Friday 3rd February 2023 – IT REALLY WAS A …

… lovely afternoon today. Sunny and once I was out of the wind, quite warm too. It really was a pleasure to be out and about.

With it being Friday today, I needed to go to the supermarket in the town for my fresh fruit and so on. But I’m not sure whether it was worth the effort from that point of view because although I managed to buy a lettuce and some mushrooms they had no bananas, no cucumber and there were a few other things that I wanted that were missing in the shops.

The reason for that though was clear to see. There was a big notice everywhere saying that the shop will be closed on Monday and Tuesday for stocktaking, so I suppose that they didn’t want too much fresh fruit and veg hanging around that they might not have been able to sell.

Hoad I known, I would have gone to one of the other supermarkets in the town centre. There are three altogether. I had plenty of time. But regardless of anything else, I was glad to be out and about in the nice weather.

Before I went to bed last night I was out and about too. I went for a walk up and down the stairs here, without my crutches too. And going down the steps I led with the left leg, to give me an opportunity to bend the right knee. Unfortunately, I couldn’t lead with the right going back up the steps. I’m a long way from there, so far that I doubt that i’ll ever be back.

It was a bad night too, tossing and turning around for quite a while trying in vain to go to sleep. Another night where I didn’t do much except watch the clock go round and round. I did eventually go off to sleep, but for nothing like as much sleep as I would have liked.

There was however enough time for me to go off on a few travels here and there. I started off going to work. I had a great big Audi saloon. I had to take the director or one of the big directors to somewhere in Germany not too far from Berlin. They explained the name of the hotel and the town, and I said that I knew it although I didn’t. When they asked why, I said that because my aunt used to go there because my family is connected with royalty (which they didn’t believe but anyway …). So the next morning I awoke. I was in Shavington. There was a lot of traffic on the road because it was rush hour. I got into the car and started it. I thought that I’d do a lap or two around the block to warm it up but I noticed that it was low on petrol or diesel so I thought that I’d go to the garage on Newcastle Road and fuel it with diesel then come back and we’d be ready to go. I was driving up Chestnut Avenue which was a 4-lane road at the time, in the right-hand lane ready to turn right at the top.

I can’t remember very much about this next bit though but I was creating a 3D figure. The telephone rang so I answered it and said that I’d call them back because I was busy with this thing and hung up. Then I realised who it was and tried to call them back so that I could continue talking to them while I was continuing to work on this 3D figure.

And then I’d bought an apartment in a big house. Rosemary had come along to help me clean it up, the house and the balcony, and do some cleaning up outside in the public areas. We ended up making the place look pretty nice although it could do with a coat of paint inside because I didn’t like the red walls. The communal parts outside were confusing. It was a tiny village with several houses dotted around and what you would think at first was private to this particular house was actually a pathway that led to one of these other buildings. It was extremely confusing to try to work out which was the communal area, which was private to our house and which was private to some other house. While we were standing on the balcony having a look out because it was quite high up we could see loads of old vehicles moving around in the distance. It suddenly occurred to us that there was a vintage vehicle rally in the vicinity that weekend. I told Roemary that I knew where I’d be going to be this weekend.

Later on there was something about one of these American mobsters. He’d been convicted of an offence but there was some kind of public enquiry into his conviction. The FBI was involved in this but the cross-examination of this guy by the FBI was particularly bizarre because it almost amounted to the FBI agent going down on his knees and pleading with this mobster to tell the truth, which I thought was quite a strange way of going about cross-examining someone.

Once again I was up quite quickly when the alarm went off, despite the lack of sleep. And when I’d finished the medication and checked my messages I made a start on continuing the notes for the next round of radio programmes. I didn’t get very far though because Rosemary rang me up and we had another one of our marathon chats.

And she brought me some good news. The sunroof that I’d bought in Canada for that Ford Flex in the Puy de Dôme finally turned up today after several months of dispute and discussion. So that’s now been passed on to whom it may concern.

And the Genz Benz 200-watt bass combo that I’d found on sale for peanuts in a pawn shop in Ottawa turned up with it too. That’s going to have to stay at Rosemary’s for a while until I can go down and rescue it, but at least it’s on this side of the Atlantic and I’ll be back on the road.

It’s nice to have some good news for a change. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any.

Later on I went out for the bus into town. It was the new bus too, the first time that I’ve travelled on that one. and i’m definitely becoming used to these crutches because I was off the bus, in and out of the supermarket and back at the bus station all in 15 minutes and I had 15 minutes to wait for the bus back home. So I had plenty of time to soak up the sun.

Back here, with still no reply to my reminder to the solicitor handling the sale of this apartment, I filled in all of the forms that I need to organise the transfer of the money and sent them off. But there were a couple of things that need more explanation and I’ll have to sort that out over the weekend. And once I’ve done that, then the ball is firmly in the court of the solicitor.

Tea was a burger on a bap with a pile of salad and some chips that had been fried in the air fryer. It really was delicious – one of the best meals that I’ve cooked. That air fryer really is the business and I ought to experiment more with it to try to have my money’s worth out of it. I’m told that it will bake bread and that might be worth an experiment.

Tomorrow i’ll finish off the notes for the radio programmes and then I really can have a complete day off on Sunday. And won’t that be nice?

High time I had a good rest and relax. Anyone would think that I haven’t done that for ages.

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