Sunday 6th March 2016 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since I posted a photo on here?

It must be ages and ages – I know for a fact that I didn’t take any photos at all during February and that has to be the first time for about 15 years since I had a photo-free month.

heavy snow fall march le fournial sauret besserve puy de dome franceBut so that you don’t feel deprived, here’s a photo taken with the camera in my mobile phone and it shows the snow that came a-falling down today.

And you’ve no idea how nice it is to be sitting inside here, by the stove, with a mug of hot coffee and a home-made banana muffin, and watching it fall. Unfortunately it didn’t stick around because we had a weird sort of weather day. heavy snowfall and then sunlight which melted the snow, and then snowfall again, and then sunlight, und so weiter.

When I went out for a walk just now, 99% of the snow had gone, but there was a crystak-clear sky with tons of stars and a rapidly-plummeting temperature. It’ll be cold tonight, that’s for sure.

As for my walk, this was the best so far. I’ve progressed to a fair distance now – about 150 yards away, I reckon. And I’m moving easier and quicker without quite so much pain and with less of a breathing difficulty although I still have this egg in my lungs that I can feel when I’m getting out of breath. So apart from that, there might be hope for me yet if only I could overcome this blood-loss thing.

So what else did I do today?

Apart from laughing at Manure, I spent all of the day going through my medical receipts. Now that the Insurance Company has agreed my maladie grave and given me a case number, I can send them all in. That meant putting them in date order, finding the prescriptions that went with them, printing out a dozen or so claim forms and filling them in, and then scanning the documents in order to keep copies. That lot took me from about 09:30 to about 16:00, with a couple of pauses for coffee and home-made banana muffins and a pause for lunch.

And how much do they owe me then? Well, to date, bearing in mind that there are quite a few bills that have yet to arrive, it’s about three months’ pension money. And that’s what I’ve spent out in about two and a half months of illness. So you can see why I’ve been struggling and in all kinds of difficulty.

So why haven’t I made a claim beforehand?

The answer to that is that without having had my claim for a maladie grave approved, I would have had to submit my claim under the normal procedures and only had part of the expenses approved. And then, the relevant claim file for that period would have been closed and you know just as well as I do what it would have been like trying to persuade an Insurance Company to reopen a closed claim.

I also had a haircut today. Liz was busy scalping Terry and so I took my turn in the queue. It needed doing but it wasn’t ‘arf cold outside afterwards.

As for last night, though, I was on my travels yet again.

I was up on the moor somewhere round by Northumberland and the Scottish border with a party of soldiers, maybe 100 of us, but we weren’t troops and in British Army soldiers but more like a throwback to Roman times, that kind of thing. We were in search of a powerful band of orc-like creatures who had been devastating this area. We had travelled so far into the wilderness and it was late in the day so the leaders of the party called for a halt for the night. He sent out two parties for observation. One of these parties had some kind of flying machine – a primitive light aeroplane made with a tubular aluminium frame but with no covering and they would fly over they area to see what was happening and see if any trace could be found of these orc-like people, while the second party, of which I was a member, would go to a watch-tower, something like a Martello tower not too far away, to liaise with whoever was in the aeroplane and receive their signals. So there we were, inside this watchtower but there was no sign of this plane – we waited and waited. Just when we considered that it was time to go back to the main party, we heard the plane flying over so the leader of our party took the lamp, a big black affair with a solar panel for recharging the battery (you have to admit that the Romans were very advanced technologically) and went outside. He didn’t return, so someone else went out, and found the first guy with an orc spear right through his body, thrown with tremendous force to the extent that it had gone halfway through him. At that moment he too was speared by the orcs, and this is how it went on. There were just 5 of us left and then the other party that had been with the aeroplane, they came back (minus the aeroplane). Not being quite aware of what was going on, I went down to meet these four people, who had a girl of about 4 with them. But there were also four other people there, two men and two women, and they were in business attire and the people from our party were looking at them. Suddenly, the penny dropped and I shouted out “run, you fools! Can’t you see that they are orcs!”. This led to something of a struggle and two of our group of four were cut down and the other two made it inside. But the little girl was left cowering by the door. I fought off these orcs and in a short time they had gone. I picked up the girl and went inside but the place was deserted. All that I could see were muddy orc footprints all over the walls and the ceiling. They had somehow managed to enter the building and removed the rest of our two parties while I was outside fighting. This left just me and the little girl, and we had to rejoin our main party a mile or two away, and God knows where these orcs were. Had they gone off with their captives, or had they killed them and were lying in wait for us, or were they attacking our main party. So we just had to grit our teeth and make a run for it, hoping that we would get through.
That was another unpleasant situation to be in and I was glad that a call of nature had aroused me from certain death. And after the usual trip down the corridor I was back with a group of children and there was gambling, people injecting themselves with needles and all of that kind of thing, which (strangely enough – or maybe not, as it happens) relates to a discussion that we were all having here on Saturday afternoon.

So now, having had my walk, I’m off for another early (but not quite so early) night. I have a blood test in the morning so I need to study.

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Saturday 5th March 2016 – THAT BLASTED NURSE …

… forgot me yet again this morning!

And there I was, deep in the arms of Morpheus, miles from anywhere on this planet when the alarm went off. And I struggled downstairs pretty quickly, remembering the other day how I had been pris au dépourvu in my nightie by the nurse and vowing not to repeat that ever again.

And then after breakfast, I waited … and waited … and waited. And then that was that. I gave it up and went and sat down in the living room feeling rather annoyed. I could have had a wonderful lie-in for a change had I known that he wasn’t going to come.

So where was I then when I was away with the fairies?

I was actually off again playing cricket last night – something that I’ve done on one or two occasions just recently. And if you remember, I did say that if ever I were to be invited to play cricket for a team, it would be as a wicket-keeper before anything else. Certainly not my bowling, which is what I was doing last night. And my bowling was, as you might expect, pretty wayward but somehow it kept confusing the opposition and I ended up taking more than my fair share of wickets. One ball went hopelessly wide but the batsman waved an unnecessary wand at it and top-edged it down to a rather short long-on. Another ball that I sent down was a rather inviting dolly and received exactly what it deserved. It flashed past me and I just instinctively stuck out my right hand and much to the batsman’s dismay and everyone else’s (including my) astonishment, I caught it. and this meant that the batting team was all out for 66, which was quite a cause for celebration.

And then I missed the celebrations because the alarm clock went off.

What I’ve done today is to update my Open Office to the latest version. When I bought this laptop last year, I downloaded the current version but when I came to use the spell-checker today I found that I had forgotten to download it. And that led to the upgrade – together with the new spell-checker.

And once the spell-checker had been installed, then do you remember all of the dictaphone notes that I was transcribing over the last month or so? Then I spell-checked all of the Canada notes and now they are ready for the next stage of the process – viz. the tying in of the notes to the relevant photos that I took while I was over there on my travels.

We had a lovely surprise as well this afternoon. The beautiful smells coming from the kitchen turned out to be Liz’s first attempt at making home-made banana muffins (made, of course, with home-made bananas), vegan of course. And they were beautiful, especially with a nice hot coffee. Sitting inside with warm oven-fresh banana muffins and hot coffee watching the snow-storm that was raging outside was really pleasant.

