… came round much earlier than planned, and much earlier than I expected. In fact, when he entered the apartment I was actually crashed out on the chair in here and it took me a good few minutes to gather my wits.
What might have been the cause of that was that I’d had another bad night – and to such an extent that when the alarm went off, for the first time for several weeks I had a great deal of difficulty in hauling myself out of bed. Although I did manage to haul myself out of bed before the second alarm went off, it was rather touch-and-go.
After the medication and checking the mails and messages, I had a good chat with Liz. It’s been a good few days since we’ve had a decent chat and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then.
Plenty of stuff on the dictaphone from the night, which might explain how I was feeling in the morning. I started off last night back in Crewe driving taxis. I had to work out some song lyrics for the people who had bought our house in Davenport Avenue and were running a taxi business from there. I did it and I must have gone round there 4 or 5 times until I finally found a woman who was in. She had a baby in a pushchair and was pushing it down the drive on the way out. I gave her the lyrics. As I was leaving she said that she didn’t fancy being in our shoes because she’d seen the insurance renewals for our 2 vehicles which worked out at about £2000 each. I asked her how much insurance she paid on her taxi but she didn’t seem very willing to tell me the answer. I began to suspect that maybe she didn’t have insurance and it was all window-dressing on their behalf.
And then I was at one of the cross-Channel ferry ports. I’d just arrived by train to take a boat across the Channel but I was so mesmerised by how beautiful the railway station and surroundings were that I had a walk around. And then I had to run like hell to reach the ferry terminal in time to catch my ‘plane – or do I mean “boat”? – or else I’d miss it and the next one wasn’t going to be for several hours yet
Later on I was back in this dream about ferries, Someone suddenly awoke and found someone standing by their bed staring at them. It took a few minutes to persuade them to go back to their own bed and go to sleep. But as a result this person overslept and was late for his ferry so he had to prepare everything and run for his ferry terminal in quite a rush in the hope that he’d still be on time to catch the ferry that he intended to catch.
Finally I was with Zero’s father again last night. We were wandering around a field and ended up climbing on top of a brick bunker that was there. Before that I was round at his house folding up some bedding to put in a drawer. Someone came in and asked if he was there. I said that they had better check with his good lady, meaning his wife of course. He went into the kitchen and sure enough he was there. They had a chat and the 3 of us went out into this field. He and I were standing on this bunker when he suddenly got off. First of all a 2-stroke Citroen Ami pulled up inside this field. It was on bogies rather than on wheels, like some Bo-Bo bogies. This field was actually part of an old railway marshalling sidings at the bottom of Ash Bank in Hanley, all abandoned and overgrown. That drove around for a while and then drove off. Another car came in, like an old Opel Ascona. It was somehow very high off the ground and making an awful noise like one of these boy racer things. When I came to get off the top of the bunker I found that the bunker had risen by several feet and I couldn’t jump off. I had to scramble around. In the end I found a wall that I could scramble down onto the ground. The climb back up to the field was steep. I couldn’t really climb up there without falling. Of course this made the other guy laugh to which I basically replied something like “it serves you all right for not waiting for me”.
But here we are again and no Zero to be found anywhere. How disappointing is that?
Much of the day has been spent in a desultory fashion doing the pairing of the music for the second of the radio programmes and then making a start on writing out the notes for them. I’ve not gone very far with that but then again I wasn’t really in so much of a rush.
There was a major interruption when one of my neighbours rang my bell because she had locked herself out of the building. We ended up having a lengthy chat in the corridor because I haven’t seen her for ages and I wanted to find out who it was who installed her shower because if I can’t find a casual tradesman to do install a shower in my new place I shall have to engage a company to do the work.
There were other things too that I have done but apart from transferring over the second instalment of the money that I need to transfer over (and this is going to be a lengthy and complicated business that will take a couple of weeks).
The physiotherapist put me though my paces and showed me a couple more exercises that I need to follow. I don’t know how I’m going to find the time to do them all at the rate that he wants me to do them.
It was a good job that I’d had a shower earlier than usual otherwise I would have been rather embarrassed (even more than I was by being asleep) by his early arrival. However, while we’re on the subject of showers … “well, one of us is” – ed … getting into the bath for my shower is certainly much easier these days than it was a couple of months ago when I returned from the hospital and couldn’t hardly walk anywhere at all. I really don’t know how I made it home from Leuven. That was horrible.
Tea, on the other hand, was quite nice. A simple vegan burger with pasta and veg cooked in a spicy tomato sauce. It doesn’t do any harm to have something uncomplicated every now and again, especially as I have a fridge full of vegan burgers. At one time LIDL had a run of cheap vegan burgers and I stocked up because like most LIDL special ranges, they go out of fashion and out of stock quite quickly.
Tomorrow I’m going to take Caliburn to LIDL and do some shopping. With Carnaval getting underway at the weekend, the town is going to be jam-packed with people and moving around will be impossible for a week or so, so I want to make sure that I have everything that I need so that I don’t need to go out anywhere.
Fighting my way on my crutches through the crowds is not going to be very pleasant
