… I’m going to have a visitor here tomorrow afternoon at 14:00.

This afternoon there was a ‘phone call from a painter and decorator. “Is it OK if I come tomorrow afternoon?”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Your landlord says that I have to paint your front door”.

That’s the first that I’ve heard about it and if I wanted to stand fast to my rights and principles I could have told him to clear off as I’m supposed to be given plenty of notice that the landlord or his agents want to come round, but it’s no skin off my nose that he’ll be here.

Not that the door actually needs it. But in fact the door on my new place could do with a good coat of paint and I need to find out the paint code and so asking a painter sounds like a good plan whenever I can lay my hands upon one. And it’s no skin off my nose if he comes here tomorrow.

There’s my doctor’s appointment in the morning and the physiotherapist at the end of the afternoon so as long as he fits in with those plans it’s fine by me.

So I’ll try to plan a decent night’s sleep for once because last night’s sleep wasn’t much to write home about. Even though I was in bed early I couldn’t go off to sleep, which probably isn’t much of a surprise seeing as how late I actually awoke yesterday

And apart from that it was quite a restless night as well, and wasn’t helped by the batteries in the dictaphone going flat at a crucial moment.

But anyway I struggled to my feet when the alarm went off and once I’d dealt with the medication and my mails and messages I attacked the radio programme.

Once again, it was rather a desultory stroll through the work rather than a rapid rush, but it could have taken much longer than it did had I not been lucky enough to have dictated the speech for the final track at almost the exact length required to fit the bill.

And as I always include in the final speech some stuff that I can cut out quite easily that won’t affect the value of the speech in any way, it was even better.

Now, people won’t get to know that the Billy Bremner who was a session guitarist at Rockfield Studios at Monmouth is not the same Billy Bremner as the former Leeds United footballer. But you can’t have everything.

Once I’d finished I listened to the programme and also to the one that I’ll be sending off, to make sure that they are good enough for broadcast and don’t contain any major errors, like talking in the present tense about a musician who has died since I recorded the programme.

It wouldn’t be the first time …

Next stop was to listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was on one of the little Neva buses with my mother and a third person going to Pionsat. I had an appointment at the hospital there. When we reached the edge of the town we dropped off some passengers at a bus stop and the driver then did a U-turn. We asked where he was going so he said that he was going to Plas Derwyn, a big stately home type of place on the outskirts of the town. He said that they were contracted to provide a service to Plas Derwyn twice an hour. If we were to alight there we could catch the Bus 28. My mother looked at her watch and said “that’s a 25 minute wait and we’ll be late”. he apologised but said that there was nothing he could do. We reached the place which was like a huge children’s holiday camp-type place. My mother and the other person alighted. Just as I was about to alight – I was taking my time – he started to move so I had to shout. he stopped and I eventually alighted. We had to fight our way through all these kids to enter this place. There was some kind of discussion going on between a few of the kids and one of the staff talking about the place being overrun with cats. This teacher-type person said “don’t worry if there are too many things here. We’ll shoot the kids instead of the cats”. She looked at me and said “and here’s a guy who would do it too”. We went in to try to see someone.

And then I was with a woman and a little girl with a dog last night. I had to go to the hospital which was about a 15-minute walk away. I took something with me like a stuffed toy on wheels that I had to rub along the floor backwards and forwards as I went but I don’t know why. This took hours and I thought to myself ‘I’m going to miss my appointment doing this. I’ll forget this cleaning the pavement thing”. I looked around and the girl and dog had gone. I asked “where have they gone?”. The woman replied “she’s gone across the road”. I was really annoyed at this and ran after her. I couldn’t catch her and kept on shouting to her to slow down so I could catch up with her but she was running really fast for a small child saying “we’ll be late at the hospital – we’ll be late at the hospital”. I had the devil’s own job to try to keep up with her

It seems that this trip to the hospital, or, rather, missing the appointment, is beginning to prey on my mind, although I don’t know why because during my daylight hours I’m not bothered at all about it.

Finally I was on a coach tour last night with Shearings as a passenger. As we were going down the road towards Batley (or Bramley – I couldn’t make up my mind apparently) we saw what looked like a miniature narrow-gauge railway alongside the main line. We were told that it was a connector between the town and a wellness centre a couple of miles outside the town, a kind of tramway. Several people were interested at that so we pulled into the town centre of Bramley (or Batley) near the railway station. There was already a coach parked on the visitors’ car park so we went next-door to a yard where there were some kind of lock-up garages. There was a West Indian proprietor and in exchange for fuelling up the coach he let us leave it on his property. We fuelled up and everyone set off to this railway station to look at the start of this tramway. It took me a couple of minutes to alight because of my disability. Then I grabbed my crutches and began to shoot off following them to Bramley (or Batley) Railway Station.

And it seems that my mobility issues are now coming to the fore too.

The rest of the day has been spent sorting out music for future radio programmes.

Having spent a week or so revising my databases into a different way of working, choosing the music is so much quicker these days, and much more logical too. It’s taken me over 200 programmes to end up in a much more efficient way and I bet that there is still plenty of room for improvement.

The “frozen pepper” experiment was not a great success. They had frozen nicely but when the one that I’d taken out had defrosted, it had gone all limp and you wouldn’t believe the amount of water that came out. There’s that much water in these peppers, so it seems.

And that got me thinking again – that if I filled it while it was still frozen and then baked it in the air fryer rather than in the microwave, that might dry it out better. I’ll have to try that next week.

So on that note I’m off to bed. It’s a busy day tomorrow with the doctor and the Welsh lesson, the painter and the physiotherapist. However did I manage to find the time to go to work?