So I don’t know what is going to happen now. The nurse is yet to arrive and it’s starting to be late – at least for me these days anyway. I’ll be going for my post-prandial perambulation in a minute and then I’ll be off to bed, whether he comes or not.

And even as we speak, the nurse turns up. 30 minutes late but there we are.

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Friday 4th March 2016 – HAVING MADE THE EFFORT …

… to dash downstairs ready for the nurse as soon as the alarm went off this morning, it goes without saying that he didn’t arrive until about 08:30. But then, that’s typical, isn’t it?

Mind you, I was lucky to be here at all because I had travelled quite a long way during the night. And that’s despite it taking me ages to drop off to sleep last night too. Despite my little walk, an early night and an exciting hour or so watching “The Raiders Of Tombstone Canyon” or some such, I was still tossing and turning around at 23:30. Clearly the effects of my nightmare last night were having something to do with all of that.

But eventually, off I went. And “off” is the right word to use too. Belgium was the first destination last night and there was quite a large mob of us in the Belgian public transport system, which included my brother (him again?) and my niece in Canada and a couple of her girls. It was almost as if we had been to a family gathering and I do remember Shavington featuring in here somewhere – Hunter’s Avenue being where we got onto this bus. Once aboard, the conductress came round to check our tickets and she overheard me talking to someone, telling them a most improbable story about 2 different lines on the Montreal Metro. “Oohhh” she said. “Do you know the Montreal Metro then?” and so we had a lengthy chat about Montreal (very reminiscent of something that really did happen to me on a bus in Montreal a few years ago where it turned out that the driver was not only from Brussels in Belgium – he recognised my accent – but actually drove on the route that I used to take to see my friend Marianne, so we spent the journey chatting about that route). So after all of that, she checked my ticket, which was one of these Belgian 10-pass tickets but I had forgotten to stamp it when I got on the bus so as a favour to me she took it off with her to stamp. But it kept on showing up an error, so I thought that it had probably run out and so I needed a new one, but for some reason I didn’t have any money on me. After yet another lengthy discussion, she agreed that she would let me off for this trip but I’d have to buy another ticket immediately as soon as I alighted – after all, we were planning to make quite a lengthy voyage involving a few changes of vehicle. And so we alighted at our first destination and so one of our party was asking where we could go to buy a ticket for the transport. There didn’t seem to be a ticket office anywhere. I seemed to remember that there was a place downstairs in the station where we could buy some of these ten-trip tickets and so that was where we headed. But here, at the entrance to the restaurant, was an automatic ticket machine (but it was blue like in Montreal, not yellow as in Brussels). I pointed it out and said that I may as well pick up my ticket here, so everyone else said that they would go downstairs to the railway station and buy my train ticket for me while they were waiting for me to join them. So I went off to the machine but the first side of it was actually a telephone, not a ticket machine. The second side of it had a huge queue hanging around by it, and the third side was out of order. I went to the fourth side of the machine and I was just on the point of trying to buy a ticket from here when I suddenly and inexplicably woke up.
After the usual trip down the corridor we were off again and this second part concerns a boy who was being kept as a slave somehow in a weird first-floor apartment and was being made to perform all kinds of household tasks and general slavery duties. He was determined that at the first available opportunity he would to make his escape, and he had some kind of confidant who would help him. His master, who resembled a kind of cross between Ebenezer Scrooge and Alastair Sim was equally determined that he wouldn’t, and so his life became even more grim. One day one of the windows breaks in this apartment – the day that the master is having to leave the same evening and be away all night until the following evening. It was the next day, the day that the master would be away until the evening, that this escape had been planned. Now with this broken window the master decides that he isn’t just going to have the pane of glass replaced but four complete new windows with frames at the back of the apartment overlooking the rear entrance to the courtyard. Some workmen arrive and they start to take out the old window frames and to fit new ones. As the work is progressing well, the master leaves on his journey and the young boy is delighted by being invited by the workmen to kick over all of the windows that have been stacked up against the wall and watching them break. But by the time the workmen come to finish for the day, there’s still one window not installed so they need to come back the next day. But with the window missing it’s easy for the boy to escape from the house and climb down a stack of old furniture that had been piled up against the rear wall of the house. And so he makes good his getaway. He ends up down West Street in Crewe, out by Merrill’s Bridge heading into town past the pubs and chip shops, being followed by this big ginger cat that allows him to stroke it but not pick it up. He passes by a pillar box that is crammed full of mail and a couple of postmen are busy trying to wrestle a couple of sacks of letters from it. And a little farther down the street there’s a railway level crossing with a branch junction that swings round immediately to the right to opposite where this pillar box was. Eventually, he ends up with friends and tells them some (but not all) of this story and how he is leaving the next day. In the meantime these people whom he’s visiting are loading all kinds of scrap paper into a shipping container and compacting it in with a hydraulic ram. It ends up with this boy having to go back to the apartment for some reason but he’s really worried in case the master has unexpectedly returned (why he couldn’t make his getaway that night I really do not know) but that’s a risk that he has to take. And the rest of this story becomes something of an anti-climax because he goes back, re-enters the apartment, the master hasn’t returned unexpectedly, and next morning with the aid of his friend he makes good his getaway and disappears into the sunrise to presumably live happily ever after.
After all of that it was my turn to look at a couple of short videos offering ideas for holiday venues. One that particularly caught my eye was a snow-swept Central European town and so off I went. I was walking up the street here in rather inclement weather, somewhere near a road junction, and some woman was driving down the hill slowly on the wrong side of the road, totally oblivious to me. She approached closer and closer and rolled forward to come to rest against my shin. Her car was one of these little Autobianchis, a red one, and I was musing to myself that I could flip it over with my foot, it was so small and lightweight.

At that moment, the alarm went off so I never knew how it all finished. I shot off downstairs, as I said.

This morning, I had plenty of things to do but I didn’t manage anything much because Liz and Terry left me here on my Tod while they went off to do some shopping. I had a good play around with my 3D program and tried out a couple of new techniques that I had been thinking about.

Lunch was left-over pizza (which, like anything else spicy, always tastes better the following day) and bread with vegan cheese spread. and then this afternoon, I made a start on one of my courses – this one being a basic Dutch course. I’m off to Leuven in a couple of weeks and I’ve forgotten most of my Flemish. Dutch and Flemish are very similar languages so if you can understand one you can understand the other, but I’m not sure how that’s going to work as most people can’t even understand me when I speak English.

But we did have some excitement today. Being fed up of waiting for my Insurance Company to phone me back, I sent another one of my incendiary e-mails. And having blistered the paint off the walls of the receiving office, I received a reply. Basically “please find attached our acceptance of your claim to be suffering from a serious illness”. It’s only taken them 7 weeks to agree this.

What it means in practical terms is that instead of being reimbursed the ceiling limit of claims, I can receive an ex-gratia payment to cover the costs of my actual expenditure, together with certain other benefits that would not ordinarily be covered. And that is certainly a great help as far as my finance go. I may even be able to afford to eat as well, if I am careful. It’s quite reassuring for my voyage to Leuven, which I was half-expecting to have to pay out of my own pocket.

But talking of eating, I’ve had home-made vegan lentil-burgers for tea tonight, with chips and peas followed by vegan ice cream. Liz made the burgers and I was lucky enough to be in the kitchen just as she was starting. Consequently, I had a grandstand view of the whole procedure and have made copious notes.

