Just now I’ve been down to the railway station and come back with a family of Ukrainian refugees.

This is something that has been simmering away for a week or so, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.

The issue has been getting from the Polish frontier into a railway station in Warsaw and that wasn’t easy at all. But last night at 23:00 they finally struggled into Warsaw and the rest has been comparatively plain sailing.

They are installed in an empty room across the courtyard from me and we are off on what is probably going to be the most difficult leg of our journey tomorrow – to wit, negotiating with Belgian bureaucracy. I lived in Belgium for 15 years and I can tell you quite a few stories ….

But retournons à nos moutons as they say on the southern side of the linguistic divide.

It’s a good job that I was awake and up and about this morning before the alarm because the alarm didn’t go off. For some reason that I have yet to fathom, the battery in the telephone went flat during the night and so it switched itself off.

Mind you, it did surprise me for despite trying my best to go to sleep early, I ended up involved in yet another lengthy chat about these refugees. There I was, in total darkness dressed as nature intended, trying to hold an intelligent conversation as the small hours drew on.

What surprised me more than anything was that there was even time for me to go off on a few travels during the night, as I discovered when I listened to the dictaphone after the medication. I’d met this young girl who was really nice. Even though she was quite a bit younger than me we’d had a really good time together and things were slowly starting to develop between us. But something happened and in the end she cleared off with my brother. That led to something of a scandal in the family but I couldn’t understand why because it was just one of those things that happened. I don’t think that it was because of that anyway but it was quite the talk, the relationship between these two. I’d ended up being away for a while. When I came back a group of people met me, some older, some younger. The mother of one of these younger people was talking to me. The question came round to what kind of girl I would actually like. I can’t remember what I said at first but this woman replied “she has to have brown hair, doesn’t she?” I thought “not really”. I said “hair will grow. It makes no difference to me”. Someone came up and said “you’re going with whatshername (they actually said that)”. I asked “what do you mean? I’ve not heard anything”. She said “you’ve been invited, or haven’t you iyet seen the parents of a certain girl who in real life created a stir around the Auvergne for a short while?”. “No” I answered. They replied that she was having one of the parties that she had and there’s an odd number of men and women because she’s on her own so she was going to invite you”. I thought that that would be a strange situation because the last couple of times that we saw each other it didn’t work out very well. We had a little walk around and I ended up being on my own walking through this town thinking “what on earth is going to happen here?”. Then I was with someone else again and we carried on walking. We saw someone coming towards us carrying some kind of brochure and I thought immediately that it was something to do with this girl. When they went past I breathed a sigh of relief.

Later, I was dreaming something in the Middle East but I can’t remember what it was. It ended up being a race. There was a start and things in the distance. You ran the first one then came back and did the second one then came back and did the third one etc. While you were doing it, depending on which lane in which you started you had to say some things in Welsh – the present tense of the verb “To Be”. I was doing fine except by the time that I reached the third lane I’d forgotten. I couldn’t remember quick enough and lost count of where I was and what I was actually doing in this race.

There was then a group of us out in the Middle East. One of the members was a very evil, horrible person. We suddenly found ourselves in a zone that had been badly damaged and was under an air raid. This guy fell into a bomb crater. Gradually his expression and appearance changed and he started to become someone quite nice while he was in this shell hole panicking, trying to get out. We were hoping that he would end up trapped in there for several days

Did I tape … “no you didn’t” – ed … the bit about where we were all leaving school and we had to go distributing leaflets around to different areas for charity purposes etc? There was a girl there whom I liked who was off doing it. When she came back she said that she had done 6 miles and was feeling pretty exhausted. i was there talking (… battery when flat …)

(…Start that one again…) We were at school and we had to distribute all kinds of leaflets around. We were all talking about what would happen – would we all need to lay in a bottle of sherry in case people came round to our house for this charity thing that we were advertising for school? One girl came in and she had done about 6 miles. She was sitting there totally exhausted. Her legs were all swollen up. She was a girl whom I happened to like. There was a little dance going on so I wanted to dance with me but she was far too exhausted so I stayed around there chatting to her. She was younger than us. One of the girls had to leave so I went over to say goodbye to her. She pointed to this girl and said “just take it easy with her. She’ll be OK”.

And later yet on a different occasion I’d done something to Caliburn and my niece’s husband came to look at it. He walked around down one side but I didn’t want him to go down the other side because that wasn’t particularly pretty but he walked over there and walked round the other side of the van but went off into the bushes for a gypsy’s. I was hoping that he wouldn’t see the other side when he turned round and came back.

Now it was time for me to head into Brussels.

The train that picked me up was one of the decrepit and derelict AM 80 trainsets. Built between 1980 and 1983 they look every bit like something from 40 years ago both on the inside and the outside, but mechanically they still do sterling service on main-line express work and sound as if they will keep on going for ever.

At the station I tracked down the Refugee Centre and had a chat with the people there who gave me some very helpful information. A railway guard informed me that Ukrainian refugees can travel on the SNCB for free on presentation of an identity card or passport.

Not so much luck at the TGV office. Yes, they can travel free on the train but the first train with empty seats is at 13:13. I was planning to be almost home by then, never mind kicking my heels around Brussels.

The train back was one of the class 08 trainsets.

There are four trains per hour from Brussels to Leuven but they don’t run, as you might expect, every 15 minutes. They come one after the other and then there is a long gap.

The fourth train in this set is a stopper – “all stations to Leuven and I’d just missed the third – an InterCity Express – and I wasn’t going to hang around for half an hour

Back here I had lunch, having realised that I hadn’t had any breakfast this morning.

This afternoon I rather unfortunately crashed out – and crashed out definitively too. So much so that I went off on a little voyage. I can’t remember how this started but there was some kind of game being played at school – a kind of word game between a minimum of 2 people. I was with a group of two others and a female teacher was controlling it. For some reason she only asked questions of the other two so after a while I told her that there was no point whatever in me having come out so I may as well go back in again, and I walked away. On my way back in I reflected that although I hadn’t started my final year at school yet, I already had a degree from the Open University so there wasn’t even much point in staying at school so I could leave and go off and do something more beneficial.

After I awoke I finished off cataloguing the photos and then there was a football match on the internet. Y Barri v Connah’s Quay Nomads. Another good game that finished 1-1 but could (and should) have been more.

Y Barri’s goal came from a penalty that was described as being “controversial”, the argument being that George Horan won the ball. Which he did of course, but only after having wrestled Kayne McLaggan to the ground.

After a quick tea of Beans and chips I headed off to the station to meet my refugees. We arranged a signal, that I’d sent them a photo, and when I met them on the station I showed them the same photo so they knew that it was me.

Loaded up with luggage, all their worldly possessions that remain, it was rather a struggle for us all to come here. But we eventually made it and they are all properly installed with a shower and everything that they need until tomorrow morning when we go back on the road.

And now I’m off to bed. No lie-in for me tomorrow so I’ll be feeling like death before we even start.

God alone knows what I’ll be like when we finish.