. Mind you, I did manage to buy the wrong milk and so I rather blotted my copy-book here.

Vegan cheese on toast for lunch (I’m becoming quite partial to this these days) and then I sat down to alternately have a little doze, drink a coffee and to continue to write up my notes from my voyage around Canada in the Autumn.

And this was when I received “the call” …

Wednesday 23rd December 2015 – I KNEW THAT IT WAS A MISTAKE …

… to drink that half-litre of sparkling water with blackcurrant syrup last night. I was up and down like a yo-yo all through the night and I didn’t really have a very decent sleep because of it. Serve me right.

And the film that I saw – the James T Wong film – was the first time that I’d seen it. It was the first one of the series apparently and Boris Karloff had only a supporting role rather than the lead role that he had later in the series. And the film lost quite a lot because of it. The plot was rather thin and the denouément was rather weak.

Anyway, I was up at the usual time, had my injection and then had my breakfast. It was about 11:00 when everyone was ready to leave and so while they shot off to Montlucon and shopping, I went round to my house to check it over and relax for a while. Surprisingly (or maybe it isn’t), even though the day was grey and depressing, the batteries were fully-charged and the water was heating up nicely.

I headed off to Montlucon at about 14:00 and went to Carrefour, but I couldn’t remember what it was that I wanted to buy so it was rather pointless. And then I went off to the hospital.

16:30 was my appointment, and so I was seen bang on 17:45, and least I now know what they think might be up with me. Apparently I have a lymphoma of the ganglions, and the cure for that is quite drastic. They intend to take out my spleen. The spleen is also the organ that controls a great deal of the immune system and so while removing the spleen MIGHT (and only “might”) solve the lymphoma problem, it might provoke problems all of its own.

But it did lead to an interesting dialogue –
Doctor – “I’m afraid we are going to have to take your spleen out”
Our Hero – “Blimey – isn’t that a really difficult operation?”
Doctor – “Rubbish! Generations of surgeons have been taking the backbone out of politicians for almost 100 years! It’s child’s play by comparison!”

Anyway, after the holidays, they will arrange an appointment for me with the surgeon and the anaesthetist and we’ll see what happens then.

So rather chastened by the news I headed back here to tell Liz.

Liz – “Are they going to do that here?”
Our Hero – “No Liz – not in the kitchen”

To cheer me up, there was home-made ice-cream. The strawberry was excellent but as for my inspiration of the choco-mint-chip (made by the simple expedient of grinding up a mint-chocolate bar into a litre of coconut milk), it was astonishingly good. I was amazed.

At least that cheered me up. And I needed cheering up too because that wasn’t the only bad news that I had had. I mentioned to the doctor the story about the twice-daily injections and she confirmed that unfortunately they do have to continue.

So I shan’t be having my lie-in after all. Drat and double-drat!

-1

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 – WELL, I HAD THE CALL!

Yes, at about 09:30.

“Mr Hall, we’ve had your blood test results. You need to come in this morning for a transfusion”
“I’m still waiting for the District Nurse to come, and it’s over an hour’s drive to Montlucon, you know.”
“Well you really need to be here before midday”.

And so that was that. With no District Nurse by 10:30, I was off and gone – on my way to Montlucon.

Mind you, I was off and gone long before that. Despite having once to leave my bed (for the usual reasons), I had a really good night to make up for the dreadful one that I had had the night before. And I was running the Formula One racing network too. My youngest sister was driving one of the cars and my niece in Canada was doing the voice-over television commentaries. However, we were under attack in our house (which bore a strange resemblance to Hankelow Hall, the abandoned stately home where we squatted back in the 1970s, except that there was a more modern extension built onto the back) by people who wanted to take over the running of the organisation. We were trying to defend it resolutely but looking out of the back, I noticed that a load of gear, including skis (for some reason), was being passed from the new extension into our house on the floor below through a window that should have been guarded by my elder sister. The door into our room was then battered down and into the room surged a crowd of people, TV cameras, everything, and my sister saying that we had all agreed to pass on our rights to this new company. I however made it quite clear that she was not speaking for me.
From there via several removes, I ended up back at my house in Gainsborough Road Crewe where I was living with a woman who was about 20 years older than me, and we had a daughter of about 11. The behaviour of this woman was extremely bizarre, which puzzled the girl and me a great deal.

So after breakfast, we had to play Hunt The Moose again. Today, Strawberry Moose was in the sun-lounge camping. And also reading a story to his new best friend Violet the sock-sloth.

Robyn was keen to join in of course. She loves having stories read to her and no-one reads stories like Strawberry Moose. And in exchange, she drew a beautiful picture of him.

At the hospital car park, there was hardly anyone about so I had a good spec right by the entrance just 200 metres from the front door of the hospital. And they were waiting for me when I arrived, which made a nice change.