Now, I’m off for my little walk up the hill again, even if it is pouring down with rain and has been all day, and then I’m off for another early night.

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Thursday 3rd March 2016 – WHAT A NIGHTMARE!

The first person to put in an appearance during my nocturnal ramble last night was, would you believe, my mother. I was so surprised, if not shocked, to see her that I sat bolt upright in bed. What on earth was she doing there? I can’t remember what role she was playing last night because the whole memory of whatever I was doing at the time was immediately wiped away.
And if that’s not enough to be going on with, the next person to put in an appearance, once I’d calmed down and gone back to sleep, was my father. I was living back in my house in Gainsborough Road, but in the front room that had been converted into a bedroom. And when my father turned up (he was apparently living somewhere else in the house) at about 6:30am, he brought none other than Percy Penguin with him. She was wearing a pair or pyjamas in a kind of flanellette material, pink with a white waistband, collar and cuffs. She hopped into bed with me for a while and then I left the bed to start to tidy up the room (as if that’s ever likely to happen anywhere where I’m living), totally ignoring her. And then I’d be back in bed again, and then back tidying up and ignoring her and so on it went.
But then I had a sudden flash of realisation about something. Out here in St Gervais there’s a proposal for one of these social cafés for the Alternative Community – not just a café but a “meeting place and social centre with board games, debates and discussions as well as food, including a vegan and vegetarian option” to quote just some of their advertising. While it’s an idea that receives my fullest support, it’s all very utopic and I’ll give it 6 months at the most. But anyway, last night, while I was in my bedroom with Percy Penguin in my house, I suddenly realised that it was the Opening Night of this café and so abandoning Percy Penguin yet again, off I went to St Gervais – a mere 850 miles or so from Crewe but since when has that ever bothered me during a nocturnal ramble? I’ve travelled much greater distances than that. When I arrived, I found that one of the people who was in charge was one of the footballers of FC Pionsat St Hilaire. He was talking about using he venue for boxing matches and training and the like, and so I asked him if he was aware that a boxing venue needed to have a doctor present at all times if there was action of any kind in the ring and who was going to pay for this. he was clearly unaware of this – he just shrugged his shoulders and wandered off into the crowd. I had a wander around, admiring the nice, shiny and polished wooden floor, and ended up at the buffet in an annex at the back. Most of the products were chocolate-based and so I asked the two girls who were serving which ones were the vegan option, but they just looked at me helplessly.
The moral of this story – particularly the latter part of it – is that leaving aside my natural cynicism (and I am the first to admit it) many of these so-called social projects are all very well and good but in 99% of these cases they lack the professionalism, the foresight, the staying power and the finance to be successful, being far too detached from reality to see what is going on. Once the initial enthusiasm wears off, they run out of ideas and can’t keep the momentum going.
Mind you, I would love to be proved wrong.

As for the moral of the first part, I cannot think for the life of me what my parents were doing during the night appearing on my travels like that. One of them is bad enough but both of them – that’s enough to put me off going to sleep for the rest of my life. I still shudder when I think about it even now, and I fled from home almost 45 years ago.

So while I was slowly coming round this morning after the alarm went off, I heard a car pull up outside. Yes, it was the nurse, so I half-ran, half-fell downstairs at something of a rather indecent turn of speed for me these days. But the news – whether this is good or bad, I dunno, is that my stitches aren’t there. I asked him to look and so he did. Either they have fallen out on their own, they have dissolved, the skin has grown over them, or there weren’t any in there to start with. Only time will tell and I’ll have to wait until Monday when I see the surgeon.

Today, I’ve had a day off and done nothing at all. I reckon that I deserve some time for myself. I have plenty to do but a day here and there won’t hurt (I wish that I didn’t). I have however made myself a pizza and in a few minutes I’ll be off for another slow walk to see how I do. I’ll try to push a little farther on.

But here’s a thing – and I forgot to mention it yesterday which is a surprise because it made such an impression upon me.

When I was in the hospital yesterday, I was in the room next to the office – and in the chair underneath the hatch which was open so that I could quite clearly hear everything that was going on in there. And one thing that did happen was that the chief nurse was ringing up people about their blood results.

One call she made to a woman was clearly answered by the woman’s partner and went something along the lines of “we have her blood test results and they show that she has a blood count of 6.8. She must be very tired so she will need to lie down right away and we’ll send an ambulance for her”

Sure enough, when she did arrive here, not only was it an emergency ambulance that brought her in but she was on a stretcher.

When my blood count dropped to 6.8, I didn’t have this treatment. Not a bit of it. I was made to come under my own locomotion over 50kms, park Caliburn up somewhere in the car park and then walk all the way across to the hospital and up into the ward.

I dunno whether it’s whether your face fits, or whether she has some other illness of which I am unaware, but there’s certainly some kind of two-speed hospitalisation procedure going on here. maybe I’m just unlucky, or maybe I’m made of more sterner stuff.

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Wednesday 2nd March 2016 – I’M BACK …

… from the hospital, thanks to Liz who brought me home after she knocked off work. And thanks again to Liz who also took me there too.

That meant a crawl out of bed at some ridiculous time like 07:30 and a rushed breakfast, and then off on the road.

And I was pretty exhausted too, for last night I was on my travels again. And things about my house are clearly preying on my mind because I was somewhere out there. I’m not quite sure where all of this started but I remember it from walking down a footpath (which isn’t there) at the back of my house (which wasn’t my house) through the woods (which aren’t there) and out into a field around the back where this path took a sharp right-hand turn due to a very high bank being in the way. I’d lived here for years but this was the first time that I’d really paid much interest in this bank and I was astonished when a passenger train rattled its way along it. Five minutes later, a swarm of people came along the path and caught me in the middle of a reverie. It turned out that there was a railway station here in Virlet – the train had stopped there and discharged these people. I’d had no idea whatever that there was a railway station here, especially one so convenient for my house. All of the time I’d been getting the train to the nearest rail junction and then catching the bus, and this was all quite inconvenient.This railway station in Virlet opened up all kinds of new opportunities.
From here I ended up in a pub somewhere in Nantwich – I had an idea that it was something like the Millfields (which has featured before on my travels). Someone was having problems with the indicators on his car – a late-model Nissan 180B I think – and so I had volunteered to fix them. I wasn’t making much progress and so I was tempted just to stick them back any old how but twisting the front flasher around, it started to work correctly and so I was quite happy. All of these manoeuvres had led me to get into a position where my head was stuck though the serving hatch and so the barman asked me what I wanted. I replied that I wanted nothing at the moment, so I could see the landlord making a face and a gesture or two to the barman to hurry up and get rid of me. I ended up though having to bend down to screw this front indicator light into the leg of this person (yes, it’s all logical, this, isn’t it?) but he told me that where I was screwing it, it wasn’t there before. I could see that – in fact I could see on his leg exactly where it used to be because there were little scabs there over the wounds that the screws had made – and I told him that it was going to be very painful if I were to screw it back exactly where it was. But he insisted and told me to go ahead – and so I did.

We arrived in Montlucon about 10 minutes late but seeing as they weren’t ready for me (the blood didn’t arrive until 10:40) it made no difference whatever.

