… the excitement over the last day or two, I was expecting to have a really decent sleep last night and probably not raise my ugly head from the pillow until midday or something like that.
And so you are probably just as surprised as I am that I was actually up and about at 09:30 this morning.
Considering that I didn’t go to bed until after midnight either, it’s something of a surprise.
In actual fact, I was awake quite a good deal earlier than that and if I’d have applied myself I could have heaved myself out of bed quite a while earlier than 09:30. But it IS Sunday after all.
Anyway, once I was up and about I didn’t do very much at all today. I’ve paired off the music for the radio programme I’ll be preparing and I’ve made a start – a slow start – on writing the notes. I’ll finish it off tomorrow but I shan’t be breaking any records. I’m still not wound up sufficiently after my gruelling few days on the move.
And that’s another thing. Rosemary has asked me if I’d like to go down to the Auvergne for a while to recover but 500 kilometres down to Menat and then 500 kilometres back in Caliburn is totally out of my reach, the way things are right now.
There was something on the dictaphone from last night. I’d been to collect Caliburn from the garage after he’d had his starter fixed. There was a young girl there. I knew her from the Auvergne. They were discussing the signing of the certificate for her controle technique. Because her vehicle was registered in the Auvergne it had to be someone from there who signed it. She was wondering whether if the guy here signed it, if it would be valid. He replied “no-one checks up on things like that”. I asked “has it passed now?”. She looked at me and suddenly realised that she’d been with me at the garage in the Auvergne when there had been some kind of issue with her car when Caliburn had passed his controle technique. We began to chat. She was very curious about the electric cable coming down my arm. She asked what it was for. I showed her a clip on my belt and said “that’s where my mobile phone normally goes. It plugs into this wire here at this end and at the other end where you see the cable I can put a solar panel on my back and plug the phone into the solar panel while I’m walking around. When you’re on an expedition that’s how you keep your phone charged”. She thought that that was a wonderful idea.
When I’d finished that I made some hot chocolate and came back in here where I regrettably … errr … relaxed for a while.
After I’d had lunch I’d taken out some pizza dough from the freezer and it had been defrosting during the afternoon. Later on, I kneaded it and rolled it out to put on the pan
However, it didn’t seem to want to spread out correctly and began to shrink. In the end I had to roll it all back up, knead it again and roll it out a second time.
When it was cooked the dough had risen to perfection and it really was a pizza as good as the one that I’d made the other day. Cutting these cherry tomatoes in half and putting them on top of the vegan cheese instead of slicing normal tomatoes and putting them on the bottom underneath the rest of the toppings is really the way to go.
So now, having emulated my namesake the mathematician and done three fifth of five eights of … errr … nothing all day, I’m going to bed. I’ll tackle the radio programme tomorrow but don’t expect it to be done quickly. I’m just not in the mood.
But it’s really nice to be back home. In the words of Steve Marriott, I’M SICK AND TIRED OF HOTELS, HARD BEDS