“Only one go” I said to the nurse trying to inject the drain into me. “They had four goes last time that I was here”
And so she did it in one, and a more painful injection I have never had. Total agony.

Lunch wasn’t up to much unfortunately, but you can’t expect much in the way of special diet when you turn up a l’improviste. However, I had foreseen this, having been caught out last time, and I had packed a packet of crisps, a handful of Liz’s home-made vegan biscuits and a banana. They didn’t ‘arf go down well. What was not so acceptable was the inexcusable, unpardonable sin of forgetting me when it came to bringing round the afternoon coffee. The fact that I MAY just have closed my eyelids to give my tired eyes a rest is neither here nor there. What you can be sure of is that harsh words were exchanged – and I did get my coffee.

I also got something else quite important too. The internet speed at the hospital is quite respectable for a public place, and so I profited by downloading a huge pile of radio programmes and a Mr Wong film from archive.org. That should boost up my supply of listening and watching matter if I’m going to be incarcerated elsewhere.

And talking of that, I was also speaking to my friend Alison, with whom I used to work at The Conference Board – that weird American company in Brussels. She had a very serious operation in Belgium and was full of praise over the treatment and care that she received. I’ve always said that Belgian health-care is the best in the world and that is where I would go if I were ever seriously ill, and so I asked her which hospital it was that she used.

It’s the one at Leuven, and having made enquiries, Alison told me that there is in fact a dedicated lymphoma department there. Furthermore, she rang them and it transpires that they would be glad to talk to me, and they passed their number onto her to give to me.

Why I’m doing this is that they have already told me that they don’t have the facilities to treat me in Montlucon. If I need treatment I have to go elsewhere. Clermont-Ferrand is, at the limit, acceptable because I’m still within some kind of travelling distance of possible visitors and facilities, but anywhere else is uncharted territory with no possibility of visits. Smuggling supplies into the hospital will therefore be extremely difficult and I’m not going to survive on what food a hospital can offer me.

Not only that, I’m dismayed at how much Flemish I have forgotten since I’ve left Brussels. I reckon therefore that a spell of immersion in a Flemish-speaking environment will do me the world of good.

An added advantage of Leuven is that there’s a Belgian 2nd-Division football club – OH Leuven, in the immediate vicinity and public transport in Belgium is very good. I’m sure that I can smuggle myself out of hospital occasionally on a Saturday night. If so, I can track down a fritkot too, and Alison has already promised to be my conduit for illicit food parcels.

I was thrown out of the hospital by 16:00 and I was wondering whether to go home for an hour or so but I wasn’t feeling up to much so I came back here. As a surprise, Liz and Kate have made me some vegan ice cream – strawberry and also choco-mint. It wasn’t ready for tea though but it will be fine for tomorrow. I hope that I’m still here to eat it, and not detained elsewhere.

I met up with the District Nurse too. He’s concerned about the continued use of this anti-coagulant and reckons that I ought to speak to the doctor about it tomorrow. he can understand why I needed it but it seems to him that the crisis has passed. He reckons that it’s now at the stage where it can be doing more harm than good, especially if I keep going for the total of three months for which it has been prescribed.

I’m all in favour of that. It’s costing me an arm and a leg for a start, and it will also mean that I can go back to having my Sunday morning lie-in. These continued 07:45 starts are killing me off.

-2

Tuesday 15th December 2015 – I WENT OUT …

… to Montlucon and the hospital today – and thereby hangs a tail. I arrived early at the hospital, before the patient who was in front of me in the queue, and as it happened, the echograph machine was free. “Okay then, Mr Hall” said the nurse “you may as well go in now”.

So in I went. “You’re Mr X” said the doctor
“No, I’m Mr Hall” I replied. “Apparently Mr X (or whatever his name was) isn’t here yet”

And the net result of all of this was that I was in, out and gone, and sitting in the hospital café having a mug of coffee even before the official time of my appointment. That’s not something that happens every day.

What does seem to happen every day, or, at least, has been happening every day quite recently, is that I was on my travels again during the night.

Last night, I was working in an office where we had to calculate the value of cars used by sales people and work out some charge for annual use of them. I was inspecting a Daytona-yellow Mark II Ford Escort built in, would you believe, 2008 and carrying an 08 plate. But the car was filthy with a good deal of surface rust and a huge dent on the roof down the offside that looked as if a scaffolding pole had dropped on it (we almost had this once with Caliburn). I reckon that to repair the damaged roof, it would cost about £800. I lifted up the bonnet and it was bright yellow painted-over-rust with a reasonably clean engine but with a major oil leak (just like my Passat). I told the owner that he needed to put a different oil in it, to which he replied that he wasn’t on the Mercedes plan!
And talking of Mercedes cars, four of us then went off to do some checking up on the road, and we were in my Mercedes (I do have a W123 240D around at my house somewhere). We ended up driving up a railway line, one track of which was in excellent main-line condition and the other track (where we were driving) being all abandoned and overgrown. As we were climbing up the hill, a beautifully clean and shiny green steam locomotive came charging down the hill pulling a huge load of shiny black oil tankers and being chased by a light locomotive. Of course we all wondered what was going on here and we reckoned that the light locomotive was chasing the train to try to catch up with it (as if that was ever likely to happen). It never occurred to us, even when we reached the top of the bank and saw the incredibly steep climb up which the train had travelled, that the light locomotive had been banking the train up the bank and had just come off. But as we pulled to a halt at the top of the hill to open a gate at the side of the line that would let us off the line onto a dirt track, we were overtaken by a wildly-out-of-control machine something similar to Cugnot’s famous fardier, also painted yellow. As the fardier pulled back in line, it overturned onto its side. I immediately dashed out of the car to take some photos, but all that I had was my mobile telephone and I just couldn’t get any of the photos to come out properly and I was so frustrated.