The nurse putting my drain in was astonished. “Mr Hall” she said. “You really do have some thick skin”
“Well, what do you expect?” I asked. “I used to be married”.

And then I sat around and waited, read a book, did some work on the computer, downloaded a pile more films, all of that kind of thing, and chatted to a couple of friends on the internet. And I had lunch too – a plate of lentils and diced carrots, a vegetable pâté, a fruit purée and an orange. Much to my surprise, they even remembered to bring me a coffee.

It was all done by 14:30 and I was ready to be discharged. That meant sitting in a draughty hospital foyer but much to my surprise they allowed me to stay up there in the warmth. That was a good move because I button-holed my doctor up there and told him that I wasn’t satisfied with my progress and the follow-up that I was (or wasn’t) having. He was quite insistent that everything was normal – the fact that I was having blood tests and the transfusion showed that there was a follow-up.

But I asked him about the loss of blood – whether it was normal for me to lose so much blood so rapidly. He told me that things wouldn’t settle down for a couple of months, but he was lost for words when I replied that at the rate that I’m losing blood, I would be lucky to still be here in a couple of weeks, never mind months.

And he was also lost for words when I told him that I still had my stitches in – some 5 weeks or so after the operation. But he told me that that’s not his department – I need to see the surgeon (and so I tried to, and she was out of course).

However, I told him that I had been summoned to attend a meeting with the Conseil Général of my insurance company and made up a good story of why that should be so, and so he’s arranged for me to have a copy of my file the next time that I’m there. What I really want it for is of course to take to Leuven with me when I go.

Liz came for me after she finished work and now I’m back here, having had more pie, green beans and new potatoes for tea.

And it was just as gorgeous as yesterday. I really am so lucky staying here with Liz and Terry who are doing such an excellent job of looking after me. As I have said before, I shall be really sorry to leave.

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Tuesday 1st March 2016 – I HAD A PHONE CALL …

… this morning, but it wasn’t necessarily the one that I was expecting.

>round about 10:15, while Terry was out cutting wood, the phone went off. “Mr Hall, this is the hospital. The Doctor has seen your blood test results and thinks that you should come in for a transfusion right away”.

So at last, someone seems to have taken notice of what is going on with my blood. But as I have said before … "and at great length too" – ed … a blood transfusion isn’t the answer. I could have kept on having these without the need to have suffered all of the agony in having my spleen removed.

But I told them that there was no chance of me going in at that time of day. Terry would have to run me, and then sit around all day until it’s done and he’s got plenty of work to do. And so we agreed that I’ll be going in tomorrow. Liz has a short day so she’ll take me in and bring me back. It’ll mean that I’ll have to sit around for a couple of hours in the hospital but that’s my problem, not anyone else’s.

Last night, I had a quiet night and didn’t go anywhere. And I do mean “anywhere” too – not even down the corridor for a ride on the porcelain horse. That is – I did go at 06:30 but seeing as how I didn’t go back to sleep afterwards and that it was nearly getting-up time, that doesn’t count. But no nocturnal voyage either – I must have slept the sleep of the dead last night.

As for today though, I’ve finished all of the dictaphone notes. Every last one of them. I would be going round to my house tomorrow where I could burn a DVD with everything on it, but I cancelled that idea yesterday as you know and in any case, I’ve the blood transfusion tomorrow.

Tea was one of Liz’s home-made vegan pies with new potatoes and beans, and didn’t that taste so nice? It made me feel so much better, that I promise you. What with the left-over pasta and tomato sauce for lunch, what more could any person desire?

So I’m off for another short walk in a bit and then I’ll be having a good wash and shave ready for tomorrow. After all, I must look my best.

But I’m bitterly disappointed with you lot from yesterday. 29th of February and I didn’t even get one proposal of marriage. You miserable bunch!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And all, apparently, for nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sunday 28th February 2016 – THE DOGS …

… managed to behave themselves last night. I hardly heard a peep out of them. But nevertheless, I was taking no chances and you have no idea just how pleasant it is, lying there in the dark with headphones listening to really good music at something of an impressive volume. I awoke briefly at 00:30 just in time to hear the tail-end of my Simple Minds concert, and that made me feel so much better.

But just a litle word of caution – when I went to the bathroom, I had to leave my bed on the left-hand side (which is what I do here, although not what I do at home) because of the floor on the right-hand side being littered with all kinds of stuff relating to my illness. I’m not quite sure what, but then logic has never really played a great part in anything that might (or might not) go on during the night.
After the customary trip down the corridor, I fell back into the arms of Morpheus and ended up somewhere in mid-Cheshire, at a Tesco supermarket (although the facade of the building did actually seem to be the Morrison’s supermarket in Winsford). I was carrying a bottle of water and looking for the manager, who eventually appeared to see me. I explained that I was from the Tesco supermarket at Whitchurch and when we were checking the shelves we found a bottle of water in a place where it shouldn’t have been on the shelves, and so it would seem to have been delivered to us in error. I was therefore taking the opportunity to return it. He took the bottle, went immediately over to the cold shelves, and there stacked in amongst the lettuce was another bottle of water of the same time. He said therefore that it must have been done in some kind of error and there was no problem or issue about our having this bottle of water.
So clutching a giant packet of crisps which I had somehow acquired, I left the supermarket and mounted my bicycle. I had the idea to telephone a girl that I knew in the Whitchurch area to see if she fancied coming out for a drink, seeing as I now had an hour or two to spare, and if she turned me down it would be no big deal. But my battery showed just 3% charge and so I needed to charge it up in the van. I freewheeled off down the steep hill to the car park and this involved a sharp right-hand turn into the car-park entrance. I remember pelting down this hill and swerving sharply into this car park entrance, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to make the turn. And just as we reached the crucial point, whether I’d miss the entrance, overshoot, fall off, hit the kerb or make it round, the alarm went off and I sat bolt upright in bed.

At least, despite everything, I’d had a reasonable night’s sleep.

After breakfast and after the nurse, I pushed on with the dictaphone notes. All of France 2014 is now done and dusted and I’ve started on the final batch of football notes. There were about 70 soundfiles of those to deal with and now the number is down to about 50. With a bit of luck, God’s help and a Bobby, this might be up-to-date by next weekend too. This will be progress, I’m sure. All that I need to do then, next time that I’m home, is to save it all to an external drive and then burn a CD with all of the files. Then, I can clear the dictaphone.

I’ve tidied up my paperwork too and managed to find the details of the next appointment that I have at the hospital. This seems to be Monday 7th March, although Liz and I are both convinced that there’s something mentioned about Friday 4th. I suppose that I’ll have to ring them up to find out.

This morning we had a snowstorm too. Just a small one for half an hour and nothing stuck, but just a reminder that winter hasn’t yet departed.

For tea, Liz and terry had chicken. But I was the lucky one, for there was some of yesterday’s curry left over. What with a baked potato and a naam bread that was discovered deep down in the freezer, I had a meal fit for a king. So much so that there was no room left for any vegan ice-cream.

So tomorrow is Monday.people will be back at work and so I’ll be expecting a “response” to the rather incendiary e-mail that I sent out on Friday, but I’ll also have to set Plan B in motion because I can’t wait any longer to start something off.

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Saturday 27th February 2016 – NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL …

… a bad night!

The guy across the road has eight or nine hunting dogs which he keeps in a compound about 40 yards from this house. They are mostly well-behaved, but they can have their moments. And last night was one of those.

They started off about something at about 20:00 and they were still at it at 01:30, which was the last time that I remember glancing at the clock and sighing. What made it worse was that I had a pain in my ear so I couldn’t use my headphones, and so that ruled out watching a film in bed. And so the whole idea of having an early night was totally wasted.

What made it worse from my point of view anyway) was that I remember absolutely nothing of my little ramble during the night. Just 30 seconds of garbled notes on the dictaphone telling me that my medical condition wasn’t improving – in fact, quite the reverse (so tell me something that I don’t know!). As a result I’d become something of an outcast and ended up living the life of an outlaw (in the traditional sense) in some kind of distressing and poverty-stricken circumstances(ditto).

Talking of the dictaphone, I’ve made an enormous amount of progress today. So much so that I’ve finished my Canada 2014 notes, finished the Germany 2014 notes, done some of the outstanding football notes and almost finished the France May 2014 notes. This is progress indeed.

I know that I clearly have nothing better to do right now, but I can be pleased that at least I’m taking full advantage of this now and bringing up-to-date a situation that I have let drag on far too long. Mind you, there is always something that comes along to disrupt the best-laid plans of mice and men and I don’t see this as being any different.

We had visitors today too and they stayed for quite a while, but it was nothing to do with me and s I left them to it.

All I can say now is that I’m going to try to have another early night and hope that the dogs behave themselves tonight. At least I’ll have a nice breakfast in the morning because I ran out of muesli today and had to make some more.

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Friday 26th February 2016 – AND THE ANSWERS …

… to last night’s questions are “Nowhere” and “No-one”.

I had my early night last night of course, but didn’t go straight to bed as I had a few things that needed doing. So I attended to them first while I was off on another nostalgia trip listening to my “Simple Minds” concert – the one that I engineered for Radio Anglais.

Eventually though, I was able to settle down and watch “Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday” – with the missing part recovered and the missing soundtrack restored and it was just as good as I remember it being. It’s quite possibly the best of the trilogy of films, I reckon.

And once I had settled down for the night, the next thing that I remember was the alarm clock going off at 07:45. First time for ages that I’ve managed to sleep right through the night, and also the first time for ages that I’ve not been on a nocturnal ramble (or, at east, a nocturnal ramble that I can recall). I’m not sure whether to be really pleased about the good night’s sleep that I’ve had, or sad that I didn’t go off walkabout during the night. As I’ve said before, these nocturnal rambles are the only way that I’m bringing some excitement into my life and relieving the boring existence of what is effectively an imprisonment right now.

It took me a good while to struggle out of bed and make my way downstairs, and much to my surprise, I managed to coax the boiler into life and had a lovely blaze going by the time that everyone else came downstairs. My technique must be improving.

Liz and Terry went off shopping this morning and left me to my own devices. I had a play with some of the new purchases that I made yesterday from the 3D Store that I use and generally took it easy. And I’ve also made great progress with my dictaphone notes for Canada 2014. I’m now on the outskirts of Montreal which means that I have only four days of voyage to transcribe. Who knows? I might even be able to do all of this over the weekend and that will please me greatly.

Now there’s one thing for which I should be grateful now that I am retired. And that is that I can’t possibly be sacked from my employment. Had I still been in employment and sent the mail that I sent out late this afternoon, I would have been in serious danger of being handed my hat.

But my excuse is that I was unnecessarily provoked.

I wrote to the Médecin Conseil of my Health Insurance provider to explain that the operation that I had four weeks ago (God! is it THAT long ago?) had evidently failed and that I reckoned that I ought to go somewhere for a second opinion. This will involve them in added expense and so I needed to consult them beforehand, to make them aware of what was going on and to approve the expenditure, and to see if they could recommend someone well-worth his salt, someone at the top of the profession who could give me the best possible advice.

I received the very helpful (I don’t think) reply of Nous ne pouvons, le médecin conseil, ne peut pas nommer aucun hôpital, vu que chacun a le libre choix de se déplacer à l’ hôpital de son choix _ crudely (and if you want “crudely”, then in the words of the late, great Bob Doney, “I’m your man”) translated by Yours Truly as “we on behalf of the Médecin Conseil cannot give out the name of any hospital, seeing that everyone has the free choice to go to any hospital of his choice”.

That’s all very well of course, but how on earth do you know which hospital to try and which hospital has the best reputation, and which hospital has the most efficient service etc. etc?. And which consultant is the most experienced and has the best connections? The hospital here clearly isn’t even sure about what illness I’m supposed to have so what hope do I have of knowing?

And so I sent them back a reply that would have blistered the paint in their office, and I ended up by asking if vu que chacun a le libre choix de se déplacer à l’ hôpital de son choix wasn’t merely a more-complicated way of saying “we couldn’t care less”?

As you can see, I can rule them out of any active involvement in my future well-being (such as it is) and as the hospital at Montlucon clearly has already run out of ideas (I’m really surprised that they haven’t been in contact with me this week to discuss the dramatic drop in my blood count) then I really am on my own here.

I have sore misgivings, and I don’t even have any ointment to rub on them.

And before I go, I would like to wish a happy birthday today to a girl who once played some kind of role in my life 45 or so years ago. I’m astonished that, with all of these various people making all kinds of cameo appearances in my nocturnal rambles, that she is yet to make her on-stage début. I would have placed her at odds-on to have made an appearance a long time before now.

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Thursday 25th February 2016 – IN WHICH OUR HERO FINALLY GETS THE GIRL

And we aren’t talking about the Girl from Worleston either, but someone else completely.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall a girl who has featured a few times in my nocturnal rambles. She and I had something of a close encounter (but nothing like as close as I would have liked it to have been) over a period of a couple of years a good while back and ever since then she’s been described as “The One That Got Away”.

But she didn’t get away last night.

I was back in Nantwich, at the top end of Welsh Row right by King’s Lane, which was the back entry into our school. Up Welsh Row, hand in hand with a boy of her acquaintance, came the young lady concerned. They were both wearing the school uniform of my old school (which is surprising because the girl didn’t go there, and I don’t have a clue who the boy was). When they reached where I was standing, we started to have quite a chat, a laugh and a joke. I was teasing them both, particularly this girl, because something had happened in her past that related to a pile of younger children. I was therefore talking about her “15 children”, implying that she was their mother (which would of course have been absolutely impossible) and quite naturally, the subject of her “16th child” drifted into the conversation (well, it’s quite natural in any kind of conversation in which I’m involved). At first, she was not willing to participate in all of this teasing but as the conversation wore on she became more relaxed and joined in the fun. From here, we all ended up heading back into town. As we set off, the boy and girl were still hand-in-hand but by the time that we had crossed the River Weaver Bridge and up towards the Swine Market, the situation between the girl and Yours Truly had become such that the boy had disappeared and it was me walking hand-in-hand with her. We turned into Beam Street towards the bus station and the further down that we walked, the more evident it had become that we were now a “couple”. Turning into Market Street, we passed in front of the Civic Hall and who should come out of there but Mrs Hayes, the school secretary (although of course, it wasn’t her at all) and she gave us a really long, cold, withering stare. And so we continued onwards, down and round the corner into Churchyardside, passing all kinds of other people who knew us and who were noticing what was going on between us. There were crowds and crowds of people milling around outside the church – apparently there was some kind of service going on there and such was the size of the attendance that people had to assemble in the shops opposite the square and were being sent over to the church on batches of 100. By time we realised what was going on, we thought “well, sod it! Enough people have already seen us together so that the word of our new relationship will have already spread like wildfire around the school no matter what we were to do from here on” and so we walked off hand-in-hand into the sunse … errr … shop across the square. All very nice and homely, it was.