I was so engrossed by all of this that after the alarm went off, I went back to sleep and it was a wild panic that saw me dash downstairs 15 minutes later. And it’s a good job that I did because the nurse was early to give me my morning injection.

I had a shower after breakfast and then set off for the hospital.

After the hospital I went, would you believe, for a walk. The first time since I’ve been ill that I’ve managed to do that. There’s a huge new shopping precinct that’s recently opened just opposite the Carrefour and so I went in there for a wander around, and did some Christmas shopping too. And then off to the Carrefour itself to do some more Christmas shopping.

For lunch, I treated myself to a plate of vegetables and chips at the Flunch – a long time since I’ve done that but why not? I’m ill and I need to cheer myself up. And as an aside, diesel at the Carrefour is just 102:7 cents – when was the last time that you ever saw it at that price?

I went back home after lunch. I’ve brought upstairs another pile of wood and now there’s enough to keep me going for about a week once I return home. What with the food that’s already up there, I should be self-sufficient for a while. I also made a start on the tidying up and believe it or not, I can actually see a difference (even if no-one else might). However, there’s still quite a lot to do.

Back here, and it was raining too when I drove home. First time it’s rained for ages (or, at least, rained that I have noticed) and those new windscreen wipers that I fitted the other day don’t half do the business. I had the nurse soon after I returned and then I had tea. There’s no footy so I shall probably treat myself to an early night.

I think that I deserve it.

-2

Friday 11th December 2015 – EEEUUURRRGGGHHH

I had to go to the hospital today. And so that meant a 07:00 start. And never did I feel less like it either after yet another uncomfortable night.

When the alarm went off I crawled downstairs and made a coffee. Some muesli and fruit juice later, I was properly fed and watered but still not on the same planet as anyone else, I reckon.

As I drove to Montlucon I slowly started to wake up and by the time I arrived at the hospital I was maybe feeling as much as half-human. “Half-man, half-aardvark” I thought to myself. “I’ve clearly been varking too ard”. But at least my luck was in somewhere. I was 20 minutes early and there was a parking place right outside the door of the hospital.

One of the more friendly nurses was on duty at the day-hospital and she even found me a mug of coffee to go a little further in rousing myself from lethargy. But she has three goes at trying to put a drain in me, without much success, and went off to call a colleague to have a go. I thought to myself “hang on a minute – these b******s are playing darts with me!”. They were all having a good moan about not being able to find a vein with any blood in it. “Hardly surprising” I retorted. “You’ve already taken most of it!”

So I was there at 08:40 – I had a drain put in at 09:40, and the blood finally arrived at … errr … 11:40, by which time we were three people in a day ward meant for two. They managed to conjure up something for lunch too – mushrooms in tomato sauce with rice and bread, with a pear for dessert. Hardly the most appetising meal that I’ve eaten – I’ll take butties next time.

My first blood pochette was empty by 13:05 – and it took until 14:00 for them to couple up the second. As a result, I wasn’t able to leave until 15:30 and that annoyed me a little – I should have been long gone from here by then. But feeling like nothing on earth, I went for a coffee in the cafe while, apparently, all the time they were frantically searching for me to tell me that I need to come back on Tuesday at 10:40 for another series of tests.

So having recomposed myself a little I went back home – to Pooh Corner that is. I had a little relax, ate some biscuits and watched something on the laptop. And then I came back to Liz and Terry’s for tea and my evening injection.

None of this did anything to cheer me up and, being totally whacked and thoroughly fed up, by 20:10 I was off to bed. And it wasn’t long before I went to sleep either.

And the result?

Here I am at 04:00 updating my blog. I’ve been awake since about 02:15 and I can’t go back to sleep. I’ll probably be like this now until mid-morning when I’ll crash out yet again and this will mess up my revision plans for today – having had them totally messed up already for today. I’m never going to finish this blasted course.

I just really wish that I could bring a little order into my life right now, but that’s not going to be possible, so it seems.

-1

EPIC HALL

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