But last night, I managed to watch the first of the “Inspector Hornleigh” films. And I must be mistaken when I say that it’s never been broadcast on British television because, sure enough, every 17 minutes or so we have the “revolving checkerboard” in the top right-hand corner that was put in by ITV to indicate that the commercial break would be along in 15 seconds and sure enough, you can tell from watching the film closely that the commercial breaks have been edited out. The quality too is very suggestive of VHS video, so it looks as if it’s been downloaded fom ITV onto a good-quality video recorder and then edited.

The film itself, the first-ever collaboration between Harker and Sim, doesn’t have the rapport that developed between them in the later films and Harker himself hasn’t developed the quick repartee and master of disguise that became his trademark in the later films. But there were certainly some priceless moments in the film –
Chancellor of the Exchequer – “members of the public shouldn’t go around robbing the Chancellor of the Exchequer with impunity like this!”
Harker – “quite right. It’s usually the other way around!”.

What with one thing and another, I had a really good night last night and you have absolutely no idea just how hard it was to pull myself out of my stinking pit this morning. I was well-away in the land of the fairies.

And after breakfast I was once more distracted because the site of the 3D program that I use was having a sale of items at $0:80 a throw so I spent the morning having a really good trawl through it. After all, I haven’t bought myself a birthday present yet.

This afternoon, in a totally new departure from my current existence, I went out and about. To St Gervais in fact. Liz’s new spectacles had arrived but a couple of things about them needed to be sorted out so I had to go with Terry as interpreter. And it was snowing there too. I know that it’s forecast for tonight here, and al of the way through to next Thursday too, but St Gervais, which is 100 metres higher up, is starting early.

This afternoon, I pushed on with the dictaphone notes for Canada 2014. I’ve made a considerable amount of progress too – so much so that I’m almost back to the point where I entered the USA from Canada in early September. If I can keep this up at this rate, I’ll be finished within a week and won’t I be happy?

I’ve made myself a pizza tonight and there’s enough left for lunch tomorrow. These big pizza sheets that Liz prefers to the round ones that I like do have their advantages.

Anyway, I’ve done enough for today. I’m going to have yet another early night and watch the second Inspector Hornleigh film.

And then, I wonder where I’ll end up tonight. And more interestingly, who will be coming with me?

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Wednesday 24th February 2016 – HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

Yes, I’m not going to tell you how old I am but when we lit the candles on my gorgeous vegan chocolate birthday cake, there was an avalanche on the ski slopes at Super-Besse and when I went to blow them out later, I was driven back by the heat.

We had vegan meatballs and tomato sauce with spaghetti as well for a birthday tea and now I’m well-and-truly stuffed. And to make things even better, the nurse forgot to come this morning and give me my injection. What more can any man desire?

I haven’t bought myself a present because firstly, I wasn’t sure that I was still going to be here (either here at Liz and Terry’s, or anywhere else for that matter) and as you all know, I’m not all here anyway. Secondly, I do have my eye on something but whether I’ll now be able to have the use out of it is anyone’s guess.

But I know that I am going to be in for a good time tonight because the birthday present that I do have lined up is something well worth having. I’m a big fan of the 1930s actor Gordon Harker, as regular readers of this rubbish may have realised. Amongst his output were three films in which he starred as Inspector Hornleigh with Alastair Sim as his sidekick, Sergeant Bingham. One of them, Inspector Hornleigh Goes To It, has been discovered and was broadcast, with 20 minutes of it missing, on BBC television years agobut since then it’s been restored in its entirety and is available from archive.org. Of course, I’ve long-since downloaded it.

As for the other two films, “Inspector Hornleigh” and “Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday”, the latter was likewise rediscovered and broadcast on BBC Television but had not only a 20-minute missing section but a 1O-minute piece where the soundtrack was lost. Since then, it has disappeared. The former film has never been aired on TV as far as I can tell, and I’ve always considered it to be lost.

However, there’s a new film archive site that’s sprung up, and would you believe, it’s actually offering those two films. It goes without saying that I’ve downloaded them, and I’ll be watching them in bed tonight as my birthday treat.

I didn’t contact the Medical Insurance people today because other things cropped up. We had another visit so we needed to tidy up, and the visitors stayed until early evening. You can’t do much when you have company. I’ll have to do this on Friday now. But I have cracked on with my dictaphone notes and seem to be making quite good progress.

I wasn’t making much progress during the night however. Anything but, in fact. I started out in an office trying to work out the business affairs of a couple of stockbrokers but I couldn’t receive a reply from them to a simple enquiry. One of these stockbrokers was a magistrate and what I wanted to know was how many penalty points a person received for being convicted for shoplifting (yes, this makes sense, doesn’t it?). I couldn’t obtain a reply to my phone calls or my letters – then suddenly a big illuminated sign went up in our office to announce that the firm of stockbrokers concerned had undergone a heavy internal re-organisation and were far too busy training new stockbrokers than to spend their time helping businesses like us perform our tasks (and the message was delivered in rather a patronising, insulting tone). We were told to contact them after 15th January (it was September at this moment, I recall). This meant that I needed to find someone else who was a magistrate and so I asked around the office. In the end, some of my colleagues gave me a name which was a Mr Hyde-White (Wilfred?) so I had to search the building in order to find him. Everyone with whom I spoke replied that it was in fact Mrs Hyde-White who worked here but even then, no-one could direct me to her office and I seemed to be going around in circles. The simple answer, of looking on the internet or even trying to find the records of the relevant Court case, never ever occurred to me;
But clearly my medical situation is preying on my mind because one of my nocturnal rambles last night was to go off and seek a second opinion about my medical condition. This involved taking the train to a town called “Port” which was somewhere along the railway line between Lyon and Marseille. The train that we needed was one of these old-type of 1960s long-distance expresses (not the TGV) and so we set off for the station, which was a huge station, just like the one at Crewe but many times bigger. We arrived there hours early for our train which was at 11:30, so we settled down to sleep on the benches on the platform – me, my brother (whatever is he doing here again?) and a girl whom I don’t recognise. Suddenly, I sat bolt upright – and it was 11:25 and the train was just pulling into the station. But here I was, half-undressed, I couldn’t find my socks (there was a pair of blue ones but I was sure that they weren’t mine but I tried to put them on anyway) or my jumper, my possessions were strewn about just about everywhere. My two companions were in the same state but they were in no kind of hurry to prepare themselves to board the train – there was only me rushing to get ready – I was trying to encourage one of them to board the train so that we could simply throw our gear on board and leap on straight away afterwards. But bang on 11:30 the train pulled out (this is of course any other country in the world rather than the UK) and we were stranded, totally unprepared. I was now panicking that I’d missed my appointment for wherever I had to go. The woman with whom I was travelling just didn’t seem to have any sense of urgency whatever. My brother and I wandered off to try to find some left-luggage lockers to dump all our superfluous stuff. I had decided that there would be just me and the clothes that I stood up in. He then decided that he would like to have the keys as he was going to wander off and make some other kind of arrangements for something else. “Don’t worry!” he said, “I’ll be back in a day or two”. I replied that I wanted the keys to do this NOW and I want you back in five minutes. This of course led to yet another interminable argument. Afterwards, I ended up back with this woman who was still totally nonchalant about all of this. She said that she couldn’t understand all of the fuss. “We’re taking the train to Porto, aren’t we?”. I replied that we weren’t at all. It was to PORT that we should be going. She couldn’t believe it, but there it was, written on the tickets. She wandered off to find a ticket inspector to see if there would be another train within the next 5 minutes that would take us to our destination in time for my appointment. But we STILL weren’t ready, with our possessions strewn about the place, I still didn’t have any socks on and all of this kind of thing. It was totally absurd, it was.
I can’t remember where I was after that but it was nowhere that I recognised. We (whoever we were) were driving along a road through a town or city that may well have been mainland European (we were certainly driving on the right) alongside a railway line and then up a slip road into the main traffic. There was a song playing, one about “riding in a taxi” and we were changing the words to sing “riding in my A60” which is strange to say the least because much as I like A60s, the cars with which I will always be associated when it comes to talking about taxis will of course be Cortinas. But as we merged into the traffic up ahead, we noticed in front of us a Morris Marina which was clearly a taxi because it was black on the lower part and up to the high waistline on the sides, with white upper body and roof and boot lid.But this was a bizarre vehicle to be using as a taxi in mainland Europe.

But this is twice just recently that I’ve been having issues about trains. This is bizarre. I wonder what it’s all about.

But I can worry about this later because I’m now off to bed to watch my films. I reckon that I’ve earned it.

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Tuesday 23rd February 2016 – AND WASN’T THAT A WASTE OF TIME?

I finally had my blood count results back today. And the total has dropped from 9.8 to 9.0 – that’s not far short of 10% – in a week. And not only that – some of the things that needed to go up have indeed gone up, but some other things that needed to go up – including the most important things like the haemoglobin – have gone down. According to the infirmière who comes twice a day to inject me with the anti-coagulant, this means that it’s not just a simple case of dilution of the blood but that there’s something much more serious going on somewhere.

This means that it’s time to put Plan B into … errr … operation. Tomorrow, I’m going to see about having a chat with the Médecin Général of my Health Insurance company to see what he thinks about me having a second opinion somewhere with a specialist.

But as you can tell, I am not amused by all of this.

I didn’t manage to make it to Worleston last night by the way. I ended up being sidetracked elsewhere. I started out on the borders of Shropshire, Cheshire and Wales, my old stamping ground from many years ago. I was heading back north towards Crewe, I suppose, and I had the wife of a friend in the car with me. She was complaining about her husband, how he was all untidy and disorganised and how she wished he was like another one of the people that we knew. I cautioned her about that, because in my experience the tidiness and organisation of our other friend was nothing but superficial and just underneath the surface was a kind of chaos worse than ever you could imagine.
So back at my place in France where I brought a coach home – an old Ford R1114 with a Plaxton Supreme body. I drove it down the lane as far as my concrete parking place (which is most unlikely) and managed to turn it round at the bottom and park it facing uphill (which is impossible). I had a few things to do there and then went off for a walk, which took me right out to the southern edge of Stoke on Trent, somewhere round about Blurton or Trentham. Here in the middle of the road was a football match taking place – one team in green and the other in white. It wasn’t a suitable place to play a football match because the road had quite a steep slope, the top of which was defended by the green team. Stanley Matthews was playing on the green team and word had gone out that if his team won, he would be made man of the match, so right at the end of the game the green team had a shot on goal. The white goalkeeper, none other than Lev Yashin, stood there watching the ball, making no effort to save it. When I asked him about it, he replied that Matthews deserved the reward. And so I headed back home, reckoning that it would take me about an hour to walk from here (yes, quite!) and I ended up heading through the centre of Stoke-on-Trent. I was passing by the bus station at Hanley (I go a strange way home, don’t I?) just as a former work colleague was arriving. he told me that my absence was missed because the boss wanted to see me and a pile of other people (who he named). It turned out that the people who he named were those who were top of the list to receive a promotion and so I was wondering whether this meant that I was in a line to receive a promotion too. This was certainly some quite exciting news and I regretted that I hadn’t been there at the time.
The next part of my voyage was even more interesting, because I was actually a nun! (And before anyone ever says anything, my brother really was a nun, although not very many people know this. Every time he was up before the bench, the magistrate used to ask him his occupation and he always replied “nun”). I was going for an interview for a religious post and having a really good chat with the interviewers. They showed me a kind of green plastic key with holes in it at strategic places and asked me if I knew who it was who made the most profit from this. Of course, I had no idea and so they told me that it was eBay. That surprised me, but they replied “when you are using this to do something like buying 30,000 ice creams, by far the greatest percentage of the money is taken by eBay”. I was astounded by the figure of 30,000 and it clearly showed. “Didn’t you realise that as part of your duties you would be taking 30,000 children out for walks?” I replied that I hadn’t given it any thought at all and that if this were part of the duties of the post I wouldn’t hesitate in carrying it out. It was the way that the matter had been presented that had caught me off-balance. But it turned out that the question of the green key related to a form of payment, rather like some kind of credit card. It was inserted into a slot, something similar to an old punch-card data input system, to confirm a payment made on credit.

But going back to the previous night, I was here on my own all morning (it might not sound relevant, but you’ll see how it all develops) as Terry went off to do some work and so, in a mad fit of nostalgia, I played some music that I had on the laptop, and played it pretty loud too. One of the tracks (if that’s the correct word to use) was the “Simple Minds” live concert that I mixed for Radio Anglais
 a while ago, and I do have to say that it’s probably the best live concert that I’ve ever mixed. The music is probably the best too, and it features the track “Someone Somewhere in Summertime”. And as I was listening to it, I picked up on the words
“Somewhere there is some place, that one million eyes can’t see”
“And somewhere there is someone, who can see what I can see”
And while I’ve found the place, what I haven’t found in all of my life is someone who can see what I can see. If I had to name the biggest disappointment of all of my life, that would be it, and maybe the vision (because it was more than a simple dream) of the Girl From Worleston the other night is something subconsciously to do with that. As you all know, I’m a great believer in the subconscious, instinct, second sight and all of that.
Anyway, have a listen to Someone, Somewhere in Summertime.

In other news, I’ve not done too much with my dictaphone notes because I’ve been rather sidetracked, dealing with issues arising from the very controversial historian Dr Alwyn Ruddock.

She was (because she died in 2005) a well-known and respected historian who did a great deal of research into the Italian banking families of the 15th and 16th Centuries and during her research, she came across some so-far undiscovered information concerning John Cabot. According to her press release into the Academic World, this information would radically change our perception of the discovery of North America in the 15th Century.

She signed a contract with the Exeter University Press to publish a book, and began to undertake some serious research into her subject. She was sent information from a couple of other historians who had uncovered hitherto-unknown documents and who felt that she was best-placed to use the material, but she dismissed most of that in a rather offhand way.

The upshot of all of this is that she never published her book and when she died, hordes of scholars were eager to peruse her notes to see if they could bring her research to a conclusion and to bring into the public domain her rather startling discoveries. Unfortunately, they were all confounded as in her will, she had left instructions that all of her research notes, photographs etc was to be destroyed unread. And indeed, her executors had shredded 87 sacks of documents and all of the clues to her discoveries were lost.

I’ve never ever met a scholar who has wilfully destroyed his or her research notes. Most scholars have an assistant who will carry on the work if the unforeseen should occur, or else they bequeath their papers to a University so that another researcher could pick them up. And that’s how research should be carried on – as a community project. And if you find that all of your work is ultimately incorrect, then scholars should be sufficiently detached from their subject to contradict themselves, as I have seen several scholars do.

But now all of this work is lost and the poor researcher who discovered some documents in the British Library in 1987 and which were kicked into touch by Dr Ruddock now has to creep back up a dark alley to rescue them and start again, after a delay of almost 30 years.

And we are still no nearer to finding out what it was about Cabot’s voyages to North America that, according to Dr Ruddock, would change our perception of the discovery of North America.

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Monday 22nd February 2016 – I CRASHED OUT …

… for a couple of hours this afternoon. And I’ve absolutely no idea why. It’s not as if I’ve been up to very much, is it, just sitting here waiting for Godot or whatever.

Mind you, I have had a day that’s been hectic in certain respects. For a start, in this urge to clean out the dictaphone and bring this up to date, I’ve not only finished the notes for the voyage to Canada in 2015 (which I think that I might have finished off yesterday) I’ve also dealt with the trip to central France in August last year, the one to Germany and the Czech Republic in June, and I’ve cracked on pretty well with the trip to Canada in 2014, the notes of which were lost when the previous laptop crashed.

You can see that it’s been a pretty hectic day all in all, at least from that point of view.

Having a blood test thins morning didn’t help matters either. That takes it out of me too, in more ways than one. Quite frankly, I don’t see the point of them giving me all of this blood if they are simply going to take it out bit by bit.

But it was during the night that, as usual, everything happened. and I do have to say that it’s rather sad right now that I have to have any excitement in my life by vicarious means.

We started off last night on the most amazing nostalgia trip. Memory Land had nothing on this. It was back in my school days and I’d started to go to school in a really scruffy, oily pair of green shorts (I actually had a pair of these too) and and equally scruffy light grey tee-shirt. It all makes a change from the school uniform that we had to wear back in those days. After school, we set off home and it was raining. I had an old, short kind of raincoat thing that I was wearing to keep the rain off. A group of us decided for some reason or other to go home a different way and we ended up wherever we were intending to be a good five minutes before the others arrived. We didn’t know this at the time but it soon became clear. There was a rather large stationary Ford Pinto engine there that performed some task or other at the place where we were, and I was having a look at it. I noticed that some of the spark plug leads had been caught up underneath it and trapped. This told me that the other kids hadn’t arrived yet otherwise they would have noticed it and sorted out the leads. Another thing that I noticed was that the cam belt adjuster had become slackened off and the belt was twisted. Someone had evidently tried to turn over the motor and that had upset the valve timing as the belt was sliding around over the top pulley on the end of the camshaft on the cylinder head. I needed my tools to adjust it and set it correctly but before I could go to fetch them, the other kids turned up. I told them not to touch the engine under any circumstances until I’d adjusted it (ohh! The nostalgic delights of changing cam belts on Ford Pinto engines! If I ever had a quid for every one of those I’d done in the 70s and 80s I would be dictating this to a couple of floozies sitting on my knee in the Caribbean somewhere). While I was adjusting and setting the cam belt and the valve timing, a couple of girls from the “latecomers” came over for a chat. One of them was very, very young (not even in school uniform – she was blond-haired, wearing a blue and white checked summer dress with a very pale blue blouse) and I had a little chat with her. The other girl then came over to join in. She was probably in year 3 or 4 of the Grammar School where I went, and I would be in year 6 or 7 (7 was the final year at out school). She lived in Worleston, so she said, and had shoulder-length dark red (almost brown) hair and a lovely smile, and I’m sure that I know who she is but I just can’t think who. We had a chat that started off just being something general and then slowly developed into something more personal. She asked me what “A” levels I was doing and so I told her that I was studying Geography, History and English (I actually studied Geography, History and Economics, as well as both parts of the “General Paper” which was an option). She told me that she was very interested in journalism because that was what her father did. She collected photographs and autographs, and started going through her collection of photographs with me. There were many photographs of lifeguards at the beach and also older ones of old Victorian women, so we started to make a few jokes that today would be considered in rather poor taste (not that that ever would bother me of course – I can’t remember now who it was who said it but I’m a fervent subscriber to the comment that “nothing is ever in bad taste if it is funny”) such as “I bet that she’s felt the cold hand of death on her shoulder by now”. We ended up having quite a laugh about this.
The bizarre thing about this – or maybe it isn’t so bizarre – is that while I was on this little voyage, I was feeling quite warm and comfortable. Chatting to this girl was very pleasant and it made me realise that during my school days -and later on – what I had missed out on was a nice comfortable companion with whom I could relax like this. None of my girlfriends at school would ever have fitted into this little scenario, and much as I liked Nerina, it’s fair to say that we weren’t ever “accomplices” in this sense. I’ve been noticing that we do occasionally have little nostalgic nights like this and I was all for turning the clock back 45 years and going off to track down this girl with the dark red hair. It’s not as if Worleston is a big place, after all and with a farmer who is a journalist, they aren’t likely to be part of the dispersed farming community out there. The “Royal Oak” would be the place to start, or maybe the church, where the Reverend Lillicrap (and I am not making this up) used to hold sway.
After the usual semi-somnambulistic stroll down the corridor, I was back at school again. This time though, it wasn’t anything like as pleasant. I’d been charged with an offence that was rather disreputable and as a result I’d withdrawn from my usual social circle (not that I ever had much of one) and was living in my car on a cliff-top somewhere. I would merely change into my school uniform to go to school and then change back into civvies as soon as I could afterwards. I only kept in some kind of social contact with one friend (someone with whom I am still in touch these days), and that was because I could rely on him and he believed in my innocence. As a result, any indiscretion that I might (or might not) have committed had not reached the ears of anyone else and I was defending the court case entirely on my own. But this all was about to change when he told me that his wife (and he mentioned her name – and she is in fact his sister in real life) had somehow heard about the events, and forbidden him to keep in touch with me. I asked him if he intended to take any notice, to which he replied that he had to. He admitted that, although no-one else knew this, she controlled him quite closely, even weighing him every day to make sure that he wasn’t eating any sweets or anything else to which he wasn’t entitled. I found this all hard to believe and when I saw her bright yellow vehicle right across the headland, heading slowly towards where I was parked up, I waved at her and that caused a major eruption amongst all people concerned.

So after all of that, it was back into the land of the living. And I had to make my own bed and open my own curtains because we were having visitors today and Liz had a day of teaching. Perhaps it was that which wore me out so much.

But counting through the boxes of injections, there is about half of them left. I wish that they would hurry up and get it over with.

And I’d like to have my blood test results too. They STILL haven’t come. And I want to go off for an early night and a decent sleep. It’s a long way to Worleston in the dark